I think part of the reason for people's undue interest in Greenlandic Norse is that there is no modern equivalent. Like, we might not now much about old Danish, but we do know it evolved into modern Danish. But modern Greenlandic is an Inuit language (actually the most spoken of all Native North-American languages) as most modern Greenlanders' ancestors came from Canada. Like Dr. Crawford said, the Scandinavian language used there today is just modern Danish. I feel this gives it a "lost to history" vibe that always peaks people's interest, similar to the Celtic languages, Tocharian, African-Romance, Icelandic-Basque Pidgin, and many others.
Given how tiny the medieval Norse population of Greenland was, how dependent it was on trade with Europe, and how short a span the colony lasted, I don't imagine Greenlandic Old Norse would have been much distinguishable from the Old Norse spoken in contemporary Iceland or the Vestfold.
I think greenlandic norse is interesting because its almost something that feels mythical. It was on the fringe of the norse world. Its like if there was a population of some animal that migrated to an island, its just interesting to know what different traits they developed.
Yeah, it's a Lost Civilization kind of mythos. Here in Denmark we still talk about it as a complete mystery, even though we largely know why they disappeared.
How long was Norse still spoken in Ireland like Dublin, Limerick, etc…? And is there evidence of a Hiberno-Norse dialect? Like runes with Gaelic borrowings.
Or in the Danelaw for that matter, were there joke about people speaking Norse in the manner of Jorvik in the same way Chaucer makes a joke about the nun speaking french in the manner of Stratford at Bow ?
@@francesconicoletti2547 Jackson made a cool reference in another video about what would make a good Robin Hood story. He said an untapped area would be to have Robin as a Norse speaker resisting Norman rule in the 1070's or whenever, as Nottingham would have been what was a Danelaw area, with people who at that time would still ostensibly speak it.
@@francesconicoletti2547 there is the famous letter where the Anglo-Saxon writer tells off a "brother Edward" for adopting heathen Danish fashions, his haircut in particular 😂 it's uncertainly dated to the turn of the 11th century, apparently. Anyway, there are people all over the UK who still like to think they're "vikings" 🙄
It would have been nice to know something more about the inscription, the place it is in, why it was made, and even what it said -- I only heard "loaded some cairns and cleared".
I have always been curious about this subject but never done enough research for myself. I always expected that since Greenland was even further out of the way than Iceland then there were probably few speakers in Greenland and probably simply for rare trade moments. Anyways, excited to watch the video!
I have seen estimates for the population of Greenland of about 5000 people at the most. That is not many even for the southern half of the eastern coastal regions!
I wasn't aware there was a lot of Latin written in runes. As Latin was my second language, I'd be interested to learn more. Some searching hasn't yet turned up anything. I'd be interested in any resources on the subject.
It's like Old English: (Early or Late) West Saxon is pretty much where instruction always starts, because that's what most of the OE corpus is in, & it's what's known best, & most teachers won't start teaching OE from one of the dialects that aren't represented so well (although the other dialects are interesting, & should be looked at, at some point in one's study).
You might have said something about when Greenland was settled by Norse speakers and where they came from and how much continuous contact the settlements had with other speakers.
Don't worry, no one understands the Danish-Greenlandic legal situation, and we change it so often, it's hard to keep track. But I think the greenlanders are heading for full independence, we all just decided to take it easy and be chill about it.
Hmm, so how do you think á sounded like in Old Norse now? Is it a "long A" like in modern Swedish (similar to "a" in "father") or is it like long å like in modern Swedish (similar to "o" in "lord")? If the latter, what's the difference between ó and á? Personally, I think á was both... Sometimes pronounced as long A and sometimes like long Å. For example the word "hávamál": I think the first A (á) is pronounced as long A, the second A as a short A, and the third Á as a long Å...
great question! so what happened was pre-1200s, there were two letters that were distinguished, á and o̜. á was a long a and represented long a (/ɑː/) while ǫ́ represented long u-umlaut (/ɒː/), a sound change that occurred in proto norse where any a next to a u became rounded. so proto norse *ansuz (pagan god) became ǫ́ss while *maþla (speech) became mál. these words had different vowels pre 1200s. post 1200s, they all spelled ǫ́ and á with the same letter - á. due to the fact that any á in old norse became å on the continent, while in iceland and on the faroese islands, they have become diphthongs that include round vowels (/aw/ in icelandic and /ɔɑ/ in faroese), it is much more likely long a became the rounded /ɒː/, like long u-umlaut. this must have meant that ó must have been a closer quality to ú than to á. i reconstruct it as /oː/, but i could just as easily see it be a true mid /o̞/. i really hope this helps!
@@SoulcatcherLucarioVery interesting! So you think mál would really be the long A then? In modern Swedish it's mål, with long Å, so I'm biased... :-D Hmm, I have a feeling that it also has to do with the letter L... If Á is followed by one L, it feels to me that it could sometimes become a long Å. Like mál, skál, etc... It's interesting that we have three vowels that could potentially be pronounced the same: ó, ǫ́ and á, especially after the 1200s... I would really like to pronounce ó as a long O (Swedish pronunciation, like long U in Spanish), but it feels a little too bold of me... :-D And similarly, I would like to pronounce ú as Swedish long U (similar in Icelandic and Japanese). Definitely not like a Spanish U... But again, I feel like I would be swimming against the current... Regarding the modern Icelandic pronunciation of á... How and when did that become the diphthong "au", do you know?
if you mean after the 1200s, long a/long u-umlaut (as they have been merged) should be pronounced as a low back round vowel, you're correct! å isn't the perfect vowel quality as that has moved up the vowel axis a bit, but you've definitely got the right idea. i tend to reconstruct that sound as /ɒː/, which is a back "ahh" while rounding your lips. ó was always distinct from ǫ́ and á. it's generally reconstructed to have a fairly close quality, so oddly similar to /o/ on the international phonetic alphabet, or somewhat in-between a swedish and . if you've taken italian, it's the same sound as a closed . it seems like the doc tends to merge o and á/ǫ́ into one [ɔ] when he speaks (like the open o of italian) so that may be a source of confusion, but ó and á/ǫ́ were definitely always pronounced differently. as for how á became au, this probably happened the late 1400s or so. this change is also happening in certain dialects of english, (dog becoming dawg, stuff like that)
@@Smedisi think it's also worth mentioning the fact why i am specifically saying after the 1200s; most of the text we have in old was written during the 12-15th centuries, so while technically you could reconstruct and use a variety of old norse with á and ǫ́ distinguished, no dialects have that distinction today; it both wouldn't be representative of how they turned out on the continent nor on the island.
@@SoulcatcherLucarioOh, I'll have to look up the difference between closed and open o in Italian. In Swedish, long O is /u:/ in IPA and short O is /ɔ/. It seems that Old Norse long ó was /o/ and not at all like /u:/ then? And short O was /ɔ/ like in Swedish? The thing with U though... In Swedish, Icelandic and Japanese, it's pronounced like /ʉː/ in IPA. Not at all like the IPA /u:/... So I wonder if Old Norse had /ʉː/...
I know this question should probably go onto a previous video: Does the mistletoe arrow Loki gives to Hodur have a name? I may be missing the big picture but it seems like a lot of people and objects destined to participate in events have names relating to those events. But I can’t find anything about mistletoe or the weapon made from it.
Jackson translated "Ása" as a female name, but it's also the singular of "Æsir". Wouldn't it be logical to presume that someone 'sitting upon the sea' might be viewed as a god, and that such a sighting would be more worthy of an inscription than just seeing some girl(especially since the next line said that her name was "Bibrau")? This is not a criticism... take it as a question for the teacher.
I wonder if its because its the most westward norse? For me i was wondering if there was any Greenlandic aka Inuit influence on the language but it seems like they were much more isolated from Inuit folk
Honestly, I am truly surprised anything survived in /from Greenland. The native people still call Denmark "the colonizers". I am going to go on a limb and say Old Norse from Greenland is rare, and that makes it interesting in itself.
Very interesting. Some say the Norse inhabitants of Greenland moved or were moved to the Canaries islands. They have statues of men practicing the glíma (Icelandic wrestling) there. I saw one statue myself there on a roundabout when driving in the island of Grand Canaria.
I think part of the reason for people's undue interest in Greenlandic Norse is that there is no modern equivalent. Like, we might not now much about old Danish, but we do know it evolved into modern Danish. But modern Greenlandic is an Inuit language (actually the most spoken of all Native North-American languages) as most modern Greenlanders' ancestors came from Canada. Like Dr. Crawford said, the Scandinavian language used there today is just modern Danish. I feel this gives it a "lost to history" vibe that always peaks people's interest, similar to the Celtic languages, Tocharian, African-Romance, Icelandic-Basque Pidgin, and many others.
Given how tiny the medieval Norse population of Greenland was, how dependent it was on trade with Europe, and how short a span the colony lasted, I don't imagine Greenlandic Old Norse would have been much distinguishable from the Old Norse spoken in contemporary Iceland or the Vestfold.
I think greenlandic norse is interesting because its almost something that feels mythical. It was on the fringe of the norse world. Its like if there was a population of some animal that migrated to an island, its just interesting to know what different traits they developed.
That animal analogy is perfect
Old Norse already kinda feels mythical to most people, and Greenland kinda feels mythical to most people, so Norse + Greenland feels double mythical.
Yeah, it's a Lost Civilization kind of mythos. Here in Denmark we still talk about it as a complete mystery, even though we largely know why they disappeared.
How long was Norse still spoken in Ireland like Dublin, Limerick, etc…? And is there evidence of a Hiberno-Norse dialect? Like runes with Gaelic borrowings.
Or in the Danelaw for that matter, were there joke about people speaking Norse in the manner of Jorvik in the same way Chaucer makes a joke about the nun speaking french in the manner of Stratford at Bow ?
@@francesconicoletti2547 Jackson made a cool reference in another video about what would make a good Robin Hood story. He said an untapped area would be to have Robin as a Norse speaker resisting Norman rule in the 1070's or whenever, as Nottingham would have been what was a Danelaw area, with people who at that time would still ostensibly speak it.
@@francesconicoletti2547 there is the famous letter where the Anglo-Saxon writer tells off a "brother Edward" for adopting heathen Danish fashions, his haircut in particular 😂 it's uncertainly dated to the turn of the 11th century, apparently.
Anyway, there are people all over the UK who still like to think they're "vikings" 🙄
i believe, to the best of my knowledge, that there is no evidence of a norse language with irish gaelic borrowings
@@xanderbucher9625 According to Wikipedia both Faroese and Icelandic have some old loanwords from Irish.
Thank you for everything that you do❤
It would have been nice to know something more about the inscription, the place it is in, why it was made, and even what it said -- I only heard "loaded some cairns and cleared".
Thank you for yet another very interesting video!
I have always been curious about this subject but never done enough research for myself. I always expected that since Greenland was even further out of the way than Iceland then there were probably few speakers in Greenland and probably simply for rare trade moments.
Anyways, excited to watch the video!
I have seen estimates for the population of Greenland of about 5000 people at the most. That is not many even for the southern half of the eastern coastal regions!
I wasn't aware there was a lot of Latin written in runes. As Latin was my second language, I'd be interested to learn more. Some searching hasn't yet turned up anything. I'd be interested in any resources on the subject.
It's like Old English: (Early or Late) West Saxon is pretty much where instruction always starts, because that's what most of the OE corpus is in, & it's what's known best, & most teachers won't start teaching OE from one of the dialects that aren't represented so well (although the other dialects are interesting, & should be looked at, at some point in one's study).
You might have said something about when Greenland was settled by Norse speakers and where they came from and how much continuous contact the settlements had with other speakers.
Don't worry, no one understands the Danish-Greenlandic legal situation, and we change it so often, it's hard to keep track. But I think the greenlanders are heading for full independence, we all just decided to take it easy and be chill about it.
I'd love to hear about attestations of Old Norse in Rus and if it differed in anyway from Old Norse in Sweden (eg through Finnic or Slavic influence)
Hmm, so how do you think á sounded like in Old Norse now? Is it a "long A" like in modern Swedish (similar to "a" in "father") or is it like long å like in modern Swedish (similar to "o" in "lord")? If the latter, what's the difference between ó and á?
Personally, I think á was both... Sometimes pronounced as long A and sometimes like long Å. For example the word "hávamál": I think the first A (á) is pronounced as long A, the second A as a short A, and the third Á as a long Å...
great question! so what happened was pre-1200s, there were two letters that were distinguished, á and o̜. á was a long a and represented long a (/ɑː/) while ǫ́ represented long u-umlaut (/ɒː/), a sound change that occurred in proto norse where any a next to a u became rounded. so proto norse *ansuz (pagan god) became ǫ́ss while *maþla (speech) became mál. these words had different vowels pre 1200s.
post 1200s, they all spelled ǫ́ and á with the same letter - á. due to the fact that any á in old norse became å on the continent, while in iceland and on the faroese islands, they have become diphthongs that include round vowels (/aw/ in icelandic and /ɔɑ/ in faroese), it is much more likely long a became the rounded /ɒː/, like long u-umlaut.
this must have meant that ó must have been a closer quality to ú than to á. i reconstruct it as /oː/, but i could just as easily see it be a true mid /o̞/. i really hope this helps!
@@SoulcatcherLucarioVery interesting! So you think mál would really be the long A then? In modern Swedish it's mål, with long Å, so I'm biased... :-D
Hmm, I have a feeling that it also has to do with the letter L... If Á is followed by one L, it feels to me that it could sometimes become a long Å. Like mál, skál, etc...
It's interesting that we have three vowels that could potentially be pronounced the same: ó, ǫ́ and á, especially after the 1200s...
I would really like to pronounce ó as a long O (Swedish pronunciation, like long U in Spanish), but it feels a little too bold of me... :-D
And similarly, I would like to pronounce ú as Swedish long U (similar in Icelandic and Japanese). Definitely not like a Spanish U... But again, I feel like I would be swimming against the current...
Regarding the modern Icelandic pronunciation of á... How and when did that become the diphthong "au", do you know?
if you mean after the 1200s, long a/long u-umlaut (as they have been merged) should be pronounced as a low back round vowel, you're correct! å isn't the perfect vowel quality as that has moved up the vowel axis a bit, but you've definitely got the right idea. i tend to reconstruct that sound as /ɒː/, which is a back "ahh" while rounding your lips.
ó was always distinct from ǫ́ and á. it's generally reconstructed to have a fairly close quality, so oddly similar to /o/ on the international phonetic alphabet, or somewhat in-between a swedish and . if you've taken italian, it's the same sound as a closed . it seems like the doc tends to merge o and á/ǫ́ into one [ɔ] when he speaks (like the open o of italian) so that may be a source of confusion, but ó and á/ǫ́ were definitely always pronounced differently.
as for how á became au, this probably happened the late 1400s or so. this change is also happening in certain dialects of english, (dog becoming dawg, stuff like that)
@@Smedisi think it's also worth mentioning the fact why i am specifically saying after the 1200s; most of the text we have in old was written during the 12-15th centuries, so while technically you could reconstruct and use a variety of old norse with á and ǫ́ distinguished, no dialects have that distinction today; it both wouldn't be representative of how they turned out on the continent nor on the island.
@@SoulcatcherLucarioOh, I'll have to look up the difference between closed and open o in Italian.
In Swedish, long O is /u:/ in IPA and short O is /ɔ/. It seems that Old Norse long ó was /o/ and not at all like /u:/ then? And short O was /ɔ/ like in Swedish?
The thing with U though... In Swedish, Icelandic and Japanese, it's pronounced like /ʉː/ in IPA. Not at all like the IPA /u:/...
So I wonder if Old Norse had /ʉː/...
I know this question should probably go onto a previous video: Does the mistletoe arrow Loki gives to Hodur have a name? I may be missing the big picture but it seems like a lot of people and objects destined to participate in events have names relating to those events. But I can’t find anything about mistletoe or the weapon made from it.
Waiting for more Icelandic diary🥹 I really love that 🥰
We wanna about Greenland because it’s the most mystery old and lost
Jackson translated "Ása" as a female name, but it's also the singular of "Æsir". Wouldn't it be logical to presume that someone 'sitting upon the sea' might be viewed as a god, and that such a sighting would be more worthy of an inscription than just seeing some girl(especially since the next line said that her name was "Bibrau")?
This is not a criticism... take it as a question for the teacher.
I wonder if its because its the most westward norse?
For me i was wondering if there was any Greenlandic aka Inuit influence on the language but it seems like they were much more isolated from Inuit folk
FYI the best people have pet lizards this is a fact. 🦎
14:08 unless your name is Ása and you're on a boat on the blue sea, then maybe there is enough for a birthday card.
*your
@Nipponing thanks
I prefer saga videos to language ones, but really I am just commenting to help the algorithm.
Honestly, I am truly surprised anything survived in /from Greenland. The native people still call Denmark "the colonizers". I am going to go on a limb and say Old Norse from Greenland is rare, and that makes it interesting in itself.
Maybe it's the mystery of whatever happened to the norse people of Greenland...?
GIVE ME THE IGUANAS
Living in Cumbria, I'd love to know more about Hiberno Norse.
Very interesting. Some say the Norse inhabitants of Greenland moved or were moved to the Canaries islands. They have statues of men practicing the glíma (Icelandic wrestling) there. I saw one statue myself there on a roundabout when driving in the island of Grand Canaria.
I love the topic of old norse language , i wish they would seek relics from the norsemen like people do the Egyptian pyramids