howdy, newtlets,
herman isn't here. he's been arrested for heresy because he was observed by the mind-control robots to be secretly believing that Assyrian was a foreign pronunciation of Arthurian, and that otto and ossa and offa were all foreigners having a go at saying Arthur and they meant king, and they're going to string him up.
i feel a bit guilty about it because if he did believe such heretical stuff it may have been because of me. i told him how if you naively apply the best principles of historical linguistics to the corpuses, having a good general knowledge of at least several, you end up chucking out the current chronologies as spurious and fanciful and then bang goes your ecclesiastica out of both shotgun barrels and there he poor ole is on the rack and ecclesiastica turning the crank handles.
so the least i can do is take his class for him while he's away.
etty moloji is my name those of you who are new to this blog. today i'm going to talk about the futhark.
naturally, being not only understaffed, underpaid and underfunded, but also overworked, overspecialized, and over a barrel, university scholars and independent specialists in the field of runology seem to be pretty firmly in agreement that futhark is a meaningless list of the first six letters - feoh, ur, thorn, os, rad and cen - of the ancient runic alphabet that survived in various forms into medieval times in old England and Iceland, and, like some scholars of old, they have missed the glaringly obvious truth:
spells
fathers
now that means that, just as in the south of England, the u, which is sharp-cornered and sometimes also upsidedown, is pronounced ah not oo; and the '<' , named cen in the anglo-saxon rune poem, was pronounced s at least by the writers of this six-letter sequence. from other evidence, it must have been pronounced s or c, depending where you are, just as 'c' is in modern english. cen meant fire, candle, can of fuel or the burning of same. look also at kindle, pronounce the c as a s and you get cinder, incinerate, incendiary etc. spell it with a s and you get sun, and with a sh and you get shine, and sheen – and then there's scintillate; all related to words for tin. cornwall's a likely spot, innit? lot of tin, lot of dinero, lot of foreign traders with a Cornish presence having a go at pronouncing it in their own, sometimes thick, accents. not a problem, especially in view of the fact that anglo Saxons still do those things with those letters.
so how come the rune poem lists them in that order? we can't know, but i can easily imagine a reconstructionist in the past finding the word and reading it as foo-thark, which is meaningless, concluding it to have been, like alphabet (alpha, beta, etc), the beginning of an alphabet.
one of the reasons that old texts are being mistranslated is that most of the work done on them was done before and during the nineteenth century when the academic mind was building on assumptions which are now easily seen to be invalid. in the nineteenth century, it was firmly believed that the precise time of the creation of the universe right down to the time of day had been accurately calculated, and what with the churches and the universities going at it hammer and tongs over everyone's head, charles darwin was having a hard time getting his work read. that was the intellectual climate, the academic position.
if the nineteenth century scholars were romantics, swept up in the heady newness of it all after long centuries of repression and anathema; and if their work smacks strongly of their impassioned fantasies of the magical lands of their ancestors, the renaissance collectors and translators of old texts were worse. they brought forth many of their texts from undisclosed hiding places and published them if they dared to publish them at all under false pretences, passing them off as fictional works they'd written themselves. this applies to dante's inferno equally with the faerie queene, many of shakespeare's plays, tirant lo blanc, and most of the arthurian texts.
the reason why this was so is still lost in the mists, but it's easy to see that these texts, if historical at all, clash wildly and howlingly with the history of the world as produced for us out of the texts from which the bible's old and new testaments were concocted, and the church was very intolerant of alternative beliefs about anything.
the amount of work these several centuries of scholars have done is vast, the structures of 'knowledge' and belief arising from it are extensive, unwieldy and precarious, and they are straining present day credence to the limit. we must believe, for example, that if an entry in the famed dictionary of the irish language, taken from a old glossary made under unknown (or even falsely portrayed) conditions by a person whose knowledge of irish was clearly inadequate, gives bizarre translations of all passages in which it occurs except a very few, it is not because the suspect glossary, dil and centuries of scholarship are wrong, it is because the irish were bizarre, and since this is what the ancient romans always maintained, it must be right.
similarly, we must not disturb the slumber of that miracle baby born of god and an intact-hymen virgin, by dating mss according to the most persuasive evidence; we must date all mss mentioning evidence of christianity, a church, a priesthood, a worldwide network of monasteries and abbeys, as later than this event.
similarly we must not see the eons old succession of ruler-priests called jesus and josephus (jose'uses) and joses and jo cephas, and caiaphas and cheop's. we have to believe this even though it means that the whole of the arthurian history has to fit into the time after the roman occupation and before the anglo-saxon period, and scholars have looked for it in vain and have started to proclaim that anyway, it doesn't really matter if it was real or not, the myth is what inspires us most.
only a few fanatics, ferocious in their defence of their falsehoods, as enraged against heretics as any old-time cleric ever was, archaic in their methodology, lacking any epistemology and abysmal at dialectic, and their fans, dupes, and equally error-driven scholars working in dependent related disciplines such as numismatics, history and comparative philology (called historical linguistics by some) still believe that the ancient texts from homer to snorri and even shakespeare and spenser, have all been accurately translated, their lexicography pretty close to perfect, their meanings well-understood and their contexts satisfactorily worked out, or else emerging as scholars steeped in the established hermeneutical traditions continue their work.
one can appreciate their predicament. the body of opinion that determines how old texts will be translated and what sense will be made of the translations will be profoundly shocked by the paradigm shift that would occur within it as a result of anyone of its fundamental assumptions being recognised as false. and each discovery of the falsity of an assumption would lead inevitably to the examination of all assumptions, and many others would be seen to be false and there'd be a total collapse of all the screen memories currently in the way of progress towards the achievement of a more realistic approach to cultural memory retrieval and maintenance from the evidence of texts.
this is rendered more painful by the fact that currently one cannot progress in the academic arena unless one is dedicated in a peculiarly archaic fashion. i have discovered in the most painful way possible that i cannot offer a word of critique upon an instance of current dogma without deeply wounding or offending the scholar i'm addressing, as if the fabric of their body of opinion is the flesh of their bones. this serves as a kind of emotional blackmail: only a nasty person would persist in presenting academics studying old irish texts with evidence that their translations are wrong. they can't defend themselves, so they resort to personal attack, insults and defamation, trying to discredit me by proving that i have not exhibited the same commitment to their methodologies as they do. their friends rally round.
this leads me to the conclusion that independent, free-thinking intellectuals with an instinct for critique and a conscientious love of truth get weeded out of these disciplines early in their career, and those that make it through to post-graduate levels are acutely aware (if they're not repressing it) that there is 'only one opinion' as an oxford scholar assert to me a short while ago (on the subject of historical linguistics) and their career depends on their not wavering from it, making their tiny little edges of progress only within existing paradigms as driven by prevailing opinion.
when it gets that seriously stultifyingly up itself, you suspect the church. but you have to dare to say: the bible is a fraud, and that immediately drops you head first into the slush-category. no truly intelligent person could say that, or even if, well okay, everybody kno-o-o-ows that, but nobody really cares, what does it matter if it's wrong or right, what does it matter if all history derivable from old texts is twisted insanely around their petty fibs and outside frauds, such that truths are no longer accessible through them, what does it matter if all chronologies are way off the mark, and all ancestral lineages horribly distorted and all cultures of the past hopelessly misrepresented, most to their detriment. after all it's the myth that drives our dreams, shapes our culture's evolution, makes us what we are.
so okay, cu chullain when ever he lost his temper had a stream of blood shooting out of the top of his head like a fountain and his knees went on backwards.
wouldn't have been that he had a red plume on his helmet and they were wrong about the knees, would it? all those scholars wouldn't be wrong?
and irish kings just did fuck horses, didn't they? wouldn't be that some translator mistook the word for a woman for a word for a mare, in a linguistic situation in which confusion about that word was eminently possible, with emer, mari(e) mare, myrgh, margh, mary, marry, maere etc, all meaning either horse, mare, wife or girl, depending where and who says it and which dialect, would it? and even if it were, it's the myth we're all enamoured of, isn't it???
and there wouldn't have been circle ceremony, with quarters and a centre and peace throughout the whole world, would there, just brehon law, which is really rather good, in keeping with bizarre magician kings who fucked their horses and rolled themselves up in bloody bullskins to find out whatever they needed to know (wouldn't have books, would they?)
oh, breath-blast them all! let their eyes be skinnyfat and a terrible soft slipperiness to their gibberish!! i'm going to translate them sanely. and just admit it when i don't know what a word means. sometimes the meaning's just lost forever... until we learn to time travel, anyway.
( naturally as a wyverne spirit person, i find this a sensitive area. people who think dragons are for beheading, riding about on or running through with lances just aren't my type, y'know. even more so as an independent etymologist who disagrees with the textbooks on fundamentals so essential i can scarcely find common ground. )
this is a response to mainstream proto-indo-europeanists. they are imo up to their necks in fundamental error. their scholarship is hidebound. most of its fundamental principles were already laid down by the nineteenth century, and have never been questioned from any academic position that i could call valid, and okay, i'm finicky, but i'm not that finnicky.
the earliest inventors of the art of 'comparative philology' (now called 'comparative historical linguistics' or some similar thing) were free-thinkers ahead of their time, but they had gone under the spell of the keepers of the mostly Sanskrit traditional literature of India. their work won great acclaim and came under the scrutiny of mainstream universities which were heavily committed to church dogma. though the bravest intellectuals involved in the early development of 'comparative philology' as a scholarly pursuit were not committed to defending these dogmas, as the universities took it up, perforce they warped the study around 'established' biblical dogmas as if they were beyond question, god's own words, 'gospel'.
now, this was before darwin's work was accepted. church scholarship had established the exact date of god's creation of earth by working it out from the bible. adam spoke the first words in the garden of eden when he named the animals, less than six thousand years ago, if i remember rightly. that wasn't considered to be a myth – in fact it wasn't all right to call that a myth – until the middle of last century. it was blasphemy to hint that it 'ain't necessarily so'. i remember the bold, rash feeling there was to it too. like you looked around after to see if you were going to be struck down by a thunderbolt for blaspheming. the birth of jesus, calculated from biblical evidence and the dogma concerning them, was and still is slap bang in the centre of the one and only time scale for all earth for all time, neutral, zero, the end of an ugly era and the commencement of another, better one.
into this atmosphere came this wonderful idea of tracing the origins of words by comparing them and working out how they came to be different and from what common ancestor they diverged, and the belief that you'd soon find that original, perfect language that god and adam spoke in the newly created garden, not so very long ago.
don't get me wrong – i'm not saying they haven't progressed. they're no longer expecting to find adam's own language. they know about laetoli and the ice-ages etc. they've got quite articulate about analysing the result of this process. so what harm does insisting on the infallibility of sacred texts and the sacred traditions concerning them do? pull up a chair. J
the scene is set in william jones's famous statement that
"the Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the greek, more copious than the latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident…" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)
let's unpack it. 'more perfect than the greek. . . more exquisitely refined than either' (and he might have added hebrew) refers us at once to the conviction then held that extinct, tightly conjugated languages were the original, superior languages from which the uninflected languages had deteriorated into their present forms. both were taught in schools as models of excellence to attune the mind to all that is holy and good. kid's greek text-books used to promise their pupils that they were about to learn the very language that god chose to tell us all about his son. practically angel-speak. note he doesn't regard latin as 'perfect', just 'copious', reflecting the idea that latin was less holy – 'god' had preferred the greek version to the latin vulgate since luther's and king james' versions hit the stands. his hyperbole 'more exquisitely refined' indicates that he expected to find people ready to agree with him – slightly disenchanted with the 'classics', but still seeking the elusive ideal, and expecting to find it further a-field.
this idea of the superiority of ancient languages goes back to the celtic idea of the twenty noble languages which are recorded as having been taught in the Scythian schools. while scholars have declared roman writings all but infallible, they have dealt more contemptuously with the everyone else's, so while livy's account of road-making with vinegar and fire (eg) is considered fact even though impossible, the Scythian schools are still often considered to be entirely mythical, even though supported by truckloads of evidence. in fact they were extremely influential. but when did they exist and what were they?
the oldest datable examples of writing we have are not earlier than the renaissance, and while we can date parchment and ink, we can't date the actual text. no spoken examples date from before the invention of the phonograph. carvings on stone are notoriously difficult to date. carbon dating is sometimes farcically inaccurate, as are all other methods of dating carved inscriptions.
(read don quixote for a contemporary account of salvaging old texts from the burnings. it gives a wonderful account of publishing, translating, getting away with appearing learned to people who aren't and then making it up as you go along and being pain for it, and the hermeneutics of the age are all exquisitely there.)
analysis and a modern (not post- which obscures it a bit) education shows how they must have come into being. both modern and ancient languages were taught in neat paradigms. then, immersion and/or wider experience of the language fills this out. you can imaging this potted approach narrowing down to the pure condensed form of paradigms: the conjugations of verbs and declensions of nouns and adjectives.
so the idea that the inflected languages are older than the non-inflectedies s still fondly and firmly held today (although i might refer you here to a discussion on the celtic l list in which Raymond karl concede me this point early this year or late last). there is no evidence to support claims re the antiquity of the inflected languages. none at all.
irish old texts describe a Scythian school which taught the twenty noble languages to trainee officials who would then be sent to the places in which these languages were spoken to live and work there, in positions of high authority - like an english speaking student taking german before going to teach geology at a german university. the date is now not knowable, but evidence i'm seeing places it in the middle ages, not too long before the Norman invasion in England.
i've been making a sort of study of anc gk textbooks of the 19th and early 20th with the help of nigel molesworth (google him if you don't know him – but beware, he's a steeeeeep learning curve). they keep turning up in op-shops and they're much easier to learn anc gk from than the latest, which is inclined to be over-reacting to the octopus – it's not everybody's medicine. the little first form grammar is naïve and pure, with the only spin on it being the probiblical one, before it was obscured by all the modernistic (and post-) spins of the 20th century, and the honest attempts to eliminate spin from language teaching; so the politics in them is glaringly intelligible.
(probibly should slap copyright on probiblically as a coining) (or bung in a hyphen)
these languages were taught as second languages from chantable paradigms into which the original had been potted up by the scholars responsible, and chantable vocabulary lists. a student who learnt a language in this way never heard the natural language until sent out into the field. but language change was then as now faster than textbooks could keep up with. so teachers educated in this way, the learned celts who educated young romans for example, were having to teach natives whose language had continued to evolve through bride-exchanging, conquest and immigration et al, the text book, chantable paradigm version, which had only ever been a very imperfect misrepresentation of a snapshot in time of a rapidly evolving language. a thoroughly artificial language, yet it carried so much prestige that the natural speakers of the original were regarded in some instances (notably welsh and greek) as inferior languages and were replaced by the chantables in schools for the elite, which over the generations provided a leg-up into civilisation for the locals by teaching it to them until the original language at last died out.
this system disappeared when the celtic empire went down (we can't assume we know when that was, as i'll explain later) and attempts at reconstruction were made during the renaissance. the most recent instance of this we have is the ancient greek, which was reconstructed from the old texts that surfaced after the fall of Constantinople. these texts were translated inexpertly around the fantasies of impassioned reconstructionists, whose work has never been checked except tautologically, according to the lexicography and grammar they themselves invented, all debate being knock-out competition instead of respectful consideration of all viewpoints.
there's more coming, but it's a good beginning if you can loosen up on believing the textbooks on the antiquity of the inflected languages.
the great adventure began one day when bluestocking the bard was looking something up in the local library. discerning that the book she needed wasn't there, she muttered under her breath, 'darn!', and it's a good thing it wasn't something stronger, for it echoed rather loudly, as stage whispers do, in the still, stiff silence of that stern and sullen place. at once the woman behind her, who had been poking about in some of the dustier, cobwebbier shelves, abandoning all decorum, screamed 'yoicks!' spun on her stubby high heel and stared bluestocking full in the face. 'tally ho!' she added, remembering almost to whisper. she beamed and nodded. 'darn,' she said. 'just the one i'm after.'
'one what?' asked bluestocking.
'panting syllable. that's what 'darn' is to me. and i'm after that little one. i've been on is track a long while and i know im well. you can catch scent of im from donegal to china and all the way up the danube and down the dnieper changing from tin to tan and from tan to can and every which way and now ere e is ere: darn.' she was short and muscular with big bowling-ball breasts, powerful thighs and thick, white fingers. 'etty moloji,' she concluded proffering that hand. bluestocking shook it and smiled her widest, and would have said, 'oh, how interesting,' but the librarian caught her eye with a sombre glare and she only nodded. but as she left the library, she found etty beside her, tugging her sleeve. 'you see i need to know why you said "darn" instead of "blast" or "shit" or something. where and when did you first hear it, used how, and by whom, and when and where and why did you first start using it yourself. and much more. may we walk together a space.'
'certainly. why, i'd be helping scholarship. i first heard darn from my mother and father when i was little, and i asked them what it meant and they said it had no meaning: it was just something you say. i suppose it must have been some old reference to the goddess dana. she's well-documented anyway. where would you like to walk?'
'cornwall? there's such lots of lovely runnable syllables there. and you often catch glimpses of our darn.'
'well, that's fine with me,' said bluestocking the bard. 'my great grandfather was a Cornishman.'
'well, you mean a den, then?'
'a dane? no, a cornishman.'
'the cornish word for man is den.'
'oh, i see, it only sounds like dane.'
'well, i wouldn't say only. it's going beyond the evidence to say they're the same word, but we should not rule out the possibility, which is rather strong in this instance, although whether dane came from den or vice versa, or whether both came from a common source extinct or extant can't be guessed at yet. added to which there are other possibilities, some of them equally strong. greeks intermarried with britons long ago, though the history documenting it has not been understood.'
'oh, are you going to refer now to the danaans? because weren't greeks once called danaans?'
'well, it's not as simple as that. i was thinkin of tirant lo blanc. but it goes back further, you see: it's about tin. now, ere in cornwall' (which is where they now were) 'they ad a tin-trade, and people came from everywhere, all of them talking their eads orf an in all sorts of languages and foreign accents, ship-board creoles, pidgins and things. among them they'd've pronounced tin in every possibly way: tin, tan, ton, tyn, tun, twn, tn, and then some said chin and gave us china (there was also a pottery industry, making fine china, too; some said can, cen or even sin, and there's the cin of incinerator. there's shine, sheen and then other metals, zinc, tungsten and other industries that use tin, or other metals, such as dying, paint-making and leather-making give us tint, tan, tone and so on. and then all kinds of containers are made of metals, some of them named for the metal: tins, cans, tanks, and here's a verb: contain and, depending what you put in em and how long it pullulates, stench, and stink. even the noise it makes is a din. and that's only the english words. Cornish has tan, meaning fire, and tinn or dinn, meaning hard, stern, and uncompromising, and related to the english stern. . . '
'what's fire got to do with it?' bluestocking couldn't help asking.
'they made their fires in tins.'
'who did?'
'the people who used the word tin to mean fire. they heated their spaces by lighting a fire inside a tin. that would get hot and warn the room. light the fire would mean the same as light the tin. some people would still say that today. the irish word for fire is tine, sometimes pronounced like chin-é or chin-ye. maybe even chimney means fires. -ne or -ney is a plural ending in some old dialects. it's like the irish –anna. means the same as the english any in some instances.'
'and stern too? where does the s come from?'
'that's a long story,' said etty. 'let's call in at the diwotti and talk about it over pastiow ha pott te.'
'good idea,' said bluestocking, and into the diwotti they went.
don't miss the next exciting instalment: where the s came from
'
there's a new book on the market, a hermeneutical work, and everybody's talking about it, so i'll be having a peruse of it as soon as i can get hold of a copy. for those of you clambering for my wise help and guidance, i'll let you know whether it's worth a gecko or not. shlomo zand or sand is the author, and The Invention of the Jewish People is the book. i've ordered the paperback -paupers must live like paupers - so watch this space. herman newt: well, i’d say tew rhimes with dew, or it’s stew without the s, so i’d go for chew for the first syllable, and d@ for the second, and i’d put the emphasis on the first. chewdah. oh i get it. in cornish that's mutate to jewdah. like judah.
etty moloji: only if they spelt it chewdar, but they didn't. that doesn't mean they never did, only that we haven't recorded it. but you could bet your last mudworm at least some of them would have and yes, that does support the hypothesis of a link between the two. but can you think of any other ways? for example, your assumption that tew rhymes with dew or stew is pretty packed for an etymological foray. it assumes that the t is, like that in stew or like the d in dew, slender. perhaps it was at least sometimes, but let's feel about for all the possibilities and see what sort of contexts they guide us to. you see the spelling must have the power to represent the sounds it represented in some way to the writer, bearing in mind that, for example in modern english, spelling gets almighty surreal sometimes, so we can assume a range of pronunciations loosely referred to at least by the letters.
herman: oh, i see. yes, well tew, as in ‘’e didn’t tew me why’.
etty: that’s it. and of course the vowel will vary from speaker to speaker e, o, i, a, @, u, etc. you see spelling was well, idiosyncratic, and writing was getting a tad cryptic. butcher’s hooks, you know. rows and rows of them, and when you get ms and ns and and vs and us and ws and double ls and double is and things like that all in a row its anybody’s guess, especially when you’re learning the school language out of text books, like they did latin, and gaulish and oh, all the inflected ones, for chrissakes they’re not old, they’re jerrybuilt from potted grammars, and you could so easily get taught the wrong word and there’s your tell turned into a tew before you know it.
herman: is this what happened?
