The Order of the Futhark (A Free Course in Runes, pt. 5)
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- čas přidán 28. 08. 2024
- The alphabetical order (beginning "futhark"/ "fuþark"...) of the rune alphabet is one of its most diagnostic characteristics and one of the biggest mysteries about it too. Start with pt 1: vimeo.com/7956...
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The Order of the Futhark sounds like a secret society.
lol :D yeah, dr crawford discovering how clickbait works
I'd join that society
Lol.
I assumed it was a tier on patreon or something. I totally didn't see it coming, to be literally the order. 😂
Exactly what I was going to say, and I'm a Granger!
What makes it so fascinating is the sheer range of reasonable explanations one could conjure up. It could be as simple as a mnemonic, someone deliberately randomising the order on a whim, or artistic license, or as complex as a multilingual code based on a mix of mathematics and wordplay.
Fantastic hypothesis! I went to see if I could use Gaulish to explain the weird Futhark order, by finding words that mean the Proto-Germanic words in Xavier Delamarre's Dictionnaire de la language gauloise:
Fehu: argenton, a, check!
Uruz: bos, b, check!
Thurisaz: cauaros (means either giant or hero), c, check!
Ansuz: deuos, d, check!
Raido: uecti, f/u, check!
Kaunaz: I'm not sure what letter should go there honestly
Gebo: Idem
Wunjo: iantus, i, check!
Hagalaz: can't find the word for hail or rain in Gaulish
Naudiz: same
Isa: ice is iago, so the order is starting to get weird
Jera: year is either sonnocingos or *bledani in Proto-Celtic, not attested for Gaulish for that root
Ihwaz: yew is either eburos or iuos
Pertho: unsure meaning
Algiz: alcos, ?
Sowilo: sonnos, ?
Tiwaz: Toutatis perhaps? Would follow S if sonnos is correct, makes some sense
Berkanan: betula, ?
Ehwaz: caballos, epos or markos
Mannaz: gdonios, ?
Laguz: locus or lopos, ?
Ingwaz: Cernunnos? Sucellos?
Othala: orbios means heir, so maybe *orbioca?
Dagaz: *diyos, ?
Maybe not as easy as I thought, especially since we don't know all Gaulish words that ever existed.
I can't link to it, but one reconstructed PC vocabulary has *alamo for riches (f), *φiturnajo for candle (k), and *kassari for hail (h). I think we need the orders of the Alipne alphabets to figure out which letters they dropped.
@@marjae2767 I think I've seen *kassari for hail! Thanks for the info. I tried using the order of the Lugano alphabet but I was uncertain about some letters.
The third letter for "giant" can't be cauaros then, if we consider *kassari for k. It probably was a word starting in g. I'm tempted to use the gargo- root here which means "terrible", maybe something like *gargennos, *gargatios or *gargarios.
Honestly the mnemonic related to the names hypothesis makes most sense to me. Or maybe someone made a really good alphabet song!
The alphabet song theory isn't that stupid an idea actually. For the musical "alfabet" this is exactly what happened:
Taken from wiki, this most reliable source (ahem...):
In 11th century Italy, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo invented a notational system that named the six notes of the hexachord after the first syllable of each line of the Latin hymn "Ut queant laxis", the "Hymn to St. John the Baptist".
UT queant laxīs
REsonāre fibrīs
MĪra gestōrum
FAmulī tuōrum,
SOlve pollūtī
LAbiī reātum,
Sancte Iohannēs.
Each successive line of this hymn begins on the next scale degree, so each note's name was the syllable sung at that pitch in this hymn.
"UT" was changed in the 1600s in Italy to "DO" at the suggestion of the musicologist Giovanni Battista Doni (based on the first syllable of his surname), and Si (from the initials for "Sancte Iohannes") was added to complete the diatonic scale.
I'm not sure I understood his point about that, to be honest. Can you explain it to me? I don't get why "fehu" would get moved to the beginning, and he compares it to "a" meaning "money" in their language? I'm honestly lost.
@@PRKLGaming Oh that's not the one I was talking about, just that someone had a mnemonic song/story/something for remembering the alphabet. But no the idea was that maybe in the Celtic alphabet their "A" letter was named "money" and their "money" word happened to start with A, so when it was adopted to spell proto-Germanic, they were like "what word means 'money', 'fehu', OK, so we'll put F at the start in the position of the 'money' letter in the Celtic alphabet" and so on. I'm not sure I buy it because I don't think there would be a very clean mapping between Celtic and Germanic such that there'd happen to be similar enough names that work for each letter... it seems to me that that sort of mapping would produce lots of redundant and lots of missing letters. But who knows.
@@Muzer0 you'd need a significant degree of bilingualism in the population responsible for adopting the language. That wouldn't be especially surprising though, prior to the rise of centralised nation states and their education systems enabling standardised languages, imperialism, and the demise of minority languages both have sped up, multilingualism was the norm in most of the world (and still is today in many places where centralised education systems are relatively weak, or colonialism arrived relatively late)
The word for "silver" in Celtic languages usually starts with "a", so if that was used for "money" in Lepontic (or whatever) there's a start
Thanks again!
Time for Jackson to publish some childrens books on his favourite stories (pre-school with colourful illustrations). I think they would sell well for birthdays and holidays.
Hope this mistery is resolved during our lifetime, either way another great video, keep em coming!
BTW "the order of the Futhark" would be an awesome movie title
I tried my hand at reconstructing a Gallic alphabet, but I think the spam filter ate it because I linked to the dictionary I was using. Finding possible roots wasn't so hard, there were usually several possibilities, among others. Figuring out how the Alpine Gallic alphabets would work, what would begin with F or H, etc. was beyond me.
P.S. The spam filter ate 2 of my other comments, but the source I was using had *alamo for faihu (a-f), *φiturnajo for candle (f-k), and *kassarī for hail (k-h), among others. I really hope it doesn't delete this for mentoning faihu. Using the order of the Alpine Gallic and Raetic alphabets would probably be a lot more helpful here than the order of the Roman alphabet.
I'm surprised nobody mentions the proposal by Vennemann & Mailhammer that the Runic alphabet was directly inspired by the Phoenician alphabet through contact with Carthaginian traders. Their book "The Carthaginian North: Semitic influence on early Germanic" demonstrates plausible influences of Semitic phonology, morphology, vocabulary and, especially, writing system, on Germanic. The shape and ordering of the letters have a particular correspondence.
I just bought the poetic edda and the saga of the Volsung I love the books
Looking at the lyrics of the Icelandic band Skald's song Run the lyrics for the chorus are essentially equivalent to the "Furthark alphabet song" ha ha
regarding that idea from your patreon it definitely doesn't seem implausible, the following Proto-Celtic words (per Matasović's etymological dictionary) seem to line up alright (and are in the first part of the futhark where the order's relatively stable)
*arganto- "silver" > "money" in modern languages ~ fehu
*bow- "cow" ~ uruz (the semantic link here seems relatively weak imo, but the name of the Elder Futhark u rune is itself a little problematic)
*kawaro- "champion" > "giant" in Middle Welsh ~ þurisaz
*dēwo- "god" ~ ansuz
*ati-daw-ino- > Welsh etewyn "torch" ~ kenaz (this one's pretty weak, as it both assumes the OE name is original, and that the mediating Celtic language had i-affection of a as Welsh does)
*wenyā "family" ~ wunjō (these two are obviously cognates, and also wunjō appears one position later, with gebō appearing in it's place, so this is tricky)
that would get us an expected order of fuþa?kw, not too dissimilar from fuþarkgw
after that it gets difficult to try to line them up, especially as it's unclear what exact inventory of letters the source alphabet would have had
one potential note is that f appears last in etruscan and *folkā "arable land" is a plausible correspondence with ōþalą provided the transmission into Celtic happened before the loss of *f < *p (and iirc there is some evidence for relatively late retention in Lepontic)
other words near the end are much trickier, maybe *gdesi "yesterday" corresponding to dagaz if we had gd > xt as we do medially, and Etruscan kh was understood by the Celts as a fricative
Ingwaz is also essentially uncomparable here, as there's no good way to know who might be seen as equivalent, and it's the one letter that isn't acrophonic (for obvious reasons)
it's also interesting to note that this process is the one that seems to have been used in the adoption of the alphabet into Semitic in the first place, where hieroglyphs weren't used in a way corresponding to their Egyptian consonantal values, but the first letter of the Semitic translation of the Egyptian name for the glyph
It's a good hypothesis, for instance, some refer to their ships as brine horse. And from each of those names, there would be more links, inferences, insinuations. In modern times, saying the word horse, could bring up many other meanings and references in a persons mind. So, if naming a letter a name, you could have a dozen other thoughts coupled with it.
One reason the order might be different than Greek/Latin is that they purposefully wanted to obscure any connection to known scripts. You pointed out how hard it is to recognize it is a related script when the order is different. Still, that doesn't explain how people would remember the new order, so their must be some logic that we don't understand for why the order is the way it is. One thing you didn't mention was that if the letter names had known meanings, they could be part of some kind of mnemonic poem or story. Another thing is that some of the letter order being switched is more easy to see, like "p" and "æ" being mixed up, because they were both rarely used sounds right next to each other in the middle of the alphabet. The "D" and "O" characters being switched could also be because they were somehow seen as "extra" letters, and thus were put at the end of the alphabet, especially because we still aren't sure about the origin of the "D" character. Or the "O" could be moving to the end under the influence of the Greek alphabet having Omega at the end.
Could the order of the runes be a clever attempt to make the writing more unintelligible to outsiders, possibly in trade? Seeing the futhark spelled out to someone of other origin they may assume that the runes in that order represent the sounds of ”abc” which will make interpretation of actual words written in runes hard. Just a thought…
Will you be writing a book on Runes in the Dinosaur Age?
Hello Jackson, a quick question please. Alphabet evolution: Egyptian hieroglyphs -> Proto Sinai (Egypt writing system) -> Phoenician(modern Lebanon) -> Greek alphabet (added vowels - Cyrillic alphabet ) -> Latin -> Modern European languages but it started in Egypt it seems. Europe is linked to Egypt. Why were runes dropped in nordic countries/Germany in favor on Egyptian writing, do you know?
Very few people probably knew how to write in runes, then upon being christianized, most literature would then be written down by christian monks using the latin language or at least the latin script. In the long run carving the runes into stone seems to become less and less commonplace, with a small uptick just post christianization.
I'm not sure I understood his point about the names of the runes being the reason for their order, to be honest. Can somebody explain it to me? I don't get why "fehu" would get moved to the beginning, and he compares it to "a" meaning "money" in their language? I'm honestly lost.
the idea is that the source script may have followed the more typical abc... order. If that script then assigned letters names (e.g. arganton "silver" also "money" in surviving Celtic languages for a) the Germanic peoples may have adopted the alphabet by translating the letter names and then applying the acrophonic principle (i.e. translating arganton as fehu "wealth", and using the letter for the f sound that the word begins with)
this same process seems to have been how the alphabet was adopted into Semitic from Egyptian hieroglyphs as well!
Where is lindkaer? Like I cant find the area it was found in denmark. Is it lindholm?
I'd pay decent money for a full course on old norse if you put some more effort into packaging it neatly and making it as short as possible
Thank you very much for this online course. Ever since I became aware of the way the Greeks were denoting numbers: alpha 1, beta 2, ..., theta 9,
iota 10, kappa 20, ..., qopa 90, rho 100, sigma 200, ... sampi 900. And when comparing this to the runes, I wonder whether the runes are not used in a similar fashion and the order has been established for some counting and accounting purpose. While runes have been used for ciphers and calendars in later times, are there inscriptions which are "business accounts"? Or are there texts or oral traditions or philological evidence which point to number systems used by Germanic or Celtic cultures which may explain the runes as numbers? As far as I know the "score" system based on 20 seems to be Viking, Finno-Ugric and possibly Swedish used a system based on 8. If the runes work like the Greek alphabet, they point to a system based on the number 9.
They were used in Old Slavic - somewhat.
Decimals were there. Not named at gutark, neither Greek: separate pre-Cyrillic (synthetic) alphabet, called Glagolitsa (Word-craft, in literal translation), sources were hunted upon and destroyed, being pre-Christian.
How can we know for sure that its an order for this alphabet, but not some sacred phrase that is written with purpose?
Bitcoin is a lot older than I expected
4:47 Are you pronouncing the name "futhark" with an Eth or a Thorn? 🤔 Is it the preceeding or the following vowel (or something else) that gives us clues to how the Th-rune is supposed to sound in runic inscriptions ?
Im going to be honest i don't understand what the Patreon subscriber's suggestion was, can anyone explain it to me in different words?
So, in an imaginary alfabet from an imaginary language, lets assume the first letter A is called
"Araf".
Now, when using this alfabet as the basis for a new alfabet for another imaginary language, suppose that "Araf" translates to "Brop".
Then, keeping the order of the translated words the same, the first letter of the new alfabet would be "B". Andsoforth.
At least that is how I understand the hypothesis.
@@embeleco2342 thank you very much i now understand. super interesting
@@embeleco2342 I'm still not sure I understand. If we use real world examples, it would be like the Gauls changed alpha to a word that meant "money", let's say it's "annos" because that sounds Gaulish.
Then, some Germanic tribe picks up "annos" and translates it to their language so it's "fehu".
Is that it?
I guess my point is that it necessarily needs an intermediary language. It can't go from alpha/a to fehu, because alpha/a doesn't mean anything.
@@PRKLGaming the idea is that the source script may have followed the more typical abc... order. If that script then assigned letters names (e.g. arganton "silver" also "money" in surviving Celtic languages for a) the Germanic peoples may have adopted the alphabet by translating the letter names and then applying the acrophonic principle (i.e. translating arganton as fehu "wealth", and using the letter for the f sound that the word begins with)
this same process seems to have been how the alphabet was adopted into Semitic from Egyptian hieroglyphs as well!
Letter names might be a fruitful route. It's not the same time period nor the same location, but Scots Gaelic is a Celtic laguage and it has letter names.
The Ogham script also has letter names (that mean something in the language, unlike the Greek names Alpha, Beta, etc.), but these names are attested pretty late, so it is hard to know if they are the original names of the letters. A lot of the letters are named after trees. Now, the earliest inscriptions of the Runic alphabet are a lot older than the first inscriptions in Ogham, but there are a lot of parallels. Ogham also has a different alphabetical order than Greek/Latin, and is arranged into different groups like the Aetts in the Runic script. It also has a bunch of coded versions of the script, just like Futhark.
I suspect answers to questions like this lie not in the texts but in the understanding of the role of the scribe in their society. For instance asking why thorn disappeared from the English alphabet cannot really be resolved by studying medieval manuscripts and grave markers, it probably has more to do with the rise of printing and the purchase of continental European typefaces , which did not have thorn, by English printers. Once printed texts became the standard, thorn was marginalised. None of this is about the logic of communicating English effectively or evident on any written alphabet anywhere.
Well, "A" doesn't have a meaning, but aleph = ox(cattle).
Yes, and fä is cattle in Norse languages. The hypothesis is interesting. 👍
:)
I think it's possible that the "invention" of the elder futhark was made by a single person, basing it on an older alphabet he (most likely a male individual) encountered, and that the order is just the whim of that single person. If so, there's no practical reason for the particular order they're in.
😋🙃🙂
He is Odins man. He's a real jerk!
Regarding the translated names hypothesis:
A ?argentus ᚠ feoh
B ?bovis ᚢ ur
C ?cena ᚦ þorn
D ?deus ᚩ as
E ?equus ᚱ rad
F ?foetor ᚳ cen
G ?gratus ᚷ gyfu
H ?honos ᚹ ƿynn
I ?imber ᚻ hægl
The first nine letters, based on no evidence whatsoever: im just just a dude with a dictionary, but wouldn't it be nice if...?
Pecunia is the word for money in Latin.
Also, it'd have to be Gaulish or Lepontic.
Argentus, silver, can mean wealth, money by extension, in the same way as *fehu means primary cattle, stock and by extension wealth, money.
And no, it does not HAVE to be Lepontic, Gaelic, etc.
But see also the comment by benthebow.
you're comparing to the Classical Latin alphabet's order, based on Northern Italic scripts we'd expect an order more like A B C D E V Z H TH (possibly with some of B, C, D, &/or H lost as in Lepontic, and/or with C reinterpreted as a G). Even in Old Latin where the Etruscan V had shifted to an f sound, Z was retained (and only replaced by a newly innovated G in the 3rd century BCE)
First of all, i didn't know that, so thanks for learning me something new!
I agree that comparing with Northern Italic scripts would a priori make more sense.
As i understood it, in Old Latin the Z was replaced by G somewhere in the third century BCE and reintroduced in the first BCE, together with the addition of Y, both placed at the end of the alphabet, resulting in the Classical Latin alphabet.
Given that the oldest known Futhark inscriptions are dated as old as possibly 26CE, comparing with Classical seems to fit in chronologically?
Nevertheless, your reaction shows that the devil is in the details. Shout out to all dedicated scholars!
@@embeleco2342 one issue with that is the existence of the Negau Helmet, which JC has often brought up as plausibly intermediate between runes and Old Italic scripts. It dates to the 4th or 5th century BCE, before the introduction of G to Latin
even if the Negau Helmet isn't actually intermediate between Germanic and Italic, it seems likely that the script would have taken quite some time between being adopted by a Celtic people and being adopted as runes by the Germanic peoples, and then appearing in the Vimose Comb around 160CE
plus, as JC has generally said before, he doesn't believe the alphabet is (primarily) derived from Latin, but instead from sister alphabets (like Lepontic). If this is the case then innovations unique to Latin (like the introduction of G) shouldn't appear in it