Old Norse

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Bluepaint
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Old Norse

Postby Bluepaint » Sat Apr 22, 2017 9:25 pm

A short video about a project between University of York & Jorvik Centre where they attempted to recreate/speak Old Norse:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=1s&v=_OKxzSKzJe0

Edit: because I am a technophobe I can't embed the video :lol:
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Re: Old Norse

Postby DaveBee » Sat Apr 22, 2017 10:07 pm

Rhian wrote:A short video about a project between University of York & Jorvik Centre where they attempted to recreate/speak Old Norse:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?t=1s&v=_OKxzSKzJe0

Edit: because I am a technophobe I can't embed the video :lol:
York also hosts an early music festival, and is apparently choc-a-block with chocolate shops. A must visit! :-)
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Re: Old Norse

Postby Soffía » Sun Apr 23, 2017 9:11 am

I know that the pronunciation of Old Norse and Modern Icelandic are not the same, but getting Icelanders working on this project would have been a great start.
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Re: Old Norse

Postby Valerian » Tue Aug 22, 2017 5:36 pm

Hi, I want to have a tattoo done in Short twig runes. I don't speak Old Norse and I can't write in runes. So I wanted to ask one of you guys to translate a quote for me.

No gods,
or kings.
Only man.

I would really appriciate it if you could help me.

Thanks
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Re: Old Norse

Postby emk » Wed Aug 23, 2017 3:14 pm

Valerian wrote:Hi, I want to have a tattoo done in Short twig runes. I don't speak Old Norse and I can't write in runes. So I wanted to ask one of you guys to translate a quote for me.

No gods,
or kings.
Only man.

I would really appriciate it if you could help me.

I don't know if there's anybody on this forum who can write grammatically correct Old Norse.

I've heard that there's a small handful of people in the Society for Creative Anachronism who can write Old Norse well enough to prepare short runic texts. Maybe check the Eastern Kingdom in the US, the northern part, and ask very politely if somebody can point you in the right direction. You'll need to talk to the scribes, and I would strongly recommend offering to pay them for their work; it's a pretty rare skill. (Also, if you're offering to pay a fair price, you're more likely to actually get pointed to the right person.) If you care about an accurate tattoo, you'll want to make extra sure that you're talking to one of the tiny handful of people who can actually write grammatically correct Old Norse. It's very likely that these same people could prepare a professional-quality tattoo design, or know somebody who can. I've seen some breathtakingly gorgeous calligraphic work by SCA scribes.

You might be able to get started by searching the Rundata database, which contains most known runic inscriptions. You might get lucky and find something close, which would at least allow you to learn enough to make sure you're working with somebody who actually writes Old Norse. If you find an inscription that contains part of the text you want, I do actually have a copy of Danmarks Runeindskrifter with pictures of most of the runic inscriptions from Denmark, and you might be able to persuade me to post a picture of a specific page if you've done your homework. ;-)

I'm always a bit sad when I see people with meaningless, embarrassing or grammatically incorrect tattoos in a foreign language. This is really common for Egyptian hieroglyphics, and some of the tattoos are just horribly bad. Maybe it's the language geek in me, but I can't imagine permanently marking my body with misspellings, broken grammar, or total nonsense.

(Amusing story: I did have a friend who spoke fairly fluent Chinese, and when he was in China, he would often make himself a beautiful calligraphic name tag which said "Idiot American" and pretend that it was made for him by a friend. He had a very dry sense of humor.)
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Re: Old Norse

Postby rdearman » Wed Aug 23, 2017 3:27 pm

hummm....

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Is that correct?
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Re: Old Norse

Postby IronMike » Wed Aug 23, 2017 4:42 pm

I would advise you search out departments of Scandinavian or some in the UK (I know one U there has a dept of Anglo-Saxon/Norse/Germanic or smthg like that), and see if you can get a nice professor or grad student to help you. Might be worth giving it a shot yourself and then asking them for help. Beware someone who might translate it, uh...creatively and then you end up with a tattoo you don't really want!
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Re: Old Norse

Postby Josquin » Wed Aug 23, 2017 5:47 pm

In Modern Icelandic, the inscription would be something like:

Engir guðir
eða konungar,
bara maðurinn.

The Old Norse shouldn't be too different from this, I don't know how to write in runes though.
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Re: Old Norse

Postby vonPeterhof » Wed Aug 23, 2017 9:03 pm

Josquin wrote:In Modern Icelandic, the inscription would be something like:

Engir guðir
eða konungar,
bara maðurinn.

The Old Norse shouldn't be too different from this, I don't know how to write in runes though.

Going by my (basic) knowledge of runes, the short twig version should look something like this:

ᛁᚴᛁᛧ᛬ᚴᚢᚦᛁᛧ
ᛁᚦᛆ᛬ᚴᚢᚿᚢᚴᛆᛧ
ᛓᛆᚱᛆ᛬ᛙᛆᚦᛧᛁᚿ

The only difference I'm aware of from Modern Icelandic is that in Old Norse "maðurinn" would be "maðrinn".
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Re: Old Norse

Postby Iversen » Sun Aug 27, 2017 9:31 pm

I have just returned from holiday and haven't had time to go into details with this. Actually there is a splendid grammar with pronunciation hints written by an Icelandic genius in the 12. century, "Fyrsta málfræðiritgerðin", so there is not as much guesswork involved with the pronunciation as you might have feared. It has been sufficiently well described to surprise ud on certain points, like the existence of nasal vowels in Old Norse - they have become simple flat vowels in Modern Icelandic.

One way to write a text in credible Old Norse without being one of the few specialist would be to make a sketch in Modern Icelandic and then change some obvious things to make them look more ancient and maybe let a specialist do the final retouches.

Let's first take the alphabet: the old alphabet i "a b c d ð e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z þ æ ǫ ø œ " (source en.wikibook). The main problem is therefore to replace ö with ǫ or ø. The other letters are basically retained the ancient times. You could try convert the text into runes, but there is a problem. The latest version of the runic alphabet is one with dotted runes ('stungne runer' in Danish), but that's medieval - not really 'vikingish' enough to be really fun, and the previous version is notoriously inadequate to render the sounds of Old Norse of the viking period. I would stick with the revised roman letters used in modern publications of the sagas.

There are a few changes in the morphology, like the change from -r to -ur in the nominative singular of masculine nouns (as mentioned by VonPeterhof), but basically the old system has survived.

Changes in vocabulary is more irksome. There are good Old Norse-into-something dictionaries available (most written at least a century ago), but the problem is to go the other way. If I had to do the job I would read through the word list in for instance Wimmer's text collection or Zoëga's dictionary and change the words in my test version into the corresponding Old Norse words as I hit upon them - which of course is easier if you know it almost by heart and know where you may have used new words. But most words are luckily the same as they were 1000 years ago.

And finally there is syntax including word order. If you can make some sentences impersonal and switch the word order in some others then the whole lot will look more convincing. In my log I actually once commented on one famous stanza of Norse lore which illustrates this point:

Vreiðr var þá Vingþórr
er hann vaknaði
ok síns hamars
of saknaði,
skegg nam at hrista,
skör nam at dýja,
réð Jarðar burr
um at þreifask.

PS: I haven't tried to imitate Old Norse yet, but it might be fun to try the trick some day where I haven't got something more sensible to do. So far I have however problems enough with writing convincingly in modern Icelandic.
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