1.
North Germanic languages
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The language group is sometimes referred to as the Nordic languages, a direct translation of the most common term used among Danish, Swedish and Norwegian scholars and laypeople. Approximately 20 million people in the Nordic countries have a Scandinavian language as their native language, languages belonging to the North Germanic language tree are spoken commonly on Greenland and, to a lesser extent, by immigrants in North America. Dialects with the assigned to the northern group formed from the Proto-Germanic language in the late Pre-Roman Iron Age in Northern Europe. At last around the year 200 AD, speakers of the North Germanic branch became distinguishable from the other Germanic language speakers, the early development of this language branch is attested through runic inscriptions. The original vowel remained when nasalised *ōn and when before /z/, Proto-Germanic *geƀō ‘gift’ > Northwest Germanic *geƀu >, North Germanic *gjavu > with u-umlaut *gjǫvu > ON gjǫf, and West Germanic *gebu > OE giefu, cf. Goth giba. Proto-Germanic *tungōn ‘tongue’ > late Northwest Germanic *tungā > *tunga > ON tunga, OHG zunga, OE tunge, vs. Goth tuggō. *geƀōz ‘of a gift’ > late Northwest Germanic *geƀāz >, North Germanic *gjavaz > ON gjafar, the rhotacism of /z/ to /r/, with presumably a rhotic fricative of some kind as an earlier stage. This change probably affected West Germanic much earlier and then spread from there to North Germanic and this is confirmed by an intermediate stage ʀ, clearly attested in late runic East Norse at a time when West Germanic had long merged the sound with /r/. The development of the demonstrative pronoun ancestral to English this, Germanic *sa, sō, þat ‘this, that’ + proximal *si ‘here’, Runic Norse, nom. sg. þeim-si, etc. with declension of the 1st part, fixed form with declension on the 2nd part, ON sjá, þessi m. Some innovations are not found in West and East Germanic such as, Sharpening of geminate /jj/ and /ww/ according to Holtzmanns law Occurred also in East Germanic, Proto-Germanic *twajjôN > Old Norse tveggja, Gothic twaddjē, but > Old High German zweiio Word-final devoicing of stop consonants. Proto-Germanic *nahtuN > *nāttu > *nǭttu > Old Norse nótt /ɑi̯/ > /ɑː/ before /r/ Proto-Germanic *sairaz > *sāraz > *sārz > Old Norse sárr, with original /z/ Proto-Germanic *gaizaz > *geizz > Old Norse geirr. General loss of word-final /n/, following the loss of short vowels. Proto-Germanic *bindanaN > *bindan > Old Norse binda, but > Old English bindan and this also affected stressed syllables, Proto-Germanic *in > Old Norse í Vowel breaking of /e/ to /jɑ/ except after w, j or l. The diphthong /eu/ was also affected, shifting to /jɒu/ at an early stage and this diphthong is preserved in Old Gutnish and survives in modern Gutnish. In other Norse dialects, the /j/-onset and length remained, the word *ek, which could occur both stressed and unstressed, appears varyingly as ek and jak throughout Old Norse. Loss of initial /j/, and also of /w/ before a round vowel, Proto-Germanic *wulfaz > North Germanic ulfz > Old Norse ulfr The development of u-umlaut, which rounded stressed vowels when /u/ or /w/ followed in the next syllable. This followed vowel breaking, with ja /jɑ/ being u-umlauted to jǫ /jɒ/, Norwegian settlers brought Old West Norse to Iceland and the Faroe Islands around 800
2.
Phoenician alphabet
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The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants and it was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and it became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script, the Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are texts written in boustrophedon. The earliest known inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle. The script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet -- such as Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian, and the Paleohispanic scripts -- were very successful. This simple system contrasted with the scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another reason for its success was the trading culture of Phoenician merchants. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt, Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script and its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, and it was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This idea was popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform, the theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian
3.
Greek alphabet
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It is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts. In its classical and modern forms, the alphabet has 24 letters, Modern and Ancient Greek use different diacritics. In standard Modern Greek spelling, orthography has been simplified to the monotonic system, examples In both Ancient and Modern Greek, the letters of the Greek alphabet have fairly stable and consistent symbol-to-sound mappings, making pronunciation of words largely predictable. Ancient Greek spelling was generally near-phonemic, among consonant letters, all letters that denoted voiced plosive consonants and aspirated plosives in Ancient Greek stand for corresponding fricative sounds in Modern Greek. This leads to groups of vowel letters denoting identical sounds today. Modern Greek orthography remains true to the spellings in most of these cases. The following vowel letters and digraphs are involved in the mergers, Modern Greek speakers typically use the same, modern, in other countries, students of Ancient Greek may use a variety of conventional approximations of the historical sound system in pronouncing Ancient Greek. Several letter combinations have special conventional sound values different from those of their single components, among them are several digraphs of vowel letters that formerly represented diphthongs but are now monophthongized. In addition to the three mentioned above, there is also ⟨ου⟩, pronounced /u/, the Ancient Greek diphthongs ⟨αυ⟩, ⟨ευ⟩ and ⟨ηυ⟩ are pronounced, and respectively in voicing environments in Modern Greek. The Modern Greek consonant combinations ⟨μπ⟩ and ⟨ντ⟩ stand for and respectively, ⟨τζ⟩ stands for, in addition, both in Ancient and Modern Greek, the letter ⟨γ⟩, before another velar consonant, stands for the velar nasal, thus ⟨γγ⟩ and ⟨γκ⟩ are pronounced like English ⟨ng⟩. There are also the combinations ⟨γχ⟩ and ⟨γξ⟩ and these signs were originally designed to mark different forms of the phonological pitch accent in Ancient Greek. The letter rho, although not a vowel, also carries a rough breathing in word-initial position, if a rho was geminated within a word, the first ρ always had the smooth breathing and the second the rough breathing leading to the transiliteration rrh. The vowel letters ⟨α, η, ω⟩ carry an additional diacritic in certain words, the iota subscript. This iota represents the former offglide of what were originally long diphthongs, ⟨ᾱι, ηι, ωι⟩, another diacritic used in Greek is the diaeresis, indicating a hiatus. In 1982, a new, simplified orthography, known as monotonic, was adopted for use in Modern Greek by the Greek state. Although it is not a diacritic, the comma has a function as a silent letter in a handful of Greek words, principally distinguishing ό. There are many different methods of rendering Greek text or Greek names in the Latin script, the form in which classical Greek names are conventionally rendered in English goes back to the way Greek loanwords were incorporated into Latin in antiquity. In this system, ⟨κ⟩ is replaced with ⟨c⟩, the diphthongs ⟨αι⟩ and ⟨οι⟩ are rendered as ⟨ae⟩ and ⟨oe⟩ respectively, and ⟨ει⟩ and ⟨ου⟩ are simplified to ⟨i⟩ and ⟨u⟩ respectively
4.
Archaic Greek alphabets
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The system now familiar as the standard 24-letter Greek alphabet was originally the regional variant of the Ionian cities in Asia Minor. It was officially adopted in Athens in 403 BC and in most of the rest of the Greek world by the middle of the 4th century BC, the green type is the most archaic and closest to the Phoenician. The red type is the one that was transmitted to the West and became the ancestor of the Latin alphabet. The blue type is the one from which the later standard Greek alphabet emerged, *Upsilon is also derived from waw. The green type uses no additional letters beyond the Phoenician set, thus, the aspirated plosives /pʰ/, /kʰ/ are spelled either simply as Π and Κ respectively, without a distinction from unaspirated /p/, /k/, or as digraphs ΠΗ, ΚΗ. Likewise, the clusters /ps/, /ks/ are simply spelled ΠΣ and this is the system found in Crete and in some other islands in the southern Aegean, notably Thera, Melos and Anaphe. The red type also lacks Phoenician-derived Ξ for /ks/, but instead introduces a supplementary sign for that sound combination at the end of the alphabet, in addition, the red alphabet also introduced letters for the aspirates, Φ = /pʰ/ and Ψ = /kʰ/. Note that the use of Χ in the red set corresponds to the letter X in Latin, while it differs from the later standard Greek alphabet, where Χ stands for /kʰ/, only Φ for /pʰ/ is common to all non-green alphabets. The red type is found in most parts of central mainland Greece, as well as the island of Euboea, the light blue type still lacks Ξ, and adds only letters for /pʰ/ and /kʰ/. Both of these correspond to the standard alphabet. The light blue system thus still has no letters for the clusters /ps/, /ks/. In this system, these are typically spelled ΦΣ and ΧΣ and this is the system found in Athens and several Aegean islands. The dark blue type, finally, is the one that has all the consonant symbols of the standard alphabet, in addition to Φ and Χ, it also adds Ψ. This system is found in the cities of the Ionian dodecapolis, Knidos in Asia Minor, in the psilotic dialects of Anatolia and adjacent eastern Aegean islands, as well as Crete, vocalic Η was used only for /ɛː/. In a number of Aegean islands, notably Rhodes, Milos, Santorini and Paros, in Knidos, a variant letter was invented to distinguish the two functions, Η was used for /h/, and for /ɛː/. In south Italian colonies, especially Taranto, after c.400 BC and this latter symbol was later turned into the diacritic sign for rough breathing by the Alexandrine grammarians. The normal letter epsilon was used exclusively for the latter, while a new special symbol stood both for short /e/ and for /ɛː/, the letter Digamma for the sound /w/ was generally used only in those local scripts where the sound was still in use in the spoken dialect. During the archaic period, this includes most of mainland Greece, as well as Euboea, in Athens and in Naxos it was apparently used only in the register of poetry
5.
Old Italic script
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Old Italic is one of several now extinct alphabet systems used on the Italian Peninsula in ancient times for various Indo-European languages and non-Indo-European languages. The alphabets derive from the Euboean Greek Cumaean alphabet, used at Ischia, various Indo-European languages belonging to the Italic branch originally used the alphabet. Faliscan, Oscan, Umbrian, North Picene, and South Picene all derive from an Etruscan form of the alphabet, the Germanic runic alphabet was derived from one of these alphabets by the 2nd century AD. It is not clear whether the process of adaptation from the Greek alphabet took place in Italy from the first colony of Greeks and it was in any case a Western Greek alphabet. In the alphabets of the West, X had the value, Ψ stood for, in Etruscan. Until about 600 BC, the form of the Etruscan alphabet remained practically unchanged. From the 6th century, however, the alphabet evolved, adjusting to the phonology of the Etruscan language and its origin is disputed, it may have been an altered B or H or an ex novo creation. Its sound value was /f/ and it replaced the Etruscan FH, some letters were, on the other hand, falling out of use, B and D were apparently considered superfluous over P and T. K was dropped in favour of G. O disappeared and was replaced by U, in the course of its simplification, the redundant letters showed some tendency towards a syllabary, C, K and Q were predominantly used in the contexts CE, KA, QU. This classical alphabet remained in use until the 2nd century BC when it began to be influenced by the rise of the Latin alphabet, soon after, the Etruscan language itself became extinct. U came to be used to represent Oscan o, while Ú was used for actual Oscan u, the Nucerian alphabet is based on inscriptions found in southern Italy. It is attested only between the 6th and the 5th century BC, the most important sign is the /S/, shaped like a fir tree, and possibly a derivation from the Phoenician alphabet. U /u/ and V /w/ are distinguished, Θ is probably for /t/ and X for /g/. There are claims of a related script discovered in Glozel, the alphabet of Sanzeno, about 100 Raetic inscriptions. The alphabet of Magrè, east Raetian inscriptions, alphabet of Este, Similar but not identical to that of Magrè, Venetic inscriptions. Inscripted abecedarium on rock engraves in Valle Camonica, the South Picene alphabet, known from the 6th century BCE, is most like the southern Etruscan alphabet in that it uses Q for /k/ and K for /g/. It is, ⟨. ⟩ is a reduced ⟨o⟩ and ⟨, ⟩ is a reduced ⟨8⟩, the Old Italic alphabets were unified and added to the Unicode Standard in March,2001 with the release of version 3.1. The Unicode block for Old Italic is U+10300–U+1032F without specification of a particular alphabet, writing direction varies based on the language and even the time period
6.
Elder Futhark
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The Elder Futhark is the oldest form of the runic alphabets. It was a system used by Germanic tribes for the northwestern. Its inscriptions are found on artifacts from the 2nd to 8th centuries, in Scandinavia, from the late 8th century, the script was simplified to the Younger Futhark, while the Anglo-Saxons and Frisians extended the Futhark which eventually became the Anglo-Saxon futhorc. The Elder Futhark consists of runes, often arranged in three groups of eight runes called an ætt. In the following table, each rune is given with its common transliteration, ï is also transliterated as æ, and may have been either a diphthong, or a vowel near or. Z was Proto-Germanic, and evolved into Proto-Norse, and is transliterated as ʀ. The remaining transliterations correspond to the IPA symbol of their approximate value. H n i j ï p. t b e m l d The Elder Futhark runes are commonly believed to originate in the Old Italic scripts, either a North Italic variant, conversely, the Greek-derived 4th century Gothic alphabet does have two letters derived from runes, and. Similarly, the Meldorf inscription of 50 may qualify as proto-runic use of the Latin alphabet by Germanic speakers, the Raetic alphabet of Bolzano in particular seems to fit the letter shapes well. The f, a, g, i, t, m and l runes show no variation, and are generally accepted as identical to the Old Italic or Latin letters F, A, X, I, T, M and L, respectively. There is also agreement that the u, r, k, h, s, b and o runes respectively correspond directly to V, R, C, H, S, B and O. The runes of uncertain derivation may either be original innovations, or adoptions of otherwise unneeded Latin letters, similarly, the s rune may have either three or four strokes, and only from the 5th century does the variant with three strokes become prevalent. Note that the runes of the 6th to 8th centuries tend to have only three directions of strokes, the vertical and two diagonal directions. Early inscriptions also show horizontal strokes, these appear in the case of e, the general agreement dates the creation of the first runic alphabet to roughly the 1st century. Early estimates include the 1st century BC, and late estimates push the date into the 2nd century, the question is one of estimating the findless period separating the scripts creation from the Vimose finds of ca. Other scholars are content to assume a findless period of a few decades, pedersen suggests a period of development of about a century to account for their assumed derivation of the shapes of þ and j from Latin D and G. The invention of the script has been ascribed to a person or a group of people who had come into contact with Roman culture, maybe as mercenaries in the Roman army. The script was designed for epigraphic purposes, but opinions differ in stressing either magical, practical or simply playful aspects
7.
Younger Futhark
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The reduction, somewhat paradoxically, happened at the same time as phonetic changes led to a greater number of different phonemes in the spoken language, when Proto-Norse evolved into Old Norse. Thus, the language included distinct sounds and minimal pairs which were not separate in writing, the Younger Futhark is divided into long-branch and short-twig runes, in the 10th century further expanded by the Hälsinge Runes or staveless runes. The lifetime of the Younger Futhark corresponds roughly to the Viking Age, usage of the Younger Futhark is found in Scandinavia and Viking Age settlements abroad, probably in use from the 9th century onward. During a phase from about 650 to 800, some inscriptions mixed the use of Elder and Younger Futhark runes, by the late 8th century, the reduction from 24 to 16 runes was complete. The main change was that the difference between voiced and unvoiced consonants was no longer expressed in writing, other changes are the consequence of sound changes that separate Old Norse from Proto-Norse and Common Germanic. The first ætt was reduced to its first six letters, fuþąrk, the second ætt lost the æ and p runes. The j rune was rendered due to Old Norse sound changes. The old z rune was kept but moved to the end of the row in the only change of letter ordering in Younger Futhark. The third ætt was reduced to four runes, losing the e, ŋ, o and d runes, the names of the 16 runes of the Younger futhark are recorded in the Icelandic and Norwegian rune poems. The exceptions to this are, yr which continues the name of the unrelated Eihwaz rune, thurs and kaun, in cases the Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon. The Younger Futhark is divided into long-branch and short-twig runes, the difference between the two versions has been a matter of controversy. Later other runic inscriptions with the runes were found in other parts of Sweden. They were used between the 10th and 12th centuries, the runes seem to be a simplification of the Swedish-Norwegian runes and lack certain strokes, hence the name staveless. They cover the set of staves as the other Younger Futhark alphabets. This variant has no assigned Unicode range, in the Middle Ages, the Younger Futhark in Scandinavia was expanded, so that it once more contained one sign for each phoneme of the old Norse language. Inscriptions in medieval Scandinavian runes show a number of variant rune-forms. Medieval runes were in use until the 15th century, of the total number of Norwegian runic inscriptions preserved today, most are medieval runes. Notably, more than 600 inscriptions using these runes have been discovered in Bergen since the 1950s and this indicates that runes were in common use side by side with the Latin alphabet for several centuries
8.
Dalecarlian runes
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The Dalecarlian runes, or dalrunes, was a late version of the runic script that was in use in the Swedish province of Dalarna until the 20th century. The province has consequently been called the last stronghold of the Germanic script, which one does not know to be still continued anywhere else in Sweden. The Dalecarlian runes were derived from the runes, but the runic letters were combined with Latin ones. At the end of the 16th century, the Dalecarlian runic inventory was almost exclusively runic, in its last stage almost every rune had been replaced with a Latin letter, or with special versions that were influenced by Latin characters. Although the use of runes in Dalarna is an ancient tradition and it is a bowl from the village of Åsen which says Anders has made bowl anno 1596. Most inscriptions are brief but there are also longer ones, the Dalecarlian runes remained in some use up to the 20th century. Some discussion remains on whether their use was a tradition throughout this period or whether people in the 19th and 20th centuries learned runes from books written on the subject. The character inventory was used for transcribing Elfdalian. Jansson, Sven BF, Runes in Sweden, Stockholm, Gidlund, ISBN 91-7844-067-X
9.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
10.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
11.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
12.
Scandinavia
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Scandinavia /ˌskændᵻˈneɪviə/ is a historical and cultural region in Northern Europe characterized by a common ethnocultural North Germanic heritage and mutually intelligible North Germanic languages. The term Scandinavia always includes the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, the remote Norwegian islands of Svalbard and Jan Mayen are usually not seen as a part of Scandinavia, nor is Greenland, an overseas territory of Denmark. This looser definition almost equates to that of the Nordic countries, in Nordic languages, only Denmark, Norway and Sweden are commonly included in the definition of Scandinavia. In English usage, Scandinavia sometimes refers to the geographical area, the name Scandinavia originally referred vaguely to the formerly Danish, now Swedish, region Scania. Icelanders and the Faroese are to a significant extent descended from the Norse, Finland is mainly populated by Finns, with a minority of approximately 5% of Swedish speakers. A small minority of Sami people live in the north of Scandinavia. The Danish, Norwegian and Swedish languages form a continuum and are known as the Scandinavian languages—all of which are considered mutually intelligible with one another. Faroese and Icelandic, sometimes referred to as insular Scandinavian languages, are intelligible in continental Scandinavian languages only to a limited extent, Finnish and Meänkieli are closely related to each other and more distantly to the Sami languages, but are entirely unrelated to the Scandinavian languages. Apart from these, German, Yiddish and Romani are recognized minority languages in Scandinavia, the southern and by far most populous regions of Scandinavia have a temperate climate. Scandinavia extends north of the Arctic Circle, but has mild weather for its latitude due to the Gulf Stream. Much of the Scandinavian mountains have a tundra climate. There are many lakes and moraines, legacies of the last glacial period, Scandinavia usually refers to Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Some sources argue for the inclusion of the Faroe Islands, Finland and Iceland, though that broader region is known by the countries concerned as Norden. Before this time, the term Scandinavia was familiar mainly to classical scholars through Pliny the Elders writings, and was used vaguely for Scania, as a political term, Scandinavia was first used by students agitating for Pan-Scandinavianism in the 1830s. After a visit to Sweden, Andersen became a supporter of early political Scandinavism, the term is often defined according to the conventions of the cultures that lay claim to the term in their own use. More precisely, and subject to no dispute, is that Finland is included in the broader term Nordic countries, various promotional agencies of the Nordic countries in the United States serve to promote market and tourism interests in the region. The official tourist boards of Scandinavia sometimes cooperate under one umbrella, Norways government entered one year later. All five Nordic governments participate in the joint promotional efforts in the United States through the Scandinavian Tourist Board of North America, Scandinavia can thus be considered a subset of the Nordic countries
13.
Runes
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The Scandinavian variants are also known as futhark or fuþark, the Anglo-Saxon variant is futhorc or fuþorc. Runology is the study of the runic alphabets, runic inscriptions, runestones, runology forms a specialised branch of Germanic linguistics. The earliest runic inscriptions date from around 150 AD, the characters were generally replaced by the Latin alphabet as the cultures that had used runes underwent Christianisation, by approximately 700 AD in central Europe and 1100 AD in northern Europe. However, the use of runes persisted for specialized purposes in northern Europe, until the early 20th century, runes were used in rural Sweden for decorative purposes in Dalarna and on Runic calendars. The three best-known runic alphabets are the Elder Futhark, the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, and the Younger Futhark, the Younger Futhark is divided further into the long-branch runes, short-branch or Rök runes, and the stavlösa or Hälsinge runes. The Younger Futhark developed further into the Medieval runes, and the Dalecarlian runes, historically, the runic alphabet is a derivation of the Old Italic scripts of antiquity, with the addition of some innovations. Which variant of the Old Italic family in particular gave rise to the runes is uncertain, suggestions include Raetic, Venetic, Etruscan, or Old Latin as candidates. At the time, all of these scripts had the same angular letter shapes suited for epigraphy, the process of transmission of the script is unknown. The oldest inscriptions are found in Denmark and northern Germany, not near Italy, a West Germanic hypothesis suggests transmission via Elbe Germanic groups, while a Gothic hypothesis presumes transmission via East Germanic expansion. The runes were in use among the Germanic peoples from the 1st or 2nd century AD, no distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was certainly present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time. Similarly, there are no signs for labiovelars in the Elder Futhark The term runes is used to distinguish these symbols from Latin and it is attested on a 6th-century Alamannic runestaff as runa and possibly as runo on the 4th-century Einang stone. The name comes from the Germanic root run-, meaning secret or whisper, in Old Irish Gaelic, the word rún means mystery, secret, intention or affectionate love. Similarly in Welsh and Old English, the word rhin and rūn respectively means mystery, secret, secret writing, or sometimes in the sense of the word. Ogham is a Celtic script, similarly carved in the Norse manner, the root run- can also be found in the Baltic languages, meaning speech. In Lithuanian, runoti means both to cut and to speak, according to another theory, the Germanic root comes from the Indoeuropean root *reuə- dig. The Finnish term for rune, riimukirjain, means scratched letter, the Finnish word runo means poem and comes from the same source as the English word rune, it is a very old loan of the Proto-Germanic *rūnō. The runes developed centuries after the Old Italic alphabets from which they are historically derived. The formation of the Elder Futhark was complete by the early 5th century, specifically, the Raetic alphabet of Bolzano is often advanced as a candidate for the origin of the runes, with only five Elder Futhark runes having no counterpart in the Bolzano alphabet
14.
Viking Age
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The Viking Age is the period from the late 8th century to the mid-11th century in European history, especially Northern European and Scandinavian history, following the Germanic Iron Age. It is the period of history when Scandinavian Norsemen explored Europe by its seas and rivers for trade, raids, colonisation and conquest. Three Viking ships had beached in Weymouth Bay four years earlier, the Viking devastation of Northumbrias Holy Island was reported by the Northumbrian scholar Alcuin of York, who wrote, Never before in Britain has such a terror appeared. Vikings were portrayed as violent and bloodthirsty by their enemies. The chronicles of medieval England portrayed them as rapacious wolves among sheep, the first challenges to the many anti-Viking images in Britain emerged in the 17th century. Pioneering scholarly works on the Viking Age reached a readership in Britain. Archaeologists began to dig up Britains Viking past, linguistics traced the Viking-Age origins of rural idioms and proverbs. New dictionaries of the Old Norse language enabled more Victorians to read the Icelandic Sagas, the Vikings who invaded western and eastern Europe were chiefly pagans from Denmark, Norway and Sweden. They also settled in the Faroe Islands, Ireland, Iceland, peripheral Scotland, Greenland and their North Germanic language, Old Norse, became the mother-tongue of present-day Scandinavian languages. By 801, a central authority appears to have been established in Jutland. In Norway, mountainous terrain and fjords formed strong natural boundaries, communities there remained independent of each other, unlike the situation in Denmark which is lowland. By 800, some 30 small kingdoms existed in Norway, the sea was the easiest way of communication between the Norwegian kingdoms and the outside world. It was in the 8th century that Scandinavians began to build ships of war, the North Sea rovers were traders, colonisers and explorers as well as plunderers. There are various theories concerning the causes of the Viking invasions, for people living along the coast, it would seem natural to seek new land by the sea. Another reason was that during this period England, Wales and Ireland, the Franks, however, had well-defended coasts and heavily fortified ports and harbours. Pure thirst for adventure may also have been a factor, a reason for the raids is believed by some to be over-population caused by technological advances, such as the use of iron, or a shortage of women due to selective female infanticide. Although another cause could well have been caused by the Frankish expansion to the south of Scandinavia. Consequently, these Vikings became raiders, in search of subsistence, There is ongoing debate among scholars as to why the Scandinavians began to expand during the 8th through 11th centuries
15.
Phoneme
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A phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a particular language. The difference in meaning between the English words kill and kiss is a result of the exchange of the phoneme /l/ for the phoneme /s/, two words that differ in meaning through a contrast of a single phoneme form a minimal pair. In linguistics, phonemes are written between slashes like this, /p/, whereas when it is desired to show the exact pronunciation of any sound, linguists use square brackets. Within linguistics there are differing views as to exactly what phonemes are, however, a phoneme is generally regarded as an abstraction of a set of speech sounds which are perceived as equivalent to each other in a given language. For example, in English, the k sounds in the kit and skill are not identical. Different speech sounds that are realizations of the same phoneme are known as allophones, phonemes are conventionally placed between slashes in transcription, whereas speech sounds are placed between square brackets. Thus /pʊʃ/ represents a sequence of three phonemes /p/, /ʊ/, /ʃ/, while represents the sequence of sounds. The symbols used for particular phonemes are often taken from the International Phonetic Alphabet, however, descriptions of particular languages may use different conventional symbols to represent the phonemes of those languages. A phoneme is a sound or a group of different sounds perceived to have the function by speakers of the language or dialect in question. An example is the English phoneme /k/, which occurs in such as cat, kit, scat. Although most native speakers do not notice this, in most English dialects the c/k sounds in words are not identical, in kit the sound is aspirated. The words therefore contain different speech sounds, or phones, transcribed for the aspirated form, the above shows that in English, and are allophones of a single phoneme /k/. For example, in Icelandic, is the first sound of kátur meaning cheerful, Icelandic therefore has two separate phonemes /kʰ/ and /k/. A pair of words like kátur and gátur that differ only in one phone is called a pair for the two alternative phones in question. The existence of pairs is a common test to decide whether two phones represent different phonemes or are allophones of the same phoneme. In other languages, though, including Korean, even though both sounds and occur, no minimal pair exists. The lack of minimal pairs distinguishing and in Korean provides evidence that in this language they are allophones of a single phoneme /t/, the word /tata/ is pronounced, for example. Signed languages, such as American Sign Language also have minimal pairs, Sign language minimal pairs refer to one of the signs parameters, handshape, movement, location, palm orientation, and non-manual signal/marker
16.
Runology
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This article is about the philological discipline, not to be confused with occultist concepts like runosophy. Runology is the study of the Runic alphabets, Runic inscriptions, runology forms a specialized branch of Germanic linguistics. Runology was initiated by Johannes Bureus who was interested in the linguistics of the Geatish language. However, he did not look at the runes as just an alphabet, the study of runes was continued by Olof Rudbeck Sr and presented in his collection Atlantica. The physicist Anders Celsius further extended the science of runes and travelled around the whole of Sweden to examine the bautastenar, another early treatise is the 1732 Runologia by Jón Ólafsson of Grunnavík. The various runic scripts were well understood by the 19th century, wilhelm Grimm published his Ueber deutsche Runen in 1821, where among other things he discussed the Marcomannic runes. In 1828 he published a supplement, titled Zur Literatur der Runen, sveriges runinskrifter was published from 1900. The dedicated journal Nytt om runer has been published by the Runic Archives of the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo from 1985, the Rundata project, aiming at a machine-readable catalogue of runic inscriptions, was initiated in 1993. Runic transliteration and transcription List of runologists
17.
Latin alphabet
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The Latin alphabet is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. It is the script of the English language and is often referred to simply as the alphabet in English. It is an alphabet which originated in the 7th century BC in Italy and has changed continually over the last 2500 years. It has roots in the Semitic alphabet and its offshoot alphabets, the Phoenician, Greek, the phonetic values of some letters changed, some letters were lost and gained, and several writing styles developed. Two such styles, the minuscule and majuscule hands, were combined into one script with alternate forms for the lower and upper case letters, due to classicism, modern uppercase letters differ only slightly from their classical counterparts. The Latin alphabet started out as uppercase serifed letters known as roman square capitals, the lowercase letters evolved through cursive styles that developed to adapt the formerly inscribed alphabet to being written with a pen. Throughout the ages, many stylistic variations of each letter have evolved that are still identified as being the same letter. From the Cumae alphabet, the Etruscan alphabet was derived, the Latins ultimately adopted 21 of the original 26 Etruscan letters. Gaius Julius Hyginus, who recorded much Roman mythology, mentions in Fab, the Parcae, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos invented seven Greek letters — A B H T I Y. Others say that Mercury invented them from the flight of cranes, which, palamedes, too, son of Nauplius, invented eleven letters, Simonides, too, invented four letters — Ó E Z PH, Epicharmus of Sicily, two — P and PS. The Greek letters Mercury is said to have brought to Egypt, Cadmus in exile from Arcadia, took them to Italy, and his mother Carmenta changed them to Latin to the number of 15. Apollo on the added the rest. The original Latin alphabet was, The oldest Latin inscriptions do not distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, representing both by C, K and Q according to position, K was used before A, Q was used before O or V, C was used elsewhere. This is explained by the fact that the Etruscan language did not make this distinction, C originated as a turned form of Greek Gamma and Q from Greek Koppa. In later Latin, K survived only in a few such as Kalendae, Q survived only before V. G was later invented to distinguish between /ɡ/ and /k/, it was simply a C with an additional diacritic. C stood for /ɡ/ I stood for both /i/ and /j/, V stood for both /u/ and /w/. K was marginalized in favour of C, which stood for both /ɡ/ and /k/
18.
Old Norse
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Old Norse was a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during about the 9th to 13th centuries. These dates, however, are not absolute, since written Old Norse is found well into the 15th century, Old Norse was divided into three dialects, Old West Norse, Old East Norse and Old Gutnish. Old West and East Norse formed a continuum, with no clear geographical boundary between them. For example, Old East Norse traits were found in eastern Norway, although Old Norwegian is classified as Old West Norse, most speakers spoke Old East Norse in what is present day Denmark and Sweden. Old Gutnish, the more obscure dialectal branch, is included in the Old East Norse dialect due to geographical associations. It developed its own features and shared in changes to both other branches. The 12th century Icelandic Gray Goose Laws state that Swedes, Norwegians, Icelanders and Danes spoke the same language, another term used, used especially commonly with reference to West Norse, was norrœnt mál. In some instances the term Old Norse refers specifically to Old West Norse, the Old East Norse dialect was spoken in Denmark, Sweden, settlements in Kievan Rus, eastern England, and Danish settlements in Normandy. The Old Gutnish dialect was spoken in Gotland and in settlements in the East. In the 11th century, Old Norse was the most widely spoken European language, in Kievan Rus, it survived the longest in Veliky Novgorod, probably lasting into the 13th century there. Norwegian is descended from Old West Norse, but over the centuries it has heavily influenced by East Norse. Old Norse also had an influence on English dialects and Lowland Scots and it also influenced the development of the Norman language, and through it and to a smaller extent, that of modern French. Various other languages, which are not closely related, have heavily influenced by Norse, particularly the Norman dialects, Scottish Gaelic. The current Finnish and Estonian words for Sweden are Ruotsi and Rootsi, of the modern languages, Icelandic is the closest to Old Norse. Written modern Icelandic derives from the Old Norse phonemic writing system, contemporary Icelandic-speakers can read Old Norse, which varies slightly in spelling as well as semantics and word order. However, pronunciation, particularly of the phonemes, has changed at least as much as in the other North Germanic languages. Faroese retains many similarities but is influenced by Danish, Norwegian, although Swedish, Danish and the Norwegian languages have diverged the most, they still retain asymmetric mutual intelligibility. Speakers of modern Swedish, Norwegian and Danish can mostly understand each other without studying their neighboring languages, the languages are also sufficiently similar in writing that they can mostly be understood across borders
19.
Parchment
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Parchment is a writing material made from specially prepared untanned skins of animals—primarily sheep, calves, and goats. It has been used as a medium for over two millennia. Vellum is a finer quality parchment made from the skins of kids, lambs and it may be called animal membrane by libraries and museums that wish to avoid distinguishing between parchment and the more restricted term vellum. Today the term parchment is often used in non-technical contexts to refer to any animal skin, particularly goat, sheep or cow, that has been scraped or dried under tension. Vellum in theory refers exclusively to calfskin, and is used to denote a quality of material. The term parchment originally referred only to the skin of sheep and, occasionally, the word parchment evolved from the name of the city of Pergamon which was a thriving center of parchment production during the Hellenistic period. This account, originated in the writings of Pliny the Elder, is dubious because parchment had been in use in Anatolia, in the 2nd century BC a great library was set up in Pergamon that rivaled the famous Library of Alexandria. Writing on prepared animal skins had a history, however. H. Ibscher, and preserved in the Cairo Museum, a roll of the Twelfth Dynasty now in Berlin, the text now in the British Museum. Though the Assyrians and the Babylonians impressed their cuneiform on clay tablets, early Islamic texts are also found on parchment. In the later Middle Ages, especially the 15th century, parchment was largely replaced by paper for most uses except luxury manuscripts, new techniques in paper milling allowed it to be much cheaper than parchment, it was still made of textile rags and of very high quality. With the advent of printing in the fifteenth century, the demands of printers far exceeded the supply of animal skins for parchment. Although most copies of the Gutenberg Bible are on paper, some were printed on parchment,12 of the 48 surviving copies, in 1490, Johannes Trithemius preferred the older methods, because handwriting placed on parchment will be able to endure a thousand years. But how long will printing last, which is dependent on paper and it lasts for two hundred years that is a long time. In fact high quality paper from this period has survived 500 years or more very well, the heyday of parchment use was during the medieval period, but there has been a growing revival of its use among artists since the late 20th century. Although parchment never stopped being used it had ceased to be a choice for artists supports by the end of 15th century Renaissance. This was partly due to its expense and partly due to its working properties. When the water in paint media touches parchments surface, the collagen melts slightly, forming a bed for the paint
20.
Bell
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A bell is a directly struck idiophone percussion instrument. Most bells have the shape of a cup that when struck vibrates in a single strong strike tone. The strike may be made by an internal clapper or uvula, Bells are usually cast from bell metal for its resonant properties, but can also be made from other hard materials, this depends on the function. Many public or institutional buildings house bells, most commonly as clock bells to sound the hours and quarters, historically, bells have been associated with religious rituals, and are still used to call communities together for religious services. Later, bells were made to important events or people and have been associated with the concepts of peace. The study of bells is called campanology and it is popularly but not certainly related to the former sense of to bell which gave rise to bellow. The earliest archaeological evidence of dates from the 3rd millennium BC. Clapper-bells made of pottery have found in several archaeological sites. The pottery bells later developed into metal bells, in West Asia, the first bells appear in 1000 BC. The earliest metal bells, with one found in the Taosi site, early bells not only have an important role in generating metal sound, but arguably played a prominent cultural role. See also Klang Bell of the British Museum collection, in the western world, the common form of bell is a church bell or town bell, which is hung within a tower or bell cote. Such bells are fixed in position or mounted on a beam so they can swing to. Bells that are hung dead are normally sounded by hitting the bow with a hammer or occasionally by pulling an internal clapper against the bell. Where a bell is swung it can either be swung over an arc by a rope. As the bell swings higher the sound is projected rather than downwards. Bells hung for full circle ringing are swung through just over a circle from mouth uppermost. A stay engages a mechanism to allow the bell to rest just past its balance point, the rope is attached to one side of a wheel so that a different amount of rope is wound on and off as it swings to and fro. Swinging bells are sounded by an internal clapper, the clapper may have a longer period of swing than the bell
21.
Absalon
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Absalon or Axel was a Danish archbishop and statesman, who was the Bishop of Roskilde from 1158 to 1192 and Archbishop of Lund from 1178 until his death. He was the foremost politician and churchfather of Denmark in the half of the 12th century. He combined the ideals of Gregorian Reform ideals with loyal support of a strong monarchical power, Absalon was born into the powerful Hvide clan, and owned great land possessions. He endowed several church institutions, most prominently his familys Sorø Abbey and he was granted lands by the crown, and built the first fortification of the city that evolved into modern-day Copenhagen. His titles were passed on to his nephews Anders Sunesen and Peder Sunesen and he died in 1201, and was interred at Sorø Abbey. Absalon was born around 1128 near Sorø, Zealand, due to a name which is unusual in Denmark, it is speculated that he was christened on the Danish Absalon name day, October 30. He was the son of Asser Rig, a magnate of the Hvide clan from Fjenneslev on Zealand and he was also a kinsman of Archbishop Eskil of Lund. He grew up at the castle of his father, and was brought up alongside his older brother Esbern Snare and the young prince Valdemar, who later became King Valdemar I of Denmark. During the civil war following the death of Eric III of Denmark in 1146, Absalon travelled abroad to study theology in Paris, at Paris, he was influenced by the Gregorian Reform ideals of churchly independence from Monarchical rule. He also befriended the canon William of Æbelholt at the Abbey of St Genevieve and he was a guest at following Roskilde banquet given in 1157 by Sweyn to his rivals Canute V and Valdemar. Both Absalon and Valdemar narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of Sweyn on this occasion, Absalon probably did not take part in the following battle of Grathe Heath in 1157, in which Sweyn was defeated and slain and led to Valdemar ascending the Danish throne. On Good Friday 1158, bishop Asser of Roskilde died, and Absalon was eventually elected bishop of Roskilde on Zealand with the help of Valdemar, Absalon was a close counsellor of Valdemar, and chief promoter of the Danish crusades against the Wends. During the Danish civil war, Denmark had been open to coastal raids by the Wends and it was Absalons intention to clear the Baltic Sea of the Wendish pirates who inhabited its southern littoral zone which was later called Pomerania. The pirates had raided the Danish coasts during the war of Sweyn III, Canute V. Absalon formed a fleet, built coastal defenses, and led several campaigns against the Wends. He even advocated forgiving the earlier enemies of Valdemar, which helped stabilize Denmark internally, the first expedition against the Wends that was conducted by Absalon in person, set out in 1160. These expeditions were successful, but brought no lasting victories, what started out as mere retribution, eventually evolved into full-fledged campaigns of expansion with religious motives. In 1164 began twenty years of crusades against the Wends, sometimes with the help of German duke Henry the Lion, in 1168 the chief Wendish fortress at Arkona in Rügen, containing the sanctuary of their god Svantevit, was conquered
22.
Runemaster
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A runemaster or runecarver is a term for a specialist in making runestones. More than 100 names of runemasters are known from Viking Age Sweden with most of them from 11th century eastern Svealand, many anonymous runestones have more or less securely been attributed to these runemasters. During the 11th century, when most runestones were raised, there were a few professional runemasters and they and their apprentices were contracted to make runestones and when the work was finished, they sometimes signed the stone with the name of the runemaster. Many of the runic inscriptions have likely been completed by non-professional runecarvers for the practical purposes of burial rites or record-keeping. Due to the depictions of life, many of the nonprofessional runecarvers could have been anything from pirates to soldiers, merchants. The layout of Scandinavian towns provided centers where craftspeople could congregate, after the spread of Christianity in these regions, and the increase in runic literacy that followed, runes were used for record-keeping and found on things like weapons, ivory, and coins. Most early medieval Scandinavians were probably literate in runes, and most people probably carved messages on pieces of bone, however, it was difficult to make runestones, and in order to master it one also needed to be a stonemason. A number of historians have theorized that there may be a connection between the word erulaR, in the priesthood and the old Norse title jarl. This suggests that it is possible that those who were versed in runic arts formed their own secular upper class of learned runemasters. This claim is corroborated by the distribution of runestones throughout Eastern Norway. This continued with the prominence of runestones that accompanied the rise of Christianity. Many of the runic inscriptions carved during this time were done so for the pleasure of God, runes were often erected by long-distance explorers seeking to document their visits or memorialize their fallen comrades. Runecarvers on commission or on their own carved memorials and gravestones more than anything else, in addition, memorial runes could provide additional details about an individuals death with more accuracy than oral tradition. Additionally, based on the texts recovered, it appears that the families who raised runestones often had as many as six sons. This is most likely due to the practice of female infanticide, notable runemasters of the 11th to early 12th centuries include, Åsmund Kåresson Balle Fot Frögärd i Ösby Gunnborga Halvdan Öpir Torgöt Fotsarve Ulf of Borresta Visäte
23.
Kaunan
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The k-rune ᚲ is called Kaun in both the Norwegian and Icelandic rune poems, meaning ulcer. The reconstructed Proto-Germanic name is *Kaunan and it is also known as Kenaz, based on its Anglo-Saxon name. The Elder Futhark shape is directly based on Old Italic c. The Younger Futhark and Anglo-Saxon Futhorc shapes have parallels in Old Italic shapes of k, the corresponding Gothic letter is
24.
Ansuz (rune)
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Ansuz is the conventional name given to the a-rune of the Elder Futhark, ᚨ. The name is based on Proto-Germanic *ansuz, denoting a deity belonging to the pantheon in Germanic paganism. The shape of the rune is likely from Neo-Etruscan a, like Latin A ultimately from Phoenician aleph, in the Norwegian rune poem, óss is given a meaning of estuary while in the Anglo-Saxon one, ōs ᚩ takes the Latin meaning of mouth. The Younger Futhark rune is transliterated as ą to distinguish it from the new ár rune, since the name of a is attested in the Gothic alphabet as ahsa or aza, the common Germanic name of the rune may thus either have been *ansuz god, or *ahsam ear. The Anglo-Saxon futhorc split the Elder Futhark a rune into three independent runes due to the development of the system in Anglo-Frisian. These three runes are ōs ᚩ, ac oak ᚪ, and æsc ᚫ ash, the Younger Futhark corresponding to the Elder Futhark ansuz rune is ᚬ, called óss. This represented the phoneme /ɑ̃/, and sometimes /æ/ and /o/, the variant grapheme ᚯ became independent as representing the phoneme /ø/ during the 11th to 14th centuries. In the Icelandic rune poem, the name óss refers to Odin, ᚬÓss er algingautr ok ásgarðs jöfurr, Óss is aged Gautr and prince of Ásgardr and lord of Vallhalla
25.
Algiz
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Algiz is the name conventionally given to the z-rune ᛉ of the Elder Futhark runic alphabet. Its transliteration is z, understood as a phoneme of the Proto-Germanic language and it is one of two runes which express a phoneme that does not occur word-initially, and thus could not be named acrophonically, the other being the ŋ-rune Ingwaz ᛜ. As the terminal *-z phoneme marks the nominative singular desinence of masculine nouns, because this specific phoneme was lost at an early time, the Elder Futhark rune underwent changes in the medieval runic alphabets. In the Anglo-Saxon futhorc it retained its shape, but it was given the value of Latin x. This is a development, possibly due to runic manuscript tradition. In Proto-Norse and Old Norse, the Germanic *z phoneme developed into an R sound, perhaps realized as a retroflex approximant and this sound was written in the Younger Futhark using the Yr rune ᛦ, the Algiz rune turned upside down, from about the 7th century. This phoneme eventually became indistinguishable from the r sound in the later stages of Old Norse. The Elder Futhark rune ᛉ is conventionally called Algiz or Elhaz, like the ng-rune, the z-rune is a special case inasmuch as it could not have been named acrophonically, since the sound it represents did not occur in word-initial position. Choosing a name that terminates in -z would have more or less arbitrary. There are a number of speculative suggestions surrounding the history of the runes name, the difficulty lies in the circumstance that the Younger Futhark rune did not inherit this name at all, but acquired the name of the obsolete Eihwaz rune, as yr. The only independent evidence of the Elder Futhark runes name would be the name of the corresponding Gothic letter, the name of the Anglo-Saxon rune ᛉ is variously recorded as eolx, eolhx, ilcs, ilx, iolx, ilix, elux. Manuscript tradition gives its value as Latin x, i. e. /ks/, or alternatively as il. The reading of this name as eolh elk is entirely due to the reading of the Anglo-Saxon rune poems ᛉ secg as eolh-secg elk-sedge. This reading of the poem is due to Wilhelm Grimm, the suggestion is that this compound is realized as eolk-secg, thus containing the Latin x sound sequence. The manuscript testimony that the rune is to be read as il would then be simply an assumption that its name must be acrophonic. The name of the corresponding Gothic letter ezec, however, suggests that the old name of this rune was not just eolx and this is puzzling, because the sound value of the rune was clearly not /ks/ in the Elder Futhark period. Furthermore, the name of the sedge in question is recorded in the older Epinal-Erfurt glossary as ilugsegg, a suggestion by Warren and Elliott takes the Old English eolh at face value, and reconstructs a Common Germanic form of either *algiz or *alhiz. They cite a more fanciful school which assumes an original meaning of elk based on a theonym Alcis recorded by Tacitus, the authors dismiss the Old English elk-sedge as a late attempt to give the then-obsolete rune a value of Latin x
26.
Tiwaz rune
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The t-rune ᛏ is named after Týr, and was identified with this god. The reconstructed Proto-Germanic name is *Tîwaz or *Teiwaz, Tiwaz is mentioned in all three rune poems. In the Icelandic and Norwegian poems, the rune is associated with the god Týr, the Kylver Stone features 8 stacked Tiwaz runes at the end of an Elder Futhark inscription. From 500 AD, a Scandinavian C-bracteate features an Elder Futhark inscription ending with three stacked Tiwaz runes, according to the runologist Lars Magnar Enoksen, the Tiwaz rune is referred to in a stanza in Sigrdrífumál, a poem in the Poetic Edda. Sigrdrífumál tells that Sigurd has slain the dragon Fafnir and arrives at a fortress of shields on top of a mountain which is lit by great fires, in the fortress, he finds an enchanted sleeping valkyrie whom he wakes by cutting open her corslet with his sword. The grateful valkyrie, Sigrdrífa, offers him the secrets of the runes in return for delivering her from the sleep, on condition that he shows that he has no fear. She begins by teaching him that if he wants to achieve victory in battle, he is to carve victory runes on his sword, the Týr rune is commonly used by Germanic neopagans to symbolize veneration of the god Týr. The Týr rune in Guido von Lists Armanen Futharkh was based on the found in the Younger Futhark. It was the badge of the Sturmabteilung training schools, the Reichsführerschulen in Nazi Germany, in Neo-Nazism it has appeared, together with the Sowilo rune, in the emblem of the Kassel-based think tank Thule Seminar. It has also appeared as the logo of the fashion label Thor Steinar, which was banned in Germany. In Vinland Saga, Thorfinn has carved two Týr-runes into his dagger, likely in the context as stated in Sigrdrífumál, to achieve victory in battle
27.
Vellum
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Vellum is prepared animal skin or membrane used as a material for writing on. Vellum is prepared for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, vellum is generally smooth and durable, although there are great variations depending on preparation and the quality of the skin. The manufacture involves the cleaning, bleaching, stretching on a frame, to create tension, scraping is alternated with wetting and drying. A final finish may be achieved by abrading the surface with pumice, modern paper vellum is a quite different synthetic material, used for a variety of purposes, including plans, technical drawings, and blueprints. In Europe, from Roman times, the vellum was used for the best quality of prepared skin, regardless of the animal from which the hide was obtained, calf, sheep. Although the term derives from the French for calf, animal vellum can include hide from virtually any other mammal. The best quality, uterine vellum, was said to be made from the skins of stillborn or unborn animals, there has long been, however, much blurring of the boundaries between these terms. In 1519, William Horman could write in his Vulgaria, That stouffe that we wrytte upon, modern scholars and custodians increasingly use only the safe if confusing term membrane. In the usage of modern practitioners of the crafts of writing, illuminating, lettering. Vellum is a translucent material produced from the skin, often split, the skin is washed with water and lime, but not together. It is then soaked in lime for several days to soften, once clear, the two sides of the skin are distinct, the side facing inside the animal and the hair side. The inside body side of the skin is usually the lighter, the hair follicles may be visible on the outer side, together with any scarring, made while the animal was alive. The membrane can also show the pattern of the animals vein network called the veining of the sheet, any remaining hair is removed and the skin is dried by attaching it to a frame. The skin is attached at points around the circumference with cords, to prevent tearing, the maker then uses a crescent shaped knife, to clean off any remaining hairs. Once the skin is dry, it is thoroughly cleaned and processed into sheets. The number of extracted from the piece of skin depends on the size of the skin. For example, the average calfskin can provide three and half sheets of writing material. This can be doubled when it is folded into two conjoint leaves, also known as a bifolium, historians have found evidence of manuscripts where the scribe wrote down the medieval instructions now followed by modern membrane makers
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Manuscript
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A manuscript is any document written by hand or typewritten, as opposed to being mechanically printed or reproduced in some automated way. More recently, it is understood to be a written, typed, or word-processed copy of a work. Before the arrival of printing, all documents and books were manuscripts, manuscripts are not defined by their contents, which may combine writing with mathematical calculations, maps, explanatory figures or illustrations. Manuscripts may be in form, scrolls or in codex format. Illuminated manuscripts are enriched with pictures, border decorations, elaborately embossed initial letters or full-page illustrations. The traditional abbreviations are MS for manuscript and MSS for manuscripts, while the forms MS. ms or ms. for singular, and MSS. mss or mss. for plural are also accepted. The second s is not simply the plural, by an old convention, it doubles the last letter of the abbreviation to express the plural, just as pp. means pages. Before the invention of printing in China or by moveable type in a printing press in Europe. Historically, manuscripts were produced in form of scrolls or books, manuscripts were produced on vellum and other parchment, on papyrus, and on paper. In Russia birch bark documents as old as from the 11th century have survived, in India, the palm leaf manuscript, with a distinctive long rectangular shape, was used from ancient times until the 19th century. Paper spread from China via the Islamic world to Europe by the 14th century, when Greek or Latin works were published, numerous professional copies were made simultaneously by scribes in a scriptorium, each making a single copy from an original that was declaimed aloud. Manuscripts in Tocharian languages, written on leaves, survived in desert burials in the Tarim Basin of Central Asia. Volcanic ash preserved some of the Roman library of the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, ironically, the manuscripts that were being most carefully preserved in the libraries of antiquity are virtually all lost. Originally, all books were in manuscript form, in China, and later other parts of East Asia, woodblock printing was used for books from about the 7th century. The earliest dated example is the Diamond Sutra of 868, in the Islamic world and the West, all books were in manuscript until the introduction of movable type printing in about 1450. Manuscript copying of books continued for a least a century, as printing remained expensive, private or government documents remained hand-written until the invention of the typewriter in the late 19th century. In the Philippines, for example, as early as 900AD, specimen documents were not inscribed by stylus and this type of document was rare compared to the usual leaves and bamboo staves that were inscribed. However, neither the leaves nor paper were as durable as the document in the hot
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Scanian Law
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Scanian law is the oldest Danish provincial law and one of the first Nordic provincial laws to be written down. It was used in the region of Danish Skåneland, which at the time included Scania, Halland, Blekinge. It was also used for a period on the island of Zealand. According to some scholars, the Scanian Law was first set down between 1202 and 1216, around the time it was translated into Latin by the Danish Archbishop Anders Sunesøn. The Scanian law was recorded in medieval manuscripts, among others the Codex Runicus dated to around 1300. Denmark ceded Skåneland to Sweden by the Treaty of Roskilde in 1658, and from 1683 forward, the Scanian Law manuscripts are collections of the customary law practiced in the land. Besides provisions reflecting older customs, the manuscripts contain law provisions that demonstrate the influence of the Crown in Denmark. The different manuscripts are marked by a state of flux in the system during and after Valdemar IIs reign. According to some historians, the battle between royalty and local power structures taking place in the Nordic countries during this time is evident in the Scanian Law manuscripts. Andreas Sunesøns translation of the Scanian Law uses the word patria as an equivalent of kingdom and this royalty-centered ideology was in conflict with the patriotism expressed by the inhabitants of the different Nordic patriae, who instead stressed loyalty primarily to the area of their thing. Similar loyalties to the area are expressed in Västgötalagen, where people from Sweden and Småland are not considered natives. Codex Runicus is the most famous of several manuscripts from the 13th to 15th centuries containing handwritten copies of the Scanian Law, another well-known manuscript is Anders Sunesøns 13th-century Latin paraphrase of the Scanian Law, created for an international readership. AM37 4to also contains a version of the Scanian Ecclesiastical Law. In a footnote in the margin of the epilogue to the Scanian Ecclesiastical Law, the younger Scanian scribes comment reads, Hauí that skanunga ærliki mææn toco vithar oræt aldrigh æn. Let it be known that Scanians are honorable men who have never tolerated injustice, another version of the Scanian Law is recorded in the composite volume Ledreborg 12 12mo, which contains an adaptation of the Scanian Law for use within the area of Zealandic judicature. The oldest known version of the Scanian Law and the Scanian Ecclesiastical Law can be found in a manuscript from around 1225-1275. The manuscript was revised and edited up until the 16th century. The first leaf of the Scanian Law in SKB B74 is missing and has replaced with a section written on paper in the 16th century
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Denmark
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The term Danish Realm refers to the relationship between Denmark proper, the Faroe Islands and Greenland—three countries constituting the Kingdom of Denmark. The legal nature of the Kingdom of Denmark is fundamentally one of a sovereign state. The Faroe Islands and Greenland have been part of the Crown of Denmark since 1397 when the Kalmar Union was ratified, legal matters in The Danish Realm are subject to the Danish Constitution. Beginning in 1953, state law issues within The Danish Realm has been governed by The Unity of the Realm, a less formal name for The Unity of the Realm is the Commonwealth of the Realm. In 1978, The Unity of The Realm was for the first time referred to as rigsfællesskabet. The name caught on and since the 1990s, both The Unity of The Realm and The Danish Realm itself has increasingly been referred to as simply rigsfællesskabet in daily parlance. The Danish Constitution stipulates that the foreign and security interests for all parts of the Danish Realm are the responsibility of the Danish government, the Faroes received home rule in 1948 and Greenland did so in 1979. In 2005, the Faroes received a self-government arrangement, and in 2009 Greenland received self rule, the Danish Realms unique state of internal affairs is acted out in the principle of The Unity of the Realm. This principle is derived from Article 1 of the Danish Constitution which specifies that constitutional law applies equally to all areas of the Danish Realm, the Constitutional Act specifies that sovereignty is to continue to be exclusively with the authorities of the Realm. The language of Denmark is Danish, and the Danish state authorities are based in Denmark, the Kingdom of Denmarks parliament, with its 179 members, is located in the capital, Copenhagen. Two of the members are elected in each of Greenland and the Faroe Islands. The Government ministries are located in Copenhagen, as is the highest court, in principle, the Danish Realm constitutes a unified sovereign state, with equal status between its constituent parts. Devolution differs from federalism in that the powers of the subnational authority ultimately reside in central government. The Self-Government Arrangements devolves political competence and responsibility from the Danish political authorities to the Faroese, the Faroese and Greenlandic authorities administer the tasks taken over from the state, enact legislation in these specific fields and have the economic responsibility for solving these tasks. The Danish government provides a grant to the Faroese and the Greenlandic authorities to cover the costs of these devolved areas. The 1948 Home Rule Act of the Faroe Islands sets out the terms of Faroese home rule, the Act states. the Faroe Islands shall constitute a self-governing community within the State of Denmark. It establishes the government of the Faroe Islands and the Faroese parliament. The Faroe Islands were previously administered as a Danish county, the Home Rule Act abolished the post of Amtmand and these powers were expanded in a 2005 Act, which named the Faroese home government as an equal partner with the Danish government
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Mannaz
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See Man for the Germanic etymology. See Mannus for the mythological ancestor recorded by Tacitus, *Mannaz is the conventional name of the m-rune ᛗ of the Elder Futhark. It is derived from the reconstructed Common Germanic word for man and it took up the shape of the algiz rune ᛉ, replacing Elder Futhark ᛗ. As its sound value and form in the Elder Futhark indicate, it is derived from the letter M in the Old Italic alphabets, the rune is recorded in all three Rune Poems, in the Norwegian and Icelandic poems as maðr, and in the Anglo-Saxon poem as man. For the man rune of the Armanen Futharkh as life rune in Germanic mysticism, see Lebensrune
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Poetic Edda
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Poetic Edda is the modern attribution for an unnamed collection of Old Norse anonymous poems, which is different from the Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson. Several versions exist, all consisting primarily of text from the Icelandic mediaeval manuscript known as the Codex Regius, poets who have acknowledged their debt to the Codex Regius include Vilhelm Ekelund, August Strindberg, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and Karin Boye, Codex Regius was written in the 13th century, but nothing is known of its whereabouts until 1643, when it came into the possession of Brynjólfur Sveinsson, then Bishop of Skálholt. At the time, versions of the Edda were known in Iceland, but scholars speculated that once was another Edda, an Elder Edda. Brynjólfur attributed the manuscript to Sæmundr the Learned, a larger-than-life 12th century Icelandic priest and that attribution is rejected by modern scholars, but the name Sæmundar Edda is still sometimes associated with both the Codex Regius and versions of Poetic Edda using it as a source. Bishop Brynjólfur sent Codex Regius as a present to the Danish king, for centuries, it was stored in the Royal Library in Copenhagen but in 1971, it was returned to Iceland. The Eddic poems are composed in alliterative verse, most are in fornyrðislag, while málaháttr is a common variation. The rest, about a quarter, are composed in ljóðaháttr, the language of the poems is usually clear and relatively unadorned. Kennings are often employed, though they do not arise as frequently, nor are they as complex, like most early poetry, the Eddic poems were minstrel poems, passing orally from singer to singer and from poet to poet for centuries. None of the poems are attributed to an author, though many of them show strong individual characteristics and are likely to have been the work of individual poets. Scholars sometimes speculate on hypothetical authors, but firm and accepted conclusions have never been reached, the dating of the poems has been a source of lively scholarly argument for a long time, and firm conclusions are hard to reach. Lines from the Eddic poems sometimes appear in poems by known poets, for example, Eyvindr skáldaspillir composed in the latter half of the 10th century, and he uses a couple of lines in his Hákonarmál which are also found in Hávamál. It is possible that he was quoting a poem, but it is also possible that Hávamál. The few demonstrably historical characters mentioned in the poems, such as Attila, the dating of the manuscripts themselves provides a more useful terminus ante quem. Individual poems have individual clues to their age, for example, Atlamál hin groenlenzku is claimed by its title to have been composed in Greenland, and seems so by some internal evidence. If so, it can be no earlier than about 985, in some cases, old poems may have been interpolated with younger verses or merged with other poems. For example, stanzas 9-16 of Völuspá, the Dvergatal or Roster of Dwarfs, is considered by scholars to be an interpolation. The problem of dating the poems is linked with the problem of finding out where they were composed, Iceland was not settled until about 870, so anything composed before that time would necessarily have been elsewhere, most likely in Scandinavia
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Medieval Scandinavian law
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Initially they were geographically limited to minor jurisdictions, and the Bjarkey laws concerned various merchant towns, but later there were laws that applied to entire Scandinavian kingdoms. Each jurisdiction was governed by an assembly of men, called a þing. The court assembly, the thing, used the law and heard witnesses to rule whether the accused was guilty or not, there were usually two types of punishment, outlawing and fines. The most common means of justice were, however, fines and this system was extremely intricate and the fines themselves, singularly a mulct, were also varied according to the social status of the accused and/or the victim. Disputes of innocence were often solved by trial and these trials consisted of different tests for men and women. However, as long as the courts were not made aware of the crime, there was no written code of law until after the Viking Age, but the code of fines, duels, and disavowing criminals was the standard across the Scandinavian world. The best sources for information about the Viking legal system are found in Iceland, the Eyrbyggja Saga, for example, portrays accounts of the compromises made at the Althing. Mar Hallvardssons wound and the blow Steinthor gave Snorri the Priest were said to equal the deaths of the three men killed at Alfta Fjord. The killings by Styr, one on side, cancelled each other out, as did the killings of Bergthor. The killing of Freystein Bofi was set against the killing of one of Steinthors men at Alfta Fjord, Thorleif Kimbi got compensation for the leg he had lost. The killing of one of Snorris men at Alfta Fjord was matched against the unlawful assault Thorleif Kimbi had committed by starting the fight, all other injuries were evened out, all outstanding differences paid for, and so they parted on friendly terms. Everyone honoured this settlement as long as Steinthor and Snorri were both alive, in 1117, the Althing decided that all the laws should be written down and this was accomplished at Hafliði Mássons farm over that winter and published the following year. As with the other Scandinavian countries in the Medieval Age, Norway was governed by a system of þings at which the kings would convene to settle legal disputes. A jury typically consisted of members, twenty-four members, or thirty-six members according to the importance of the matter in question. One of the most common practices in Norway of determining innocence was a holmgang, the winner was considered to be in the favor of the gods and thus the innocent party. Although not as common, outlawing men was practiced as well, bjorn, son of Ketil Flat-Nose, was declared an outlaw by a thing assembled by King Harald in the very beginning of the Eyrbyggja Saga. The thing was, and still is called Gulaþing and it is a kind of social contract that classifies citizens into classes and set the amount for fines according to the crimes committed. Udal law is a remnant of the ancient Norwegian laws
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Lawspeaker
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A lawspeaker or lawman is a unique Scandinavian legal office. It has its basis in a common Germanic oral tradition, where people were asked to recite the law. Two of the most famous lawspeakers are Snorri Sturluson and Þorgnýr the Lawspeaker, in Sweden, this office was the most important one of regional governments, where each lagsaga was the jurisdiction of a lawspeaker who was subordinate to the lawspeaker of Tiundaland. The lawspeaker presided over the Things, worked as a judge, the lawspeaker was obliged to memorize the law and to recite it at the Thing. It was the lawspeaker who, on the behalf of the people, however, after the establishment of the province laws, ca 1350, he would participate at the Stone of Mora with twelve companions from his jurisdiction. The office was not hereditary, but he was selected from the more powerful families. The first Swedish lawspeaker for whom we have substantial biographical information is Eskil, from the mid-13th century and onwards, the lawspeakers became more attached to the king, and it was common that lawspeakers were members of the kings council. King Magnus Eriksson decided that the king would influence the appointment of the lawspeakers, six nobles and six yeomen would in consultation with two clergymen appoint three men from the jurisdiction among whom the king would select the one he deemed to be most fit. This procedure would be in effect until the 16th century when the process of selection was transferred to the king. Still, the appointment remained restricted to noblemen until 1723, by then, the functions of the office had become restricted to that of a judge, a function which also became less important by time. In 1849, the office was abolished, but the title remained occasionally in use as a title of honour for governors, in 1947, the title of lagman was reintroduced for senior judges, namely the presidents of divisions of the courts of appeal. Since reform in 1969, presidents of the courts are lagmän. Correspondingly, presidents of the administrative courts also carry the title of lagman. Finland being governed by Swedish law wholly until 1809, the events were the same as in Sweden, however, the lagman offices were terminated and lagman became an honorific title only in 1868. In the 1993 reform, laamanni and lagman were reintroduced as the title of the judge of a district court or a senior judge in a court of appeal. In Norway, the lawspeakers remained counselors versed in the law until king Sverre I of Norway made them into his officials, in the laws of Magnus VI of Norway, they were given the right to function as judges and to preside at the lagtings. The lagtings and the office of lawspeaker were abolished in 1797, in Iceland, the office was introduced in 930, when the Althing was established. He was elected for three years, besides his function as the president of the thing, his duties were restricted to counselling and to reciting the law
35.
Codex Runicus
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The Codex Runicus is a codex of 202 pages written in medieval runes around the year 1300 which includes the oldest preserved Nordic provincial law, Scanian Law pertaining to the Danish land Scania. Codex Runicus is one of the few runic texts found on parchment, the manuscripts initials are painted various colors and the rubrics are red. Each rune corresponds to a letter of the Latin alphabet, a similar use of runes in a Scandinavian manuscript from this era is known only from the small fragment SKB A120, a religious text about Marys lament at the cross. The two manuscripts are similar in how the runes are formed and also in their language use, some scholars argue that they were written at the scriptorium at the Cistercian monastery at Herrevad in Scania, although the idea is contested. Support for this idea has found in reports written by Olaus Magnus, a Catholic ecclesiastic active during the 16th century in Uppsala, Sweden. According to Olaus Magnus, there were many books written with runes in important Swedish religious centres, such as Skara and Uppsala, other historians have questioned the accuracy of his report. The manuscript has three parts, the Scanian Law, the Scanian Ecclesiastical Law, a chronicle of the early Danish monarchs. The Scanian Ecclesiastical Law is a settlement detailing the administration of justice agreed upon by the Scanians and the archbishop of Lund in the late 12th century. The two law texts are written in the hand, but the non-legal material of the codex, beginning on leaf 92, is believed to have been added in another hand. The history section consists of a fragment of a list of Danish kings, following the historical texts is a description of the oldest border between Sweden and Denmark. On the last leaf of Codex Runicus is a verse with musical notations - the first musical written in Scandinavia. It is the earliest written evidence of music in Denmark. Like other Scandinavian manifestations of Medieval runes, the alphabet of the Codex Runicus contains a sign for each phoneme of the language. A dotted variant had been introduced in order to separate voiceless k from the voiced consonant g. New runes introduced for the sounds also appear in the codex. The verse with the musical notations is the first two lines of the folk song Drømde mig en drøm i nat, about a girl who dreams of becoming a rich woman. The melody is one that is known to all Danes. The section with the verse and musical notations are on the last leaf and reads, Drømde mik en drøm i nat, the Codex Runicus has the shelfmark AM28 8vo and is part of the Arnamagnæan Collection in the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark
36.
Olaus Magnus
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Olaus Magnus was a Swedish writer and Catholic ecclesiastic. Born in Skeninge in October 1490, like his elder brother, Swedens last Catholic archbishop Johannes Magnus, he obtained several ecclesiastical preferments. Among them a canonry at Uppsala and Linköping, and the archdeaconry of Strängnäs and he remained abroad dealing with foreign affairs and is known to have sent home a document that contained agreed trade-relations with the Netherlands. On the success of the reformation in Sweden, his attachment to the Catholic church led him to stay abroad for good where he accompanied his brother in Poland and they were both exiled and Magnus Swedish belongings were confiscated in 1530. Settling in Rome in 1537, he acted as his brothers secretary, in 1545, Pope Paul III sent him to the council of Trent where he attended meetings until 1549. Later, he became canon of St. Lamberts Cathedral in Liège. King Sigismund I of Poland offered him a canonry at Poznań and he spent the remainder of his life with the monastery of St. Brigitta in Rome and he died on 1 August 1557 at the age of about 67. His original Swedish name was Olof Månsson and this text on dark winters, violent currents and beasts of the sea amazed the rest of Europe. It was translated into Italian, German, English and Dutch, abridgments of the work appeared also at Antwerp, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfort and Leiden. It is still today a valuable repertory of much information in regard to Scandinavian customs. It included a map of Northern Europe with a map of Scandinavia, the map is referred to as carta marina, and consists of 9 parts, and is remarkably large,125 cm tall and 170 cm wide. Following the death of his brother, he also let historical works that the brother had written be published, present day oceanographers rediscovered Olaus Magnus eye for detail and a series of scientific publications followed on Olaus truthful depiction of currents between Iceland and the Faroe Islands. Drømmen om hjemlandet The dream about the country of origin This article incorporates text from a now in the public domain, Chisholm, Hugh. Carta Marina James Bell Ford Library, Minnesota Carta Marina satellite images The Plymouth Marine Laboratory Remote Sensing Group webpage on correllations with current oceanography
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Carl Linnaeus
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Carl Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who formalised the modern system of naming organisms called binomial nomenclature. He is known by the father of modern taxonomy. Many of his writings were in Latin, and his name is rendered in Latin as Carolus Linnæus, Linnaeus was born in the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his education at Uppsala University. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published a first edition of his Systema Naturae in the Netherlands and he then returned to Sweden, where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, at the time of his death, he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message, Tell him I know no man on earth. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, Swedish author August Strindberg wrote, Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist. Among other compliments, Linnaeus has been called Princeps botanicorum, The Pliny of the North and he is also considered as one of the founders of modern ecology. In botany, the abbreviation used to indicate Linnaeus as the authority for species names is L. In older publications, sometimes the abbreviation Linn. is found, Linnæus was born in the village of Råshult in Småland, Sweden, on 23 May 1707. He was the first child of Nicolaus Ingemarsson and Christina Brodersonia and his siblings were Anna Maria Linnæa, Sofia Juliana Linnæa, Samuel Linnæus, and Emerentia Linnæa. One of a line of peasants and priests, Nils was an amateur botanist, a Lutheran minister. Christina was the daughter of the rector of Stenbrohult, Samuel Brodersonius, a year after Linnæus birth, his grandfather Samuel Brodersonius died, and his father Nils became the rector of Stenbrohult. The family moved into the rectory from the curates house, even in his early years, Linnæus seemed to have a liking for plants, flowers in particular. Whenever he was upset, he was given a flower, which calmed him. Nils spent much time in his garden and often showed flowers to Linnaeus, soon Linnæus was given his own patch of earth where he could grow plants
38.
Dalarna
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Dalarna, is a historical province or landskap in central Sweden. Another English language form established in literature is the Dales, Dalarna adjoins Härjedalen, Hälsingland, Gästrikland, Västmanland and Värmland. It is also bounded by Norway in the west, borders of the province mostly coincide with the modern administrative Dalarna County. The word Dalarna means the dales, the area is a popular vacation destination for Swedes from the south, who often travel there to relax during summer vacations, drawn by good fishing lakes, beautiful campgrounds, and deep forests. Many such Swedes own or rent a residence in Dalarna. In mid-June, summerfest celebrations and dances are held in many of the villages and, of course. Dalarna is a full of historical associations, possessing strong local characteristics in respect of its products. In the western district Lima, some people in villages speak a dialect, Dalecarlian, while in Älvdalen. Historically, the people of Dalecarlia – called Dalecarlians, or Dalesmen and Daleswomen – are famous for their love of independence, the Old Norse form of the province is Járnberaland, which means the land of the iron carriers. The provinces of Sweden serve no administrative or political purposes, Dalarnas coat of arms dates from 1560, the use of two crossed arrows as a symbol precedes this. A Duchy of Dalecarlia also exists, and the arms include a ducal coronet. Blazon, Azure, two Dalecarlian Arrows Or in saltire point upwards pointed Argent and in chief a Crown of the first, as early as 1525, the arrows appeared in use on a seal. Dalarna County uses the coat of arms, granted for the then Kopparberg County in 1936. The northern part of the lies within the Scandinavian mountain range. The southern part consists of plains, with mines, most notably copper. Highest point is Storvätteshågna,1,204 meters above sea-level, lowest point is at 55 meters, in the south-east part. Lake Siljan features in the part of Dalarna, and the Västerdal River. Dalarnas second lake is Runn, which lies between Falun and Borlänge, with 66.6 square kilometres of water and over fifty islands, the lake is a popular tourist destination
39.
Runic calendar
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A Runic calendar is a perpetual calendar based on the 19-year-long Metonic cycle, correlating the Sun and the Moon. Runic calendars were written on parchment or carved onto staves of wood, bone, the oldest one known, and the only one from the Middle Ages, is the Nyköping staff from Sweden, believed to date from the 13th century. Most of the several thousand which survive are wooden calendars dating from the 16th, during the 18th century, the Runic calendars had a renaissance, and around 1800, such calendars were made in the form of tobacco boxes in brass. A typical Runic calendar consisted of horizontal lines of symbols. Special days like solstices, equinoxes, and celebrations were marked with lines of symbols. The calendar does not prove knowledge of the length of the year or of the occurrence of leap years. It is set at the beginning of year by observing the first full moon after the winter solstice. The first full moon also marked the date of Disting, a pagan feast, on one line,52 weeks of 7 days were laid out using 52 repetitions of the first seven runes of the Younger Futhark. The runes corresponding to each weekday varied from year to year, on another, many of the days were marked with one of 19 symbols representing the 19 Golden numbers, the years of the Metonic cycle. The new moon would fall on that day during that year of the cycle, for example, in the 18th year of the cycle, the new moons would fall on all the dates marked with Tvimadur, the symbol for year 18. Later calendars used Pentadic numerals for the values 1–19, a version using Latin alphabet for weekdays and Arabic numerals for the golden numbers was printed in 1498 as part of the Breviarium Scarense. The solution devised was to add three special runes to represent the numbers above 16, Arlaug, Tvimadur, and Belgthor, a primstav is the ancient Norwegian calendar stick. These were engraved with images instead of runes, the images depicted the different nonmoving religious holidays. The oldest primstav still in existence is from 1457 and is exhibited at Norsk Folkemuseum, adherents of the Estonian ethnic religion have published Runic calendars every year since 1978. During the Soviet occupation, it was an illegal samizdat publication, zu den Bildern und Inschriften des Runenkästchens von Auzon Franks Casket Becker, Alfred, website Franks Casket An article on rune calendars, with illustrations from http, //www. gangleri. nl/
