“ I wish you good thinking.” Just on the face of it, with limited information, the Younger Futhark seems to me to be a “texting” version of the Elder Futhark.
@@aerobolt256 If you think about it, modern, normal English does the same, to an extend. The T in "stand" sounds different than in "truck," the letter O can sound different in words like how, long and roof, and the combination "th" can represent two different phonemes, none of which sound anything like a T or an H. There's often a discrepancy between how many phonemes a language has and how many letters its speakers think they need to represent them, and maybe Old Norse just took this concept a bit further.
Since the language changed so much, it also became difficult for people to understand the old text, both the meaning and the runes themselves. The mapping between runes and vowels, which had changed, became unclear and didn't make sense anymore. So rather than to try to use runes that they didn't understand, they came up with something simpler. And the reinvention happened to be poorer.
That's a really astute observation! If one only knows part of an alphabet, they might substitute letters and merge letters together to try and form some semblance of the spoken language.
There was a lecture series from Toulane university that covered Norse culture and history from bronze age to viking age, and it was available to the public on video tapes at one point, In it the lecturer talked about possible reasons for the beginning of the viking raids, with language change being one of the suspected factors. He claimed before 700AD it was relatively easy for continental Germanic people to understand the proto Norse speakers, and he cites the early saga heros such as Sigurd, Gudrun and the like who were essentially west germanic characters from the migration era and which the Norse speakers happily adopted as their own, as evidence that in this early time period Norse speakers saw themselves as one and the same as the Germanic peoples on the continent.
This makes me think of Braille. About 12 years ago, a new version of Braille (type II) was produced. A lot of people hated it because it contained fewer characters and, they felt, limited expression - compared with type I Braille it was like ‘text-speke’ - abbreviated. So I wonder if that might be behind Younger Futhark - a desire to make it easier, possibly to widen the number of people using it.
As always, potentially boring stuff is presented so interesting and well explained from this guy. I wish all ancient languages could have a genious like this to give us similar insight.
Interesting point. 450AD to 650AD was during the migration period. It's not hard to imagine the proficient elder futhark users migrating in droves to former Roman lands seeking better fortunes after the collapse of the empire during this period. Indeed we know for a fact large numbers of Jutlanders migrated to what would later become England, along with Angles, Saxons and Frisians in this era, and it was said that Northumberia and Bernacia had lots of Norwegian settlers even before the Viking age.
It makes me think of how in old English they used "a" for the sound in "father" but "æ" for the sound in "cat." And yet today we see it as obvious that "a" can do both of these sounds. That's how I imagine the writer of the rok stone looking back at elder futhark is thinking.
I believe that the difference between these two "a" in English is relative modern. Pronounciation in Old English was not like today. Old English "catt" was probably pronounced closer to the German pronounciation with an a like "father" but shorter, I think. Like the first three phones of German "Katze" or like you pronounce today "cut".
Such a fascinating historical event that I really hope has more discoveries helping to answer our questions, and that we find more evidence for determining what actually happened, and why! Thanks for sharing this!
One hypothesis I have seen is that it was a deliberate reform. Someone, or a group of poeple, in the Denmark-Southern Sweden area decided that adding more runes wasn't the way to go (like they did in England and Frisia, ending up with 30-35 runes), and instead went for a radical simplification. Don't underestimate peoples insights into how language and writing worked at the time, just because they didn't have internet. ;) Of course, there's no way to prove that this is actually what happened... so we will probably never know for sure. :/
@@davidweihe6052 If the distinctioms were being lost in speech, then loosing them in writing would have made sense. What's weird is is that linguistic reconstruction tells us they didn't. Most of the phoneme distinctions reappeared in writing as soon as the Latin alphabet was adopted -- a pretty clear indication that they were still being maintained in speech, even if they weren't written. (There is, of course, such a thing as a distinction between emphatic and "lazy" pronunciation, but it seems a little dubious to assume that's responsible, and I'm not sure how stable emphatic pronunciations can be over centuries without prescriptive norms reenforcing the emphatic pronciations.
What was the literacy rate? How many people actually could read runes at that time? It seems that rapid changes are easier when it's a very small percentage of people that are changing, unlike modern writing systems where there is resistance from almost the whole population due to nearly full literacy.
There's a lot of academic debate about that. In the high middle ages material from Bergen and other towns, as well as graffiti all over churches seem to show runes were very common to know at that time, and used for casual messages. It might have been that way earlier as well, but we simply do not have enough material surviving to say.
That thing about the old Irish written language changing in a similar way as proto norse is indeed very interesting. There is genetic evidence of contact between the british isles and western Norway that dates as far back as hundreds of years before the 800s. So there's the possibility that the languages may have affected eachother even that far back in time.
I like to imagine how they view the whole “same symbol for different sounds” the same way English speaking ppl view “th” representing both sounds. Sure they’re different sounds but because we learnt of them with the same symbol for too long, it never quite occured to us (unless you are too into linguistics lmao). One thing i definitely believe is that the supposed “logic” of a writing system is only good for the learning stage, whereas the more we use them in our everyday life, we just remember certain “shape” of a word and doesn’t care abt spelling all that much, which is why writing system that seems weird and illogical still works most of the time
I kinda agree with Tina. The change to Younger Futhark, in a nutshell, seems to me to be a change to a phonetic approximation of the language: you get enough written content that you can reliably guess at what the word actually is - but not enough to convey subtleties such as poetry or puns. What this appears to be akin to is the development of an argot or creole from a language or language mixture. Unlike the other folks who are suggesting catastrophe, I would postulate that this sprang from more people - previously illiterate classes - using the runic alphabet and using it for more common purposes. Around 700AD (per Wiki - Medieval Warm Period) the temp starts to go up again. I do not know if there is a parallel population surge, but increased warmth may have led to greater prosperity and an expansion of literacy. These people do not need runes to impress kings, they are using it for trade - and occasionally on memorial stones...and skulls!
Like with the Rök stone, we can point to the extreme weather events of 535-536, which also left a big mark in Irish tree rings. Crop failures and mass death could lead to a cultural bottleneck and big change in short time, just like with the black death.
It is amazing how quickly a people can change their language and alphabet especially when one considers how Icelandic is still so similar to Old Norse today. You would think that survivng would be harder and less dependent on language there than the continental Norse lands. It must have been something terribly difficult to overcome to just abandon language like that.
Just a laypersons observation: The consonant runes that have a dual sound can be found represented in the differences between Swedish and Danish. Take the words for "book"; "bok" in Swedish and "bog" in Danish.
I have a feeling that the line of transmission of the Elder Futhark died out for whatever reason and people with an imperfect second-hand knowledge of it had to scramble to create a new system out of what they knew.
Between 450 and the late 7th century, there's a massive shift in physical culture around the middle of the 6th century in Scandinavia. Many have linked this to the infamous volcanic winter of 536 A.D. This climactic shift has been attested in written sources all around the world (Procopius is a very detailed one from Constantinople), and the poor sunlight led to poor harvests which was followed by the first outbreak of bubonic plague in the Mediterranean and Europe at large in 541 A.D. Whether or not the plague came to Scandinavia is not fully answered AFAIK, but there are indicators that there was a massive loss of life (which isn't surprising considering Scandinavia is already largely at the very edge of the "arable" world at the time, which means resources must have been fairly scarce to begin with.) The culture that grew out of the catastrophe seems to have been highly hierarchical, with much wealth invested in graves for the high nobility, etc. It's fascinating to think about all the changes that a society goes through when - say - more than half of the population disappear. With a smaller population, a relatively small number of people could affect the language to a larger extent, especially if the reality in which they found themselves were drastically different from the reality in which they grew up. I realise that I'm speculating now, but my guts are telling me that the culture of the elite was impacted more than the elites of - say - the Byzantine Empire. I believe the elite (or the people whose ancestors would *become* the new elite) were the ones with whom these new changes were seen first and through which these changes to language spread, and I believe a similar process happened in Ireland.
Thank you as always for the videos Dr. Crawford! It is amazing how quickly the language changed..who knows what may have happened in that time? I do subscribe to the theory you presented that intercine warfare may have wiped out certain language user groups, maybe some aspects of the old language cross pollinated the newer one being used at that time.
If you consider the changes in our current spoken and in many cases written language (the general reduction in vocabulary where 'whaa' is a word that means everything from what do you mean to what are you on depending on context). Add that rapid changes have been seen elsewhere. Take the example of when Catherine de Medici married into the French royal family in 1585 and brought her cooks as she refused to eat the slop they were serving at court. In a very short period the Italian foods and sauces replaced the old heavy foods that were french traditional fare. So if there are people coming into the area and learning that being scribes can make a living for themselves (or make them valuable enough to keep around) and they came from a similar area or training, you would see a rapid dispersion of the new writing form and way of representing the language as seen from someone whose ear may not be native to those sounds. Just a thought.
The whole thing about earlier generations unexpectedly dying rapidly is pretty interesting given the recent interpretation of the rök stone, and that these changes seem to have begun following the migration period.
That rapid language change from tge 400s to the 600 automatically makes me ask two questions: 1) How sure are we of the dating of these inscriptions? How were they dated? 2) Is it possible that the "Proto-Norse" recorded in inscriptions from the 400s actually represents a much more conservative form tgan the spoken language? That sort of thing is usually associated with languages that have already been written for a long time, but a) we can't really be sure how long the language had been written on biodegradable materials, and b) it is conceivable that a formal or ritual language could have started being kept more conservative in an oral society. As I understand it, most long Elder Futhark inscriptions are magic spells or on tombstones. Those are both the sorts of things that might call for abnormal, ritual-like language.
Very interesting, I wonder if we'll ever know the reason. And the example of the Rök runestone really makes it clear that to the carver the distinction was unnecessary and the system unknown. Maybe an analogy is that in modern english writing, the distinction between the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives is not made? I feel like you could explain the distinction to any english speaker, but they still would not find it 'relevant' to make in writing?
@@MagklJellyBeanPastelLucidDream I'm not sure what you mean there haha. I was saying that younger futhark doesn't make a distinction between t and d, or k and g. In the same way english spelling no longer distinguishes between [θ] and [ð] (thorn and eth if you will). Both the sound in 'thin' and in 'than' are written 'th', while there is a difference in vocalization right?
This is interesting. Could the dramatic change be a result of the societal stresses as a result of the years without summer that happened after then 536 CE volcanic eruptions? The timing might be about right.
Interesting that they just forgot what the heck it was. You see that in Egypt that until the Ptolemaic restoration around 300 BCE they had loss the use of the hieroglyphs and were writing from habit/tradition, making spelling mistakes and replacing much of the text with bigger and bigger pictures.
Hey Jack, are You visiting Scandinavia sometimes? Do you have your heritage or relatives over here? Last weekend i visited Hästevads Stenar, a stone cirkel and grave field that ended in use with the viking age. Close to my home. Made a video of that. Found your channel interesting.
Mattias Eriksson I don’t recall which video it was that he mentioned this, but he says he’s not Scandinavian as far as he knows, and as far as he knows his family is Scotch-Irish. I’m sure he’s been to Scandinavia, but I’m also curious with what degree of regularity he visits. By the way, I believe Dr. Crawford doesn’t typically respond to RUclips comments, just so you know.
@@lughlongarm76 Ahh, ok. I Thought it would be cool to hear what be experience if he during he's presumed visits. What he typically dig in to when here. Thanks for your response!
Do languages with more sounds actually tend to have more letters? It seems possible to me that more sounds might actually encourage simpler writing as the old system would appear to have a lot of unnecessarily merged and differentiated sounds anyway, so I'm curious if the overall trend is actually to strive for accurate sound representation or to just say "screw it, we all know which word this is supposed to be anyway"
Did the Vikings themselves have any beliefs or stories about the fact that they had changed the runes? Presumably, at least some of them were aware that the runes had once looked different - because they could look at runestones that had been carved by their ancestors, hundreds of years earlier.
@@user-pm1gb2eo1s Picture me in the 70s sledding down thors mound in Gamla Uppsala :) Used to do that, but nowadays one needs to have permission to even walk up the mounds.
@@garethbrandt9163 Last time I was there my youngest son ran away, straight up the middle mound. Got a few laughs from the tourists as I had to jump the fence to run and get the little bugger..
I wonder which powers in Scandinavia had the authority to standardize the younger futhark. As far as I understand the Scandinavia consisted of small warring kingdoms. The Svea were still at war with the Göta. Denmark probably wasn't a single state yet. Why would all these small states choose to agree on a single new script.
I also think we may be over estimating the amount of literacy. It seems there was a plague or something else that destroyed the langauge. A minor globalization event possibly?
In case of Primitive (written in ogham) to Old Irish (in Roman alphabet) transition - the most common explanation, I believe, is that christianization made old educated caste (the druids) - who knew ogham and how to write ‘proper’ Primitive Irish - obsolete, and the new educated caste - Christian monks - wrote in contemporary language using a new alphabet, and that became a standard somewhere late in 7th century. In Scandinavia AFAIK there’s no such cultural and religious shift at the time. But the similarity of radical changes in writing and language in Ireland and in Scandinavia at the same time is indeed striking.
Archeology points toward a period of civil war in southern Scandinavia in the period 450 to 650 AD. That doesn't prove anything concerning language and writing, but it is interesting..
I have both read and heard theories about this. Some say there was probably a significant Danish expansion in the 400-500s. In a book acout local history in south west Norway, I've read that there is hard evidence of a huge increase in population at that time due to mass immigration of another germanic people. Also, it is very interesting to note that the language in all of Scandinavia is surprisingly similar as late as in the middle ages despite proto norse having existed almost a milennium earlier. You would think the languages developed more separately after the start of the proto norse period, but they didn't except some small differences between west and east norse. So something big clearly must have happened at least before the 800s.
Not a linguist by any means, but from the perspective of a layman with no background in Germanic language history, it could look like a literacy campaign was enforced with the goal of making reading and writing more accessible to the lower classes. For native speakers at the time, the context would've been enough to get the necessary information from written text. The less literate would have to memorize a smaller set of characters to convey a coherent thought. Though, cultural upheaval and/or drastic population decline could be the culprit. During this time reading would likely have been done out loud, allowing the reader or even the writer to verbally make the necessary changes aloud while reading or writing, but with fewer letters to be read or written. I'm thinking of the old court stenographer shorthand.
could the elder futhark have been borrowed from another culture or language ? that could explain why some younger norse writters seemed to judge the elder system filled with useless too much numerous letters.
It was certainly adapted from the Greek, Etruscan or Latin alphabet, possibly through an intermediary form. But why would that make the norse simplify it half a millennia later? And when the changes make it less suited to portray their language.
@@samuelhedengynna5181 , yes this mystery is so addicting... could this change be linked to a change in the tools of writing ( like from leather book to paper books) ? or linked to a change in the social status of the peoples who knew to write ? or may be compare to the carolinian minuscules decided by Charlemagne to facilitate education and diffusion of writings..
as a second thought , may we compare the youger futhark with our sms language less fited for academic purposes but still very quick and efficient for dayly communications ??
@@redcapetimetraveler7688 The problem with that is that it isn't any shorter to write things in Younger Futhark than in Elder Futhark. Younger Futhark is just a little easier to learn, and probably quite a bit easier to learn than a fully phonemic system for Old Norse (not Proto-) would have been. (Just think about those 38 different vowels of 10 different qualities.)
I wonder whether gaining sounds sound might actually be part of the reason why they lost letters. Changes like umlaut that created more sounds would naturally mean that people were using the same letters to represent multiple sounds, and probably in a rather confusing way when considering all the sound changes. People who has already gotten used to that idea might have been more open to the idea of reforming the orthography to a system that disn't worry about small sound distinctions. Also, it may have been easier to teach with simple ideas like "explody lip sounds", "held humming closed lips sound", "explody tip of the tounge sound", "hissing sound", "open mouth sound", "nasally open mouth sound", and stuff like that. Basically the distinctions the Younger Futhark doesn't make are related to voicing-aspiration, and precise vowel-quality specifications. Both of which take a while to explain to people who've never heard of phonetics before, and would otherwise have to rely on just example words. Perhaps Younger Futhark was actually intended to be more phonetically "logical" than Elder Futhark in terms of what things people could easily understand.
Well 200 years is something like 8 generations at the time, I guess. See how we changed in 8 generations. I do not find it very surprising (as an outsider, I know nothing of the subject).
How much of the change may have been caused by the christianisation of Northern Europe. Many of the Runes had pagan religious meaning, and the pagans believed that using the Runes was akin to using magic and invoking the power that they stood for. Christianity basically made this taboo. Surely this would have had a huge influence?
Honestly, probably very little, if any at all. For one, while runes could be used to write religious and magical inscriptions, the idea that the runes individually had a magical meaning or represented a concept on their own doesn't appear to have any historical backing until -possibly- the late medieval or early modern period ( ruclips.net/video/kW9KbtjyHN4/видео.html ), and texts in the Roman alphabet in Iceland start about 1150 AD ( ruclips.net/video/ZdYeEQWqKRg/видео.html ), so well after the switch to Younger Futhark. Additionally, most explicit religious runic inscriptions are actually explicitly Christian, not pre-Christian Norse religion ( ruclips.net/video/46UpGbIZKtY/видео.html ) and as late as 1550 in Sweden there's a runic inscription on a parish wall that reads, "Whosoever reads this: this church is called Rúnasteinn. This the parish rector ought to know, to read and write runes. Johannes Olai Calmarnensis (wrote) this." ( skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?id=15377&if=default&table=mss ) So certainly in the period where the switch was being made from Elder to Younger Futhark, I don't see any evidence for it being Christian influence-- they were using runes as well.
@@nkhtn663 Chapter 20 of the Saga of Volsungs has Brunhild explicitly state there are magic runes and spells. She lists them. Egill Skallagrimson uses one of spells mentions to find poison in his cup that burst asunder. He again used runes to fox a sick girl who was accidentally poisoned by her crush who wanted her affection. In Havamal the author riddles each of the magical runes one at a time...how can you possibly say that there is no historical evidence for magic use of the runes?
@@oldboy977 Chapter 20 of the Saga of the Volsungs is from the Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál, which as Dr. Crawford mentions here ( ruclips.net/video/8nMfnEV-h-8/видео.html) is a later poem, so it's very inconclusive evidence evidence of the runes having individual powers, especially when we don't see evidence of this in inscriptions or any other evidence from that time period. For Egil, all it says is that "you should know how to carve runes well" and that the harmful inscription involved a mistake in "10 coded letters" ( ruclips.net/video/65rjUIRnUYk/видео.html ) which again, only definitively states that runes (actually, multiple runes) were carved, which again does not ascribe any specific power to individual runes but to the inscription itself. You'll note above that I did say the runes were used to carve magical and religious inscriptions-- but not individually; those inscriptions are just magical spells written in runes, which this PDF has some actual examples of: dro.dur.ac.uk/1053/1/1053.pdf?DDD11+DDC65+dac0hsg As far as Hávamál goes, the only passage I can think of that would even fit that description is the 18 spells listed at the end ( ruclips.net/video/YwDW8XOf16Q/видео.html ), but you'll note the obvious problem here is that no legitimate, historical rune system ever used has 18 runes: ruclips.net/video/Gjmxu7z04kk/видео.html . Any interpretation of those spells as being associated with runes is a very modern interpretation that you'd literally have to add runes to (in the case of YF), or remove runes from (other futharks) to make it work. Beyond all that, however, the fact that Christian inscriptions use them, and the time difference still remains an issue for that sort of influence having anything to do with the switch from Elder to Younger Futhark.
@@nkhtn663 Regardless whether a poem was later of not it is still mention of magical uses for runes. Egill still uses runes for magic multiple times. Gods still teach runes to men, Rigsthula and and in regards to Sigurd when he slays Fafnir. Voluspa stil describes runes as magical and being tied to the fates of men. Whether they were used by themselves or as a collective the point still stands they were used for magical purposes and were considered divine. As for the the runic spells of Havamal, again I didn't say the individual runes had power but when combined they become potent and powerful, kinda like the ingredients that make up mead.
I know exactly what happened. Same thing that is happening today. The English language among younger people is changing to accommodate texting and miseducation. I hear "libry" instead of "library" on a regular basis these days. Instead of "ask" we have "ax" as in "let me ax you a question!"Or how about "S'up?" for "What's up?"
![Twenty One Pilots - The Line (from Arcane Season 2) [Official Audio]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/XCz7WUotXs8/mqdefault.jpg)
The good Doctor might not look it, but he is definitely an AMON AMARTH fan!!
“ I wish you good thinking.”
Just on the face of it, with limited information, the Younger Futhark seems to me to be a “texting” version of the Elder Futhark.
Tina Like type 2 Braille
I min isnt it basikly tipik lik this?
the kwik brun fuks iumpt ofr the lasi dok
@@aerobolt256 If you think about it, modern, normal English does the same, to an extend. The T in "stand" sounds different than in "truck," the letter O can sound different in words like how, long and roof, and the combination "th" can represent two different phonemes, none of which sound anything like a T or an H. There's often a discrepancy between how many phonemes a language has and how many letters its speakers think they need to represent them, and maybe Old Norse just took this concept a bit further.
Since the language changed so much, it also became difficult for people to understand the old text, both the meaning and the runes themselves. The mapping between runes and vowels, which had changed, became unclear and didn't make sense anymore. So rather than to try to use runes that they didn't understand, they came up with something simpler. And the reinvention happened to be poorer.
That's a really astute observation! If one only knows part of an alphabet, they might substitute letters and merge letters together to try and form some semblance of the spoken language.
There was a lecture series from Toulane university that covered Norse culture and history from bronze age to viking age, and it was available to the public on video tapes at one point, In it the lecturer talked about possible reasons for the beginning of the viking raids, with language change being one of the suspected factors. He claimed before 700AD it was relatively easy for continental Germanic people to understand the proto Norse speakers, and he cites the early saga heros such as Sigurd, Gudrun and the like who were essentially west germanic characters from the migration era and which the Norse speakers happily adopted as their own, as evidence that in this early time period Norse speakers saw themselves as one and the same as the Germanic peoples on the continent.
This makes me think of Braille. About 12 years ago, a new version of Braille (type II) was produced. A lot of people hated it because it contained fewer characters and, they felt, limited expression - compared with type I Braille it was like ‘text-speke’ - abbreviated. So I wonder if that might be behind Younger Futhark - a desire to make it easier, possibly to widen the number of people using it.
As always, potentially boring stuff is presented so interesting and well explained from this guy. I wish all ancient languages could have a genious like this to give us similar insight.
Thank you for creating this video, been looking forward to this for a while now :)
I am thinking about the catastrophes around the year 540, with volcano eruptions and plague. Could they have been the cause of the change in language?
I agree with this, many scholars do as well.
Definitely likely, since the Black Death caused old Norse to change to the modern Scandinavian languages
This was absolutely fascinating. Thank you!
Interesting point. 450AD to 650AD was during the migration period. It's not hard to imagine the proficient elder futhark users migrating in droves to former Roman lands seeking better fortunes after the collapse of the empire during this period. Indeed we know for a fact large numbers of Jutlanders migrated to what would later become England, along with Angles, Saxons and Frisians in this era, and it was said that Northumberia and Bernacia had lots of Norwegian settlers even before the Viking age.
Fascinating...
It makes me think of how in old English they used "a" for the sound in "father" but "æ" for the sound in "cat." And yet today we see it as obvious that "a" can do both of these sounds. That's how I imagine the writer of the rok stone looking back at elder futhark is thinking.
Likewise we don't distinguish between voiced and unvoiced "th" but in Iceland they do with "þ" and "ð"
I believe that the difference between these two "a" in English is relative modern. Pronounciation in Old English was not like today. Old English "catt" was probably pronounced closer to the German pronounciation with an a like "father" but shorter, I think. Like the first three phones of German "Katze" or like you pronounce today "cut".
@@waltersteerunde4444 Lower German still has Katt for cat.
Inglish is written veri wierdli if yu ask mi.
im still convinced that a lot of people back then just wrote as they THOUGHT it was right.
Great video as usual, looking forward to many more!
Such a fascinating historical event that I really hope has more discoveries helping to answer our questions, and that we find more evidence for determining what actually happened, and why! Thanks for sharing this!
One hypothesis I have seen is that it was a deliberate reform. Someone, or a group of poeple, in the Denmark-Southern Sweden area decided that adding more runes wasn't the way to go (like they did in England and Frisia, ending up with 30-35 runes), and instead went for a radical simplification. Don't underestimate peoples insights into how language and writing worked at the time, just because they didn't have internet. ;) Of course, there's no way to prove that this is actually what happened... so we will probably never know for sure. :/
That's an interesting idea.
That was kind of what I was guessing happened.
@@davidweihe6052 If the distinctioms were being lost in speech, then loosing them in writing would have made sense. What's weird is is that linguistic reconstruction tells us they didn't. Most of the phoneme distinctions reappeared in writing as soon as the Latin alphabet was adopted -- a pretty clear indication that they were still being maintained in speech, even if they weren't written. (There is, of course, such a thing as a distinction between emphatic and "lazy" pronunciation, but it seems a little dubious to assume that's responsible, and I'm not sure how stable emphatic pronunciations can be over centuries without prescriptive norms reenforcing the emphatic pronciations.
What was the literacy rate? How many people actually could read runes at that time? It seems that rapid changes are easier when it's a very small percentage of people that are changing, unlike modern writing systems where there is resistance from almost the whole population due to nearly full literacy.
There's a lot of academic debate about that. In the high middle ages material from Bergen and other towns, as well as graffiti all over churches seem to show runes were very common to know at that time, and used for casual messages. It might have been that way earlier as well, but we simply do not have enough material surviving to say.
That thing about the old Irish written language changing in a similar way as proto norse is indeed very interesting. There is genetic evidence of contact between the british isles and western Norway that dates as far back as hundreds of years before the 800s. So there's the possibility that the languages may have affected eachother even that far back in time.
This has helped explain a lot of questions I had on the futhark changes
I like to imagine how they view the whole “same symbol for different sounds” the same way English speaking ppl view “th” representing both sounds. Sure they’re different sounds but because we learnt of them with the same symbol for too long, it never quite occured to us (unless you are too into linguistics lmao). One thing i definitely believe is that the supposed “logic” of a writing system is only good for the learning stage, whereas the more we use them in our everyday life, we just remember certain “shape” of a word and doesn’t care abt spelling all that much, which is why writing system that seems weird and illogical still works most of the time
Proper good video, as ever
Sounds like a perfect question for the runes themselves.
I kinda agree with Tina. The change to Younger Futhark, in a nutshell, seems to me to be a change to a phonetic approximation of the language: you get enough written content that you can reliably guess at what the word actually is - but not enough to convey subtleties such as poetry or puns. What this appears to be akin to is the development of an argot or creole from a language or language mixture.
Unlike the other folks who are suggesting catastrophe, I would postulate that this sprang from more people - previously illiterate classes - using the runic alphabet and using it for more common purposes. Around 700AD (per Wiki - Medieval Warm Period) the temp starts to go up again. I do not know if there is a parallel population surge, but increased warmth may have led to greater prosperity and an expansion of literacy. These people do not need runes to impress kings, they are using it for trade - and occasionally on memorial stones...and skulls!
Really good video! support from Sweden!
Like with the Rök stone, we can point to the extreme weather events of 535-536, which also left a big mark in Irish tree rings. Crop failures and mass death could lead to a cultural bottleneck and big change in short time, just like with the black death.
It is amazing how quickly a people can change their language and alphabet especially when one considers how Icelandic is still so similar to Old Norse today. You would think that survivng would be harder and less dependent on language there than the continental Norse lands. It must have been something terribly difficult to overcome to just abandon language like that.
Old Norse died ut because more than half the population in Scandinavia died of the plague, while Iceland avoided the plague
God bless you from Norway
Fascinating changes.
Just a laypersons observation: The consonant runes that have a dual sound can be found represented in the differences between Swedish and Danish. Take the words for "book"; "bok" in Swedish and "bog" in Danish.
The blending of o and U is reflected in eggja as well. In some places eggja had U instead of o, so perhaps already the distinction wasn't clear.
I have a feeling that the line of transmission of the Elder Futhark died out for whatever reason and people with an imperfect second-hand knowledge of it had to scramble to create a new system out of what they knew.
Is it possible that the language didn't change as fast as it seems, but archaic spelling was used until some shake up?
Between 450 and the late 7th century, there's a massive shift in physical culture around the middle of the 6th century in Scandinavia. Many have linked this to the infamous volcanic winter of 536 A.D. This climactic shift has been attested in written sources all around the world (Procopius is a very detailed one from Constantinople), and the poor sunlight led to poor harvests which was followed by the first outbreak of bubonic plague in the Mediterranean and Europe at large in 541 A.D.
Whether or not the plague came to Scandinavia is not fully answered AFAIK, but there are indicators that there was a massive loss of life (which isn't surprising considering Scandinavia is already largely at the very edge of the "arable" world at the time, which means resources must have been fairly scarce to begin with.) The culture that grew out of the catastrophe seems to have been highly hierarchical, with much wealth invested in graves for the high nobility, etc.
It's fascinating to think about all the changes that a society goes through when - say - more than half of the population disappear. With a smaller population, a relatively small number of people could affect the language to a larger extent, especially if the reality in which they found themselves were drastically different from the reality in which they grew up.
I realise that I'm speculating now, but my guts are telling me that the culture of the elite was impacted more than the elites of - say - the Byzantine Empire. I believe the elite (or the people whose ancestors would *become* the new elite) were the ones with whom these new changes were seen first and through which these changes to language spread, and I believe a similar process happened in Ireland.
Thank you as always for the videos Dr. Crawford! It is amazing how quickly the language changed..who knows what may have happened in that time? I do subscribe to the theory you presented that intercine warfare may have wiped out certain language user groups, maybe some aspects of the old language cross pollinated the newer one being used at that time.
If you consider the changes in our current spoken and in many cases written language (the general reduction in vocabulary where 'whaa' is a word that means everything from what do you mean to what are you on depending on context). Add that rapid changes have been seen elsewhere. Take the example of when Catherine de Medici married into the French royal family in 1585 and brought her cooks as she refused to eat the slop they were serving at court. In a very short period the Italian foods and sauces replaced the old heavy foods that were french traditional fare. So if there are people coming into the area and learning that being scribes can make a living for themselves (or make them valuable enough to keep around) and they came from a similar area or training, you would see a rapid dispersion of the new writing form and way of representing the language as seen from someone whose ear may not be native to those sounds. Just a thought.
This video must have been filmed before the last storm front came thru.
Thank you for your work.
The whole thing about earlier generations unexpectedly dying rapidly is pretty interesting given the recent interpretation of the rök stone, and that these changes seem to have begun following the migration period.
That rapid language change from tge 400s to the 600 automatically makes me ask two questions:
1) How sure are we of the dating of these inscriptions? How were they dated?
2) Is it possible that the "Proto-Norse" recorded in inscriptions from the 400s actually represents a much more conservative form tgan the spoken language? That sort of thing is usually associated with languages that have already been written for a long time, but a) we can't really be sure how long the language had been written on biodegradable materials, and b) it is conceivable that a formal or ritual language could have started being kept more conservative in an oral society. As I understand it, most long Elder Futhark inscriptions are magic spells or on tombstones. Those are both the sorts of things that might call for abnormal, ritual-like language.
Wow, I had no idea that it changed so early! I thought the elder continued to 800 AD or so.
Very interesting, I wonder if we'll ever know the reason. And the example of the Rök runestone really makes it clear that to the carver the distinction was unnecessary and the system unknown. Maybe an analogy is that in modern english writing, the distinction between the voiced and voiceless dental fricatives is not made? I feel like you could explain the distinction to any english speaker, but they still would not find it 'relevant' to make in writing?
Like a rune made from a non vocalized meaning?
@@MagklJellyBeanPastelLucidDream I'm not sure what you mean there haha. I was saying that younger futhark doesn't make a distinction between t and d, or k and g. In the same way english spelling no longer distinguishes between [θ] and [ð] (thorn and eth if you will). Both the sound in 'thin' and in 'than' are written 'th', while there is a difference in vocalization right?
Hi, I'm wondering how is the best way possible for brotherhood or brother to be written or which symbol represents that ?
This is interesting. Could the dramatic change be a result of the societal stresses as a result of the years without summer that happened after then 536 CE volcanic eruptions? The timing might be about right.
Norwegian changed a lot during the 14th century, when we had the plague. Maybe the same it the case around the crisis around 536 too?
Isn’t also about the same time when the impact of the iron age hit Scandinavia? Would’ve been a tumultuous transition.
Interesting that they just forgot what the heck it was. You see that in Egypt that until the Ptolemaic restoration around 300 BCE they had loss the use of the hieroglyphs and were writing from habit/tradition, making spelling mistakes and replacing much of the text with bigger and bigger pictures.
Could intercultural contacts from the Silk Road have been an influence on the rune stone carver?
No
Well, it fits with the volcano eruption, doesn't it?
Hey Jack, are You visiting Scandinavia sometimes? Do you have your heritage or relatives over here? Last weekend i visited Hästevads Stenar, a stone cirkel and grave field that ended in use with the viking age. Close to my home. Made a video of that. Found your channel interesting.
Mattias Eriksson I don’t recall which video it was that he mentioned this, but he says he’s not Scandinavian as far as he knows, and as far as he knows his family is Scotch-Irish. I’m sure he’s been to Scandinavia, but I’m also curious with what degree of regularity he visits.
By the way, I believe Dr. Crawford doesn’t typically respond to RUclips comments, just so you know.
@@lughlongarm76 Ahh, ok. I Thought it would be cool to hear what be experience if he during he's presumed visits. What he typically dig in to when here. Thanks for your response!
Do languages with more sounds actually tend to have more letters? It seems possible to me that more sounds might actually encourage simpler writing as the old system would appear to have a lot of unnecessarily merged and differentiated sounds anyway, so I'm curious if the overall trend is actually to strive for accurate sound representation or to just say "screw it, we all know which word this is supposed to be anyway"
Did the Vikings themselves have any beliefs or stories about the fact that they had changed the runes? Presumably, at least some of them were aware that the runes had once looked different - because they could look at runestones that had been carved by their ancestors, hundreds of years earlier.
Very interesting and strange indeed why the "lesser" runic alphabet took over??? Regards from Uppsala
Wow! Wish I was in Sweden!
Yggdrasil Jormungandr I once saw a picture of Sweden!
@@user-pm1gb2eo1s Picture me in the 70s sledding down thors mound in Gamla Uppsala :) Used to do that, but nowadays one needs to have permission to even walk up the mounds.
@@garethbrandt9163 Last time I was there my youngest son ran away, straight up the middle mound. Got a few laughs from the tourists as I had to jump the fence to run and get the little bugger..
@@MattiasGrozny that would be Frejs mound :)
Since there probably were no centralized school system, there were always different styles of writing?
Could the rapid change in language be due to the thing that Henrik Williams and you talked about, the volcanoe thing?
I wonder which powers in Scandinavia had the authority to standardize the younger futhark. As far as I understand the Scandinavia consisted of small warring kingdoms. The Svea were still at war with the Göta. Denmark probably wasn't a single state yet. Why would all these small states choose to agree on a single new script.
So basically we dont know much about the elder futhark?
I also think we may be over estimating the amount of literacy. It seems there was a plague or something else that destroyed the langauge. A minor globalization event possibly?
In case of Primitive (written in ogham) to Old Irish (in Roman alphabet) transition - the most common explanation, I believe, is that christianization made old educated caste (the druids) - who knew ogham and how to write ‘proper’ Primitive Irish - obsolete, and the new educated caste - Christian monks - wrote in contemporary language using a new alphabet, and that became a standard somewhere late in 7th century.
In Scandinavia AFAIK there’s no such cultural and religious shift at the time. But the similarity of radical changes in writing and language in Ireland and in Scandinavia at the same time is indeed striking.
Archeology points toward a period of civil war in southern Scandinavia in the period 450 to 650 AD. That doesn't prove anything concerning language and writing, but it is interesting..
I have both read and heard theories about this. Some say there was probably a significant Danish expansion in the 400-500s. In a book acout local history in south west Norway, I've read that there is hard evidence of a huge increase in population at that time due to mass immigration of another germanic people. Also, it is very interesting to note that the language in all of Scandinavia is surprisingly similar as late as in the middle ages despite proto norse having existed almost a milennium earlier. You would think the languages developed more separately after the start of the proto norse period, but they didn't except some small differences between west and east norse. So something big clearly must have happened at least before the 800s.
Not a linguist by any means, but from the perspective of a layman with no background in Germanic language history, it could look like a literacy campaign was enforced with the goal of making reading and writing more accessible to the lower classes. For native speakers at the time, the context would've been enough to get the necessary information from written text. The less literate would have to memorize a smaller set of characters to convey a coherent thought. Though, cultural upheaval and/or drastic population decline could be the culprit. During this time reading would likely have been done out loud, allowing the reader or even the writer to verbally make the necessary changes aloud while reading or writing, but with fewer letters to be read or written. I'm thinking of the old court stenographer shorthand.
could the elder futhark have been borrowed from another culture or language ? that could explain why some younger norse writters seemed to judge the elder system filled with useless too much numerous letters.
It was certainly adapted from the Greek, Etruscan or Latin alphabet, possibly through an intermediary form. But why would that make the norse simplify it half a millennia later? And when the changes make it less suited to portray their language.
@@samuelhedengynna5181 , yes this mystery is so addicting... could this change be linked to a change in the tools of writing ( like from leather book to paper books) ? or linked to a change in the social status of the peoples who knew to write ? or may be compare to the carolinian minuscules decided by Charlemagne to facilitate education and diffusion of writings..
as a second thought , may we compare the youger futhark with our sms language less fited for academic purposes but still very quick and efficient for dayly communications ??
@@redcapetimetraveler7688 The problem with that is that it isn't any shorter to write things in Younger Futhark than in Elder Futhark. Younger Futhark is just a little easier to learn, and probably quite a bit easier to learn than a fully phonemic system for Old Norse (not Proto-) would have been. (Just think about those 38 different vowels of 10 different qualities.)
Because of seidr
It's all Ívarr's inn víðfaðmi fault.
I wonder whether gaining sounds sound might actually be part of the reason why they lost letters. Changes like umlaut that created more sounds would naturally mean that people were using the same letters to represent multiple sounds, and probably in a rather confusing way when considering all the sound changes. People who has already gotten used to that idea might have been more open to the idea of reforming the orthography to a system that disn't worry about small sound distinctions.
Also, it may have been easier to teach with simple ideas like "explody lip sounds", "held humming closed lips sound", "explody tip of the tounge sound", "hissing sound", "open mouth sound", "nasally open mouth sound", and stuff like that. Basically the distinctions the Younger Futhark doesn't make are related to voicing-aspiration, and precise vowel-quality specifications. Both of which take a while to explain to people who've never heard of phonetics before, and would otherwise have to rely on just example words. Perhaps Younger Futhark was actually intended to be more phonetically "logical" than Elder Futhark in terms of what things people could easily understand.
Indeed, many terrible things befell mankind between 400 and 600, terrible but transformative!
Well 200 years is something like 8 generations at the time, I guess. See how we changed in 8 generations. I do not find it very surprising (as an outsider, I know nothing of the subject).
This has nothing to do with the subject above but I think it is time that you covered the Old Gutnish variant of Old Norse.
Is the transition possibly connected to the popularity of Christianity?
Are there any really amusing inscriptions of runes? Stuff like graffiti or medieval shitposting?
Yes! There are many examples of that .
How much of the change may have been caused by the christianisation of Northern Europe.
Many of the Runes had pagan religious meaning, and the pagans believed that using the Runes was akin to using magic and invoking the power that they stood for.
Christianity basically made this taboo. Surely this would have had a huge influence?
Honestly, probably very little, if any at all. For one, while runes could be used to write religious and magical inscriptions, the idea that the runes individually had a magical meaning or represented a concept on their own doesn't appear to have any historical backing until -possibly- the late medieval or early modern period ( ruclips.net/video/kW9KbtjyHN4/видео.html ), and texts in the Roman alphabet in Iceland start about 1150 AD ( ruclips.net/video/ZdYeEQWqKRg/видео.html ), so well after the switch to Younger Futhark. Additionally, most explicit religious runic inscriptions are actually explicitly Christian, not pre-Christian Norse religion ( ruclips.net/video/46UpGbIZKtY/видео.html ) and as late as 1550 in Sweden there's a runic inscription on a parish wall that reads, "Whosoever reads this: this church is called Rúnasteinn. This the parish rector ought to know, to read and write runes. Johannes Olai Calmarnensis (wrote) this." ( skaldic.abdn.ac.uk/db.php?id=15377&if=default&table=mss ) So certainly in the period where the switch was being made from Elder to Younger Futhark, I don't see any evidence for it being Christian influence-- they were using runes as well.
@@nkhtn663 Chapter 20 of the Saga of Volsungs has Brunhild explicitly state there are magic runes and spells. She lists them. Egill Skallagrimson uses one of spells mentions to find poison in his cup that burst asunder. He again used runes to fox a sick girl who was accidentally poisoned by her crush who wanted her affection. In Havamal the author riddles each of the magical runes one at a time...how can you possibly say that there is no historical evidence for magic use of the runes?
@@oldboy977 Chapter 20 of the Saga of the Volsungs is from the Eddic poem Sigrdrífumál, which as Dr. Crawford mentions here ( ruclips.net/video/8nMfnEV-h-8/видео.html) is a later poem, so it's very inconclusive evidence evidence of the runes having individual powers, especially when we don't see evidence of this in inscriptions or any other evidence from that time period. For Egil, all it says is that "you should know how to carve runes well" and that the harmful inscription involved a mistake in "10 coded letters" ( ruclips.net/video/65rjUIRnUYk/видео.html ) which again, only definitively states that runes (actually, multiple runes) were carved, which again does not ascribe any specific power to individual runes but to the inscription itself. You'll note above that I did say the runes were used to carve magical and religious inscriptions-- but not individually; those inscriptions are just magical spells written in runes, which this PDF has some actual examples of: dro.dur.ac.uk/1053/1/1053.pdf?DDD11+DDC65+dac0hsg
As far as Hávamál goes, the only passage I can think of that would even fit that description is the 18 spells listed at the end ( ruclips.net/video/YwDW8XOf16Q/видео.html ), but you'll note the obvious problem here is that no legitimate, historical rune system ever used has 18 runes: ruclips.net/video/Gjmxu7z04kk/видео.html . Any interpretation of those spells as being associated with runes is a very modern interpretation that you'd literally have to add runes to (in the case of YF), or remove runes from (other futharks) to make it work. Beyond all that, however, the fact that Christian inscriptions use them, and the time difference still remains an issue for that sort of influence having anything to do with the switch from Elder to Younger Futhark.
@@nkhtn663 Regardless whether a poem was later of not it is still mention of magical uses for runes. Egill still uses runes for magic multiple times. Gods still teach runes to men, Rigsthula and and in regards to Sigurd when he slays Fafnir. Voluspa stil describes runes as magical and being tied to the fates of men. Whether they were used by themselves or as a collective the point still stands they were used for magical purposes and were considered divine. As for the the runic spells of Havamal, again I didn't say the individual runes had power but when combined they become potent and powerful, kinda like the ingredients that make up mead.
Andrew Fairweather runes may have been used for magic but there is no evidence to support the individual runes were magical
I know exactly what happened. Same thing that is happening today. The English language among younger people is changing to accommodate texting and miseducation. I hear "libry" instead of "library" on a regular basis these days. Instead of "ask" we have "ax" as in "let me ax you a question!"Or how about "S'up?" for "What's up?"
@widhbnw efDwdwDW No, unfortunately I am not.
@@markcash2 do you also have a problem with my grandpa saying "warsh up for dinner"?