NOWELE. North-Western European Language Evolution - Volume 73, Issue 1, 2020

The form fauþr ‘father’ on the Malt stone is normally understood as a carving error for faþur, but could very well be read at face value as a one-syllable form fǫðr, an archaic accusative singular. In a wider Proto-Germanic context, I propose that this form is part of an early levelling process of the kinship terms to one-syllable stem forms, an alternative paradigm co-existing with the classical hysterodynamic paradigm documented in the Gothic singular. This levelling takes place not only in the plural, but also in the oblique cases of the singular. In a Scandinavian context, this reading sheds light on a handful of seemingly aberrant forms.

Scholars have previously interpreted the sequence wraitalaþo on the Trollhättan II Bracteate as wrait alaþō ‘I wrote the magical formula’, wrait ā laþō ‘I wrote laþu in(to)’ or wraita laþō ‘I wrote as an invitation’. The first and second interpretations are improbable for semantic, morphological and syntactic reasons. The third interpretation does not consider the linguistic consequences of the strong preterite 1sg ending being retained as -a in Proto-Norse (PN). I will argue that final -a was preserved in early PN after a stressed syllable, but was lost after an unstressed one. I will reconsider the group of PN inscriptions that attest strong preterite verbs. Finally, I will conclude that all definite evidence of the loss of -a belongs to a later period. One exception, however, is the much-debated inscription on the Reistad Stone, which lacks the syncope and has an original word-final -a in unnam(ʀ̣) wraita.

An je einem Beispiel möchte ich folgendes zeigen: Einmal, wie sich an einem erst jüngst aufgefundenen Goldstück binnen kurzem mehrere Deutungen anhängen und mit welchen Kriterien diese bewertet werden können. Zum anderen geht es um ein schon länger bekanntes Goldstück, insbesondere um eine neue Lesung seiner Runeninschrift, die, zügig von anderen gutgeheißen bzw. übernommen, hier erneut betrachtet werden soll, um die alte Lesung zu restituieren. Die dafür gewählten Beispiele, 1. der Goldbrakteat von IK 639 Trollhättan (II)-C und 2. der Goldsolidus von Schweindorf, haben in Vortrag und Diskussion auf dem Symposium in Odense am 14. März 2017 eine Rolle gespielt.

The standard methods of philological reconstruction usually enable us to work back from the earliest recorded examples of a particular language and to reconstruct earlier stages – especially when the language in question has known close relatives. The Early Old English of the 7th to 9th centuries AD is far from unrecorded. In light of both of those facts, it is remarkable how far newly found specimens of the language, in runic inscriptions, are revealing quite new aspects of Old English. This paper considers three such examples in detail, all of them containing grammatically complete sentences. The evidence includes not only a previously unidentified runic graph, with its own implications for phonological awareness in the users of the runic script in Anglo-Saxon England, but also a range of morphological and lexical phenomena that altogether shed considerable light on varieties of Old English as early as the 8th century and on the value of this material for understanding the developing role of literacy across the period too.

This paper deals with three South Germanic runic inscriptions that are highly relevant to language history. 1. The Frienstedt comb, which dates to the second half of the 3rd century A.D., bears four runes kaba = WGmc. ka(m)ba m. ‘comb’. The nominative sg. marker -a < PGmc. *-az represents the oldest attested West Germanic dialect feature (opposite PNorse -az, EGmc. -s). 2. noru on a neckring found near or in Aalen (ca. 500) renders a woman’s byname Nōru ‘the little one’. Final -u is best interpreted as nominative sg. of an ō-stem; it thus reflects the intermediate stage between PGmc. *-ō and Pre-OHG -Ø in later 6th century inscriptions. 3. The inscription on the Wurmlingen spearhead (presumably early 7th century) reads dorih, representing a dithematic name Dōr(r)īχ(χ) m. (< PGmc. *-rīkaz). This is the first example of Second Consonant Shift /k/ > /x(x)/.

During recent excavations at Břeclav-Lány (southern Moravia, Czech Republic), archaeologists have found a fragmented bovine rib with runes. The rib was unearthed in an early Slavic pit-house and is radiocarbon- dated to ca. 600. The inscription begins at the break line and reads xbemdo (probably tbemdo), representing six of the last eight runes of the older fuþark – it seems that the lost piece of the rib exhibited the preceding part of the rune row. There is reason to believe that the carver was a Langobard who did not join the migration into northern Italy in 568 (or, alternatively, a Slav who learned and used the Germanic script?).

This paper outlines the individual histories of the attested ancient Celtic epigraphic traditions, Cisalpine Celtic, Celtiberian, Gaulish and Ogam-Irish. It discusses the types of literacy in each of them and presents them as examples of how and under which conditions literacy arose and grew, and finally disappeared, in non-classical languages of antiquity. Where possible, the Celtic languages are viewed against an early Germanic background, to highlight similarities and parallels between the two philological areas, but also to contrast the differences between them and to give an account of where and when opportunities of literate interaction may have arisen between the two groups. These zones of potential interaction, as well as uncommon shapes of letters in some Celtic writing systems, are of relevance for the concluding section where observations from a Celtologist’s point of view will be made that may have a bearing on the origins of Runic writing.

The paper investigates the potential role of the Raetic inscription corpus for the derivation of the Germanic futhark. It gives an overview of the North Italic corpora and the current state of research, focussing on the Raetic epigraphical evidence. A detailed comparison of the grapheme inventories of Raetic and Runic as well as their respective epigraphical characteristics shows that the Raetic alphabets do not serve as convincing models for the Runic script.