Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest | Hacker News Reader

Runestone discovered in Norway may be the world’s oldest

smithsonianmag.com

144 pointsdiodorus79 comments

Anybody looking for information not filtered through science journalism wouldn't go wrong checking out the Twitter threads of two of the researchers:

https://twitter.com/KristerVasshus/status/161523653168960716...

https://twitter.com/Kristel_Zilmer/status/161546218260654080...

I also recommend Jackson Crawford's video on the subject as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_m2xcoU9Q0

He also had an in-depth interview with Krister Vasshus on his Patreon which will probably be on his You-Tube channel eventually.

This statement[0] from the University of Oslo, linked from the article, explains how the stone was dated, and is in general more explanatory.

[0]: https://www.khm.uio.no/english/news/found-the-world-s-oldest...

Interesting, 1800-2000 years ago is right back in a time when it's somewhat harder to make a distinction between the various Germanic language families. Very close to a more common Germanic era, so if there's much written here it could tell us a lot about Germanic family language evolution.

But it does sound like it's the usual "I, cmrdporcupine, wrote this rune" graffiti form :-) Not a lot of words

A very neat book on this topic (he was my professor for years much later than that book):

A Concise Grammar of the Older Runic Inscriptions, by Elmer Antonsen 1975

https://a.co/d/9nITdEY

Neat! If anyone's looking to buy and dissuaded by the Amazon price, it looks like Abebooks has cheaper used copies.

I've loved runes ever since I saw them on JRR Tolkiens book as a little kid. Very very cool to see something this old.

“Not all inscriptions have a linguistic meaning,” says Zilmer. “It’s possible that someone has imitated, explored or played with the writing. Maybe someone was learning how to carve runes.”

Yeah as I understand a lot of run carvings were more symbolic, loads of stuff where people just repeat a rune over and over because it represents a god, or how many times ᚨᛚᚢ has been found.

I always wonder with runes if there is a huge survivorship bias. Runes most likely lack horizontal strokes to be easier to carve into wood, but wood doesn't endure time as much. Also with stones there's probably a similar effect: in central Europe stones like sandstone or limestone are more common. They are weathering faster than other stones.

I'm confused as to what you're saying here, but it sounds interesting. Can you clarify? Survivorship bias of what over what?

It's well known in protohistory that most of the religious sites were wooded, both with idols and altars of wood, but also in the forest itself in special places such as groves. The romans destroyed most of it, and later the christians (but I repeat myself). So I think gp is just reiterating this.

Here in America our high country and high country desert really make us lucky for having close to surface access of ancient things, makes archaeology and paleontology much easier.

I'm saying that maybe writing runes on stones was uncommon compared to write them on wood and that maybe runes were more common in central Europe than what we see, because those runes endured less than the ones on stones in Scandinavia.

If it helps any, the earliest dated rune is from a bone comb, and have also been found on wood and wax. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryggen_inscriptions says that find helped show that runes were used for things besides "inscriptions of names and solemn phrases."

This would suggest that were runes widely used in central Europe, on wood, then it would still be possible to find traces of that use.

FWIW, knowing basically nothing on the topic, I did a Google Scholar search with 'rune "central Europe"', which returned things like:

"Runes from Lány (Czech Republic) - The oldest inscription among Slavs. A new standard for multidisciplinary analysis of runic bones" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030544032...

I also found that Old Hungarian script was a runic script - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Hungarian_script , usually carved on wood or sticks.

Wood can endure surprisingly well depending on the environment. E.g. we still know that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim is a wild beast 750 years later, even though it was written on birch bark.

anyone know of any good explanations on why radiocarbon dating is considered reliable enough to support claims like this?

Is there some reason to suspect that a widely-used dating technique couldn't be applied to this case?

It would be interesting to explore whether this has any effect on the hypothesis, based purely on letterform comparisons, that runes may be traced to semitic symbols, presumably introduced by Carthaginian refugees or, anyway, travellers.

(This idea has been dismissed as impossible based on the timeline, as the oldest runes postdate Carthage's demolition by centuries, but that argument depends on assuming we have a complete archaeological record, which we of course do not.)

If the older letterforms more closely resemble a semitic form, it would be powerful evidence in favor. If not, things get more complicated.

> but that argument depends on assuming we have a complete archaeological record, which we of course do not.

In other words that argument depends on the available evidence rather than speculation, like, you know, how science should be done.

Assuming you already have all the possible evidence already leads to falsehoods. Science is about not embracing falsehoods, if it is anything.

What you promote is what cemented "Clovis first" for decades beyond its sell-by date, and opposition to the K-T bolide model and plate tectonics. Pretending to know interferes with coming to know.

For a more recent example:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...

Opposition was sloppy to the point of dishonesty.

Do you have links to the arguments in favor of the semitic hypothesis?

https://theconversation.com/shillings-gods-and-runes-clues-i...

might be a good place to start.

So that's a guy claiming he and another person figured out that the derivation of some Proto-Germanic words came from a semitic language. No published paper, just conjecture. He claims that there are a number of loanwords in Proto-Germanic that came from semitic. The word "loanword" is a link to what you would expect to lead to some evidence for it. Instead, it leads to a website listing a number of different loanwords from various languages. The closest thing on that list is Yiddish and it clearly states they mostly entered the language in the 20th century.

Plenty of publications by Venneman (mentioned on the linked site). The man was a linguistics professor for 30 years. Was he right? Probably not, but definitely not just "a guy" and "another person".

All I'm seeing on this subject by him is the book mentioned elsewhere in this thread where the summary claims close and sustained contact with the Carthaginians. The only supporting evidence I'm finding for that assertion is that he's devised new etymologies that connect Proto-Germanic to semitic roots.

All he does is mention that they've made these connections linguistically. He doesn't cite any peer-reviewed papers on the subject. Just the book. If you click the linked text throughout that article, you'll get a few Wikipedia pages, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, and a few other web pages that don't back up his claims.

I'm having trouble taking the theory seriously when he can't seem to pull up any real evidence besides wishful thinking.

You can google "Theo Venneman publications". It's not that hard.

I did. I found a bunch of papers by him, none of them relevant. Another user's comment makes it seem like there are papers of his cited in his book. By the time I saw that though, I'd gotten tired of trying to find evidence that the author of the article should have at least given basic information on how to find.

If he wants to make these claims, he needs to cite the evidence.

At issue is that there is now new evidence. It should be obvious that conclusions reached in its absence do not incorporate any evaluation of the new evidence.

The conclusion might be strengthened, unaffected, weaker, or even reversed. That is the point. There is no value in new evidence other than that it might make a difference. What is difficult about this?

There's no old evidence. You can go looking for connections, but don't try to tell me there was a reason to defend the theory to start with.

There is plenty of old evidence. We call them runestones. The glyphs on them have disputed origin. Nobody seems to imagine they were made up from whole cloth. But they don't resemble any other alphabet closely enough to nail down how they did develop.

Older examples would generally be expected to more closely resemble whatever they came from. Is this unfamiliar reasoning?

There is no evidence for the idea that they descended directly from a semitic alphabet brought up from Carthage to northern Europe. There is no evidence for trade between Carthage and early people's in that area. You realize this and so attempted to change the subject onto something you think you have an argument for.

I've wasted enough time on this. You obviously have no intention of adding any sort of evidence for this argument. Thank you for giving me a reason to read more deeply about the origins of modern alphabets, but I'll continue that reading on my own.

If you read back in the thread you will see that you have tried to change the subject at every point, and I have each time steered it back to the actual topic.

I do not know why you insist on arguing against something no one has suggested, or what so terrifies you about the simple idea I wrote that you are motivated to vicious accusations of "edenism", but I no longer care. You have revealed all we need to know.

Oh I heard about Theo Venneman, his conjectures weren't convincing to me. As far as I remember he tried to explain all Proto-Germanic words of unclear origin (unclear at the time) as stemming from Semitic but since then convincing derivations from Proto-Indoeuropean have been proposed for many of them, so his arguments are quite shaky.

> Oh I heard about Theo Venneman

I haven't heard about you (and you haven't heard about me). Why is it meaningful that you (or I) aren't convinced or think Venneman, an established expert, has shakey arguments?

Nordic runes have a blatant filiatiation to Italic scripts, especially the Etruscan alphabet. It's rather natural that it would spread from the Alps to the North Sea through the Rhine River. In that sense it's just as much descended from the Phoenician alphabet as the Latin alphabet is. But a direct descent from a Semitic script makes less sense. This being said there are cases of scripts being adopted from afar rather than from a neighbour. For example Transalpine Gaul used a Greek script before the Roman invasion, rather than an Italic one.

Yet, we know it is more complicated than simple derivation from Etruscan. So the real question is what else happened.

From TFA:

> Scholars agree that runes were influenced by an older writing system, but just which one, and when, remain the subject of academic debate. One theory posits that the runic alphabet—also known as “futhark,” after its first six sounds—was derived from the alphabet of the Etruscans in northern Italy. Another is that runes were born from the Latin alphabet, following commercial and cultural exchange between Germanic peoples and the Romans.

Apparently, assuming it was "influenced by" only one "older writing system". But there is no basis for any such assumption. It appears to be purely a matter of their own convenience, wholly disconnected from anything in the script.

What is your statement based on? Your analysis of runic scripts?

The origins of the runic script are not established. If they resembled something else strongly enough to say there was just the one, we would not be discussing this.

> If they resembled something else strongly enough to say there was just the one, we would not be discussing this.

That doesn't make sense to me. Maybe they did and you don't know about it.

Maybe read up just a bit? It is the biggest open question.

1) Why Carthaginian rather than Phoenician?

2) Given that runes are a form that's optimised for writing on trees, it should not be expected that the oldest runes will be found.

Carthaginians were Phoenicians.

I know that. When talking about language and script transmission it makes more sense in my view to talk about Phoenicians rather than Carthaginians, unless there is any specific linguistic difference such as dialect that needs to be taken into account (and in this case I don't think there is any such detail). It seems like an assumption not based on fact to assume transmission via Carthage rather than other routes.

Carthage is much, much closer to Denmark, by sea, than Tyre. That matters because theirs was a maritime empire. If there are any differences between letterforms used in Tyre and later in Carthage, the ones from Carthage are the natural choice to check. You could check the others, too, if you liked.

You have a preferred theory already, and you're trying to fit the facts to it.

Unwise.

No, I just want to know about what the evidence says about it.

There is no evidence to support the idea that Phoenician travelers had sustained contact with early Germanic peoples, and especially not enough to significantly influence German language and writing. There is evidence to show Etruscan, Latin, and Greek influence on Germanic language and writing.

In human language there are often similarities between unrelated languages and these have myriad possible origins. As such, within the realm of linguistics one needs substantial proof to successfully claim a relationship exists between two otherwise unrelated languages.

Either the physical evidence suggests a connection or it doesn't. It is obviously fallacious to insist there could be no contact between Carthaginian and Germanic populations: boats sail between the Baltic and Mediterranean seas all the damn time.

It was only a little time ago that many historians insisted bronze-age tin could not possibly have come from England. ("There's no solid evidence for it!") Then isotope analysis showed that it definitely did. The only correct statement at the time would be that we didn't know whether the tin was coming from England. Accepting the isotopic evidence does not absolve anybody from insisting they knew what they were fully aware they did not know.

Any discussion that doesn't even mention the possibility of origin in semitic forms (which, of course, Greek and ultimately Roman also trace to) seems unlikely to enlighten.

Carthaginians certainly got around. You would seem to need a plausible reason for them to have been unable or unwilling to visit Denmark.

Just because they don't mention this not-widely-accepted hypothesis you're going to dismiss it? Ok.

It doesn't offer anything else. So, yes. "Not widely accepted" means, exactly, "usefully checked against new evidence".

If you can point to anything beyond "woohoo, new older runes" and "maybe this helps distinguish between Greek and italic origin", do.

If you have any info on this, post it.

I was also curious about the topic.

I think this book review by Nelson Goering of Robert Mailhammer & Theo Vennemann's book "The Carthaginian North: Semitic Influence on Early Germanic: A Linguistic and Cultural Study" at https://hcommons.org/deposits/download/hc:40752/CONTENT/goer... and https://doi.org/10.1075/jhl.20028.goe does a good job of summarizing the argument and the review author's issues with it.

> The thesis presented in this book – that there was a substantial linguistic impact on what would become Proto-Germanic from the Punic spoken by Carthaginians who allegedly established outposts in northern Europe – has been argued by one of the authors in various articles for many years (see the collected articles in Vennemann 2003, 2013), and is already known as ‘controversial’. ... This book can be taken as arguing the best possible case for Punic influence on Germanic ...

> This, then, is the sum of the strictly linguistic evidence marshalled by MV for the alleged Punic contact and linguistic influence on Germanic. They supplement it with an appeal to writing systems, arguing that runes are best derived directly from the Punic alphabet. They make a number of points, but a large core of their argument turns on the supposed derivation of the first four runes (for f, u, þ, and a), in order, shape, and sound, from the Punic alphabet. .

> The result of this, it should by now be clear, is that I must conclude that the central thesis of the book – that there was linguistic influence from Punic on pre-Germanic – is not supported by the evidence marshalled here. More than that, I would say that this Punic hypothesis may now be confidently rejected as very probably untrue. If such influence were real, then the combined labours of two talented linguists, one working on the problem for very many years, and with ample (if often critical) feedback to build on, would have uncovered convincing traces by now. That they have not strongly suggests that such do not exist. If this is the best argument that can be made for the Punic hypothesis, then the hypothesis would appear to be incorrect.

Either new evidence changes the picture, or it doesn't. Objecting to checking is not science.

What new evidence.

The guy's post said it was checked by linguists and found inadequate to support your claim. Not that your claim is wrong, just unsupportable by that checking.

Are you aware of the article your post is attached to?

Yes. Iust can't see the word 'semitic' or 'carthage' there, am I missing something?

It is new evidence. Previous conclusions formed in its absence are obsolete. The new conclusion might be the same, or not, but not without checking first.

What explicitly is the link. What is the new evidence. Please be specific.

It is right there at the top of the window you are looking at right now. They call it TFA around here.

I wanted to know what you were talking about in the first place.

Not whether this runestone find affects our understanding of history.

What does "the picture" mean? For just about every topic there are multiple pictures, depending on one's interest.

I think it's good science for geospatial information scientists to object to requests to check for a flat earth, and for medical scientists to object to using humoral theory in medical diagnostics, so I think your second sentence, when interpreted a blanket statement, is wrong.

Surely Mailhammer, or Vennemann, or you could perform and publish your own checks, so I also don't see how your comment is relevant - who is stopping them from checking?

This sounds like "edenics" (as in garden of Eden), which posits that there was original language (probably Hebrew) from which all languages descend. Other popular "original" languages are Tamil, Sanskrit, Basque, or whatever language some nationalist crackpot decides they want to promote. It's totally disconnected from reality. Here's a Language Log post on it: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005278.h...

This is super reminiscent to me of the arguments you see claiming Tamil is the oldest language. It's just not based on sound evidence or reasoning.

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