Hi!

I stumbled across this homepage while looking for esperanto-translations of CAS on the web; I was indeed pleased to know that such existed.

But, I'm sorry to say that I do not recommend them – they're full of grammatical errors, mis-spellings, anglicisms and the general vocabulary is poor. If I was the editor of ED I would seriously consider to remove the two texts or demand a rewrite of them.

Does anyone have an other opinion, or similar opinions? Does the translations into other languages have similar problems?

/Robin

What's the point in doing them in the first place - one can translate a story, but rarely does the art of the writer survive this effort if the words are carefully selected - and the poetry (particularly Ashton's stuff) not at all - In poetry, "what" it means is maybe fifty percent of the equation; "how" it means is what makes it poetry, and able to cause the cervical vertebrae to awaken. Esperanto can never achieve that unless within its own context as fresh writing - but then, who will read it?

Quote:

calonlan
What's the point in doing them in the first place - one can translate a story, but rarely does the art of the writer survive this effort if the words are carefully selected - and the poetry (particularly Ashton's stuff) not at all - In poetry, "what" it means is maybe fifty percent of the equation; "how" it means is what makes it poetry, and able to cause the cervical vertebrae to awaken. Esperanto can never achieve that unless within its own context as fresh writing - but then, who will read it?

I must say that I don't fully understand what you are saying: Should the art of the writer survive "this effort" better if the words were'nt carefully selected? :-S Or, do you mean that a text with "words that are carefully selected" is harder to translate than a book with "words that are negligently selected"? I must disagree on both; the choice of words or phrases may be hard to translate if the second language lacks cognates, but that is seldom the case. The difficult part is to catch the style, atmosphere and hardest of all, shifts in both of the fomer.

The goal of translation is to:
Make the works of CAS known to the vast number of people who don't and never will speak (and certainly not read) English. Plus, the English of CAS is very rich, not to say ridiculously rich, and those who haven't aquired a very high level of education will never be able to grasp the more delicate nuances of his language, or (as in many cases) even the main plot of the story.

I agree that a translation can never fully represent the original, but to ignore or condemn translations just because of that fact is to spit on the art of translation.

I of all people do not condemn translations my young friend, I question the point of putting it into Esperanto, which is, so far as I am able to discern, as irrelevant to the larger audience as Ebonics. If I have missed something and there has been a huge move to universalize this strange experiment in language please enlighten me. I recall its emergence many years ago, but don't recall it getting anywhere - throughout my own travels in the Western Hemisphere, I find Pidgin English has become almost universal among the unlettered, and is readily understood by the mercantile clsses in say Brazil et al. I am not aware of any significant movement among third world schools to teach anything but standard English as the linqua franca.

Calonlan wrote:

Quote:

I am not aware of any significant movement among third world schools to teach anything but standard English as the linqua franca.

That's very interesting. I wasn't sure that standard English was being taught anywhere, any more. Does that mean that foreigners will soon, if they do not already, speak better English than most of today's native-borns? I can't say that that would astonish me.

Translation, especially of poetry, is certainly an interesting subject, by the way (although I am "hopeless" when it comes to Esperanto). Many have insisted that Poe's verse reads better in Mallarme's French translation than it does in the original English. I would not go that far, myself, but I have to admit that "la nuit vieillissait" sounds more evocative to me than "the night was senescent".

Translating is very tricky business - depends on where one is headed - for example - Puella pulchra illa gluteum maximum magnum bonum habet! if translated literally is rather dull and clinical, colloquially however: That cute chick has really great buns! is more to the point.
I am currently working on a fresh translation of "The Shepherd of Hermas", in which the Loeb classical library version doesn't quite catch what is going on as in the above reference - similarly I am working on Ogam inscriptions found in Oklahoma (actually from Murphy's Creek, Ark to Colorado Springs), and arguing with colleagues about inscriptions in Futhark found in various locations in Eastern OK -
For my money, among the best translations ever done in my view is John Ciardi's "Inferno", and the translations of the works of Nikos Kazantzakis - 2 translators involved whose names slip my mind, but whose work is so incredibly powerful, I cannot imagine the modern Greek being much better - could be wrong, but the difference can't be great enough to be worth the effort to add modern Greek (so different from the classical and Koine) to list of things yet to learn.

I am glad to encounter someone else who likes Ciardi's version of the Inferno. My bass teacher, of all people, gave a copy of it to me when I was a teenager. That was the first version of the poem I ever read, and it remains my favorite.

I had the privilege of knowing "Uncle John" back in the heyday of the Saturday Review of Literature. He was best friends with my History prof and mentor, Dr. Wm Park Hotchkiss (grandfather invented the "Hotchkiss" so well used by Lawrence of Arabia") who had been a student at Chicago of William Henry Breasted and William Albright, founders of the Oriental Institute - Ciardi and Park would sit about the kitchen table during his visits to Syracuse and the three of us would make up limericks- One of Ciardi's finest:
As Mozart composed a Sonata,
His maid bent to straighten her garter,
He wrote down with sighs
As he glanced up her thighs,
"Un poco piu appassionata!"

As I may have mentioned elsewhere his "How does a poem mean" is a superb approach to poetry for the beginner -- He also published a lovely collection called "I marry you" - and a truly superb childrens' book (really remarkable what a fine writer can do in this genre) called "Scrappy the Pup" - I still have my inscribed copies of both.
His Italian ancestry was always important to him - He and Hotchkiss had been on the same faculty many years before in the midwest. Ciardi had not heard of Clark Ashton Smith when I introduced him to him, and never got around to including him in an issue of Sat. Review - I think he was overruled by the board, the literary world at that time was (and largely still is) enamoured of Cummings and Eliot et al, and was starting to fall for the early "beat" poets - so the earlier generation of poets who remained in the ancient and unbroken line of the "mythic" history of poetry, were out of fashion (see Graves - White Goddess - again.)

calonlan Wrote:
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> I of all people do not condemn translations my
> young friend, I question the point of putting it
> into Esperanto, which is, so far as I am able to
> discern, as irrelevant to the larger audience as
> Ebonics. If I have missed something and there has
> been a huge move to universalize this strange
> experiment in language please enlighten me.
Well, there has been a definite move, but to call it "huge" would be an overstatement. Less than 2 million people speak it fluently, at best, over a little more than 100 countries. Sheer coincidence, I've spent this very day with a group of Esperantists, and I must say they form quite a refreshing company. Esperanto is much more than an experiment. Hearing a 10 year old girl commenting fluently on a play in Esperanto is a very stimulating experience for a beginner like me. I think translating CAS in Esperanto is worth the effort.

calonlan Wrote:
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> I recall its emergence many years ago, but don't
> recall it getting anywhere
Esperanto was created in 1887 but because language is considered a vital matter by most governments (imposing one's own language in international relations saves literally fortunes in translation costs) most countries constantly rejected it, as did mine, France, I'm afraid to say, a long time ago.

calonlan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I am not
> aware of any significant movement among third
> world schools to teach anything but standard
> English as the linqua franca.
This is certainly not "significant", but new Esperanto schools have been created here and there over the last years in many Emerging countries where learning a foreign language is sometimes considered, for historical, and political reasons, culturally inacceptable. In other words, instead of using as an interregional langua franca the language of another ethnic group, of the former colonial power, or of the current economical partner, they'd rather use Esperanto.

calonlan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>- throughout my own
> travels in the Western Hemisphere, I find Pidgin
> English has become almost universal among the
> unlettered, and is readily understood by the
> mercantile clsses in say Brazil et al.
Of course, but creating a Pidgin was certainly not what Zamenhof was aiming at. On the contrary, his language is meant to be as universal as possible (when a Pidgin keeps a close cultural relation to its mother tongue).
We, Westerners, think Esperanto sounds familiar because most lexical roots are indeed Indo-European and even largely Romanic, but when we start learning it, we find ourselves puzzled by it's essentially agglutinative nature, which makes it apparently easier for, say, Japanese speakers to speak it idiomatically. Learning Esperanto is indeed extremely disconcerting at first, especially for someone who interests oneself in languages, because one finds none of the exceptions or irregularities one ordinarily finds in natural languages. Besides, despite its apparent simplicity, it proves extremely resourceful. It makes you understand that there are many things you cannot say directly in your own language, when expressing them in Esperanto sounds logical and comes to your mind naturally (after, it must be said, several months of serious learning, of course).
I must say that I had all sorts of prejudices against Esperanto before I started learning it -- especially as a lexicologist I'm afraid to say -- but I found the practice of this language very stimulating. To quote Wikipedia, learning Esperanto may provide a good foundation for learning languages in general. As a linguist yourself, Dr Farmer, I'm sincerely convinced you should find it worthy of interest.


Philippe Gindre

The central premise of Esperantism is ridiculous, and involves a serious misunderstanding of how language works and is used. If Esperanto were ever to become widely spoken, it would immediately start developing local dialects which would eventually diverge considerably from original Esperanto---entirely defeating its purpose as a "world language." Ask yourself why it is we no longer all speak Proto-Indo-European. It is not possible to establish a centrally planned, inflexible language by fiat, as people use language for their own private purposes, changing it in the process.

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The central premise of Esperantism is ridiculous,
> and involves a serious misunderstanding of how
> language works and is used. If Esperanto were ever
> to become widely spoken, it would immediately
> start developing local dialects which would
> eventually diverge considerably from original
> Esperanto---entirely defeating its purpose as a
> "world language." Ask yourself why it is we no
> longer all speak Proto-Indo-European. It is not
> possible to establish a centrally planned,
> inflexible language by fiat, as people use
> language for their own private purposes, changing
> it in the process.

I have no idea why you sound so aggressive, but well... You are comparing things that cannot be compared. Esperanto is not a natural language and is not meant to be used "for one's own private purpose" but for very specific communication situations, as a second language. As a matter of fact Esperanto has already developed what could be considered as dialects, or to be more specific, a fluent speaker can tell what the mother tongue of one given Esperantophone is, by the way he/she chooses the way he expresses things. But Esperanto offers so many different ways to express one given thing that it cannot become a problem. Just as French speakers tend to use Romanic roots or structures in English, when Germans preferably use Germanic. Yet they all speak the "same" English. Esperanto was conceived by someone for whom the very problems you raise were a daily challenge. And he spent a lifetime on it. Just try to learn the language. Or at least, try to learn a few basic things about it.

Sorry old friend, I am patently amazed that any gives a damn about it at all -

Far more useful to spend one's time learning German in order to read Goethe, or French to read Proust or Moliere, or Italian to read Dante, or Russian to read Turgenev, or Greek to read Homer, or Latin to read Vergil, or Ogam to read the Mabinogion, or Bantu so you can talk to your guides while on Safari, or Hindi, Urdu, Pushto, so you can read some REALLLY old stuff, or Sheng chinese so you can help decipher Toltec, or Basque(Euskara) so you can have access to almost as much creative profanity as Arabic. Heavens! - English speakers have enough trouble with each other as it is with the absurd vocabulary of so many today.
Dylan Thomas on tour found himself up against "the barrier of a common language" -- check lexfiles.com, go to the "basic 14" for a little fun - there you find the 14 words whose roots and prefixes combine to generate 144,000 words - a main of Ashton's writing, for which many of us admire him is his penchant for precision - you can tell the story in any language, but can you capture CAS? I think not --

Quote:

Calonlan
Sorry old friend, I am patently amazed that any gives a damn about it at all -
Far more useful to spend one's time learning German in order to read Goethe, or French to read Proust or Moliere, or Italian to read Dante, or Russian to read Turgenev, or Greek to read Homer, or Latin to read Vergil, or Ogam to read the Mabinogion, or Bantu so you can talk to your guides while on Safari, or Hindi, Urdu, Pushto, so you can read some REALLLY old stuff, or Sheng chinese so you can help decipher Toltec, or Basque(Euskara) so you can have access to almost as much creative profanity as Arabic. Heavens! - English speakers have enough trouble with each other as it is with the absurd vocabulary of so many today.

(I assume by your use of words that you are of Central-North American (I'd rather not say just American) orgin, pardon me if I be wrong)

I'm surprised, everywhere I turn in the anglophone world I meet this idea: that Esperanto is folly, ridiculous or pointless; I seldom encounter stirred feelings, anger or fear (I'm quite sure that fear is part of the problem) in other cultural spheres.

The thing is, dear Calonlan, that I, in order just to have this interesting debate, had to study English intensively for nine years (plus semi-intensive hobby-studying), whereas I only needed two low-intensive years to acquire enough knowledge in Esperanto to a corresponding level.
I am no linguist, and I don't regard my linguistical skills to be more developed than those of my fellow compatriots, but my English is better than average here in Sweden. Should we non-anglophones be forced to study even more (More than nine years! Imagine the costs!) in order to able to climb the ladder? Swedish is fairly similar to English, we get a lot for free, but for a Spaniard, or better: a Japanese, it's a far more time-consuming affair. And on the other side of the Canal/Ocean, what are you doing for us? How's your countrymen's French, Polish or Arabic? Still trying to roll that 'r'?
Why should we adapt ourselves to that order and not get anything in return? One could argue that we would gain culture, but I think that we also lose our own at the same time.

"Learn German to read Göthe", that's what I call folly. I spent five years learning German* and I can hardly read newspapers... Five years of wasted tax-money. Imagine if the time was to be used on something that actually gave results.

To return to the discussion: Esperanto is not to be used as a substitute for a national language, but as an introduction to other cultures and their tongues without losing one's own. Therefore I think that it's vital to translate CAS into Esperanto – imagine a person, who has never, ever heard of CAS and his writing, stumbling upon an Esperanto translation of let's say "Ubbo Sathla". Maybe he will read it, like it and later decide to read it in it's original language. That's not an unbelievable case to me, since that is the case of my own (but insert "Swedish" instead of Espeanto). What have we lost?

Quote:

Calonlan
(...) go to the "basic 14" for a little fun - there you find the 14 words whose roots and prefixes combine to generate 144,000 words - a main of Ashton's writing (...)

Pardon me, but that sounds strikingly like Esperanto.



*Second-to closest language-relative to Swedish, which has 60% of its vocabulary borrowed from low-German.

I am not into picking a fight over this subject, if you love esperanto go for it - I could care less - However, I should tell you, I am from the deep south - North Carolina - but began travel very young due to the War - I studied voice with a view to a career in opera from a young age, and consequently learned to sing in Italian, French, German, and russian - subsequently after studying those languages briefly (every body has a subject, verb, and object located somewhere in the string of words and some sort of gender usage-quite simple really) became rather fluent, particularly in German - I am somewhat astounded that you studied English for 9 years, and German for 5 - your English seems OK but really, why so long - it is not that difficult, and German and English are very close -- and German has tons of Greek and Latin snuck into it - Later at University I strove to become a competent philologist, and worked as part of a graduate student team with my professor on the New English Bible (Dr. CH Dodd senior Ed), and have subsequently done extensive work translating fragments and epigrapha.
As a natural adjunct to my theatrical work, I managed to become able to duplicate nearly 50 of the more than 430 dialects of English spoken in the US. Having earned 2 PhDs, plus years of theatre, determining where I am from could be tricky - to the main point, it would seem that the standards of teaching languages needs to be addressed in Sweden - 5 years and unable to read Goethe? sounds like a failure of teaching technique to me, unless the education system is still spending all its time on grammar, conjugating verbs, declining nouns and adjectives etc = brrrrr - as to being introduced to other cultures - that can be done easily - but you never know a people without getting inside their idioms. And that can be done through their literature and music, rarely through their scholarly works. English has a huge vocabulary, for various historic reasons it has an enormous component of Latin and Greek, the words in the "basic 14" are all Latin based prefixes and roots - and the secret of studying language this way is not to look for precise meanings but for the "thrust" of the meaning - example - how does "de-" affect "capis", "fero-", "mand-", "teneo-", etc. How does "capis" migrate from "head" to "capitulate", "capacity", "receive" etc.

brrr -

Komponisto Wrote:
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> I seldom encounter
> stirred feelings, anger or fear (I'm quite sure
> that fear is part of the problem) in other
> cultural spheres.

It is true that when I grew up there was a community of Esperantists nearby and we were sternly warned by our parents not to go near their hovels lest we be kidnapped and eaten. But this, of course, in no way informs my mature view of the matter.

a community of "esperantists" - how amusing --

I am presently working (among numerous projects) on a reading production of "Don Juan in Hell" from Shaw's Man and Superman - this was done wonderfully in 1952 by Charles Boyer (Don Juan), Agnes Moorehead (Dona Anna), Sir Cedric Hardwicke (the Statue), and Charles Laughton (the Devil) - recommended reading for those who have not, along with Clark's "Schizoid Creator" - (Shaw's is the earlier work - 1903 I think) -- Shaw was deeply involved in "spelling reform" - which mercifully died the death -- how much we would lose by dinking with the language, and what an insult to imagine that even the "texting" cell phone generation is too ignorant to acquire language and appreciate its marvelous messy history - how awful to go "dayzee" for "Daisy" and miss the knowledge that it is "day's eye" - or "gudd-bi" (there is no Schwa on my computer, sorry) for "goodbye" - "God be wi' ye" -
and so "adieu mais amis"

I think your computer does have É™. Mine does.

not on my keyboard - and that is not the symbol for the "schwa" in use in my college days -

I have started learning Esperanto, and I am enjoying it immensely. I particularly enjoy writing original poems in it, and have written pieces with single words than can only be paraphrased by clumsy clauses in English.

So, my 2 cents, it is used by me for more than just communication with others, and it has helped me in my daily life by stimulating new areas of creativity.

So it is worth learning, IMO.

I say have at and have fun -- I would personally rather improve my Bantu, or begin Swahili - fascinating grammar - however I am deeply immersed in translating Futhark and Ogham inscriptions found all across wester Arkansas and OK to Colorado Springs -

As to the latter post – good luck. I can by just looking at some of the American runestones (the ones I've seen) and tell they are cunning but indeed forgeries. Please send me a contradicting example, and I'd be the first to congratulate you!

Komponisto Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> As to the latter post – good luck. I can by just
> looking at some of the American runestones (the
> ones I've seen) and tell they are cunning but
> indeed forgeries. Please send me a contradicting
> example, and I'd be the first to congratulate you!


Check out works by Dr. Fell, and "in Plain Sight" by Gloria Farley - the Runic inscriptions in Heavener OK, are well authenticated as to age - Mrs Farley was taken to see them as a 12 year old (she just died at nearly 90) and local indians remembered being told by their great- grand parents traceable to 1835 - which means that the inscriptions were there before anyone else could have been interested in making them - further, one was uncovered some 8 feet deep in the root system of an extremely old Oak - further, I have examined the latex cast of the cave inscriptions found in the panhandle - and the university (now in possession of the relevant information regarding the locations which have been closely held by request of the landowners), and they have verified this most significant find - I am more interested however in the Ogham, which is far more numerous - unfortunately, few items are available for viewing in the the books on the subject, - Mrs. Farley's home was wall to wall and floor to ceiling with latex molds she and various teams of students from the Univ. over the years had made. I do not know at this point the disposition of her estate. The inscription I am looking at was a 75 foot cliff, copied by hand at first - then later was blown up by persons who thought it was a map to a gold mine - it is a mixture of clearly modern cuts and very curious markings resembling ogham, possibly in rebus form, a fairly common way to obfuscate the message.
(See Robert Graves on this matter - I was unaware of these incision (deep in basalt by the way) when I studied with Dr. Graves - I do not recall his being familiar with Mystery Hill in Vermont, though he may have been. Some of the now subterranean chambers of that type are found even in Pennsylvania and are part of the local colorful mythology that gave birth to Rev. Solomon Spaulding's puloinded manuscript for a very bad novel which probably would have been called "The manuscript discovered" and was the basis for what became the Book of Mormon - Spaulding's family maintained a lawsuit againt the Mormon church until 1895 about - around 15 years ago, copies from "the unidentified scribe" in the manuscript of the book of Mormon surfaced, and several folk interested is such matters had them independently analyzed and 17 pages were noted as being from Spaulding's hand - he died 13 years before the "discovery" by J. Smith of the "Golden Tablets" which were "translated" into the famous Book - I mention this only in passing to remark about the stories circulating in upstate New York and New England about the mysterious Stone ruins and underground chambers found all over the place up there in the late 17th and early 18th century - the markings on the stones are clearly not made by plow shares or roots, and the stones are quite large and clearly man made - plus there are a number of dolmens - common also to Ireland - I have examined enough in person to to be convinced that there are some genuine inscriptions - plus the reported finds along the Rio, and one I have not seen in Vancouver, BC - make it very intriguing - let us just say the probability of viking long boats with druid priests aboard rounding Florida, coming up the Mississippi, the Missouri, and Poteau Creek Oklahoma is substantially higher than the validity of visits by UFOs. = What is your background by the way, sounds like a meeting someday (if I live that long) would be fun -

I do find it hard to read the text on this page, maybe it is the font, I don't know. I hope that I get everything.

The so called Glomedal inscription is interesting, but indeed a forgery. The word it self, GLOMEDAL is modern Scandinavian, the custom to write words without case started in the 1500-s (AD) and the word itself if written before 800 AD would have been something like GLOMA DA(I)LIZ. I am not questioning the truth in the testimonials, but they do not say that THE inscription was there in 1835, just that SOME inscription was there then. Word of mouth proof is of little weight in the serious archaeological world, I'm afraid...

I know little of Ogham, and I'd like to see some examples from the USA before making a statement. We have similar stories from Sweden, but every one of them later turned up to be forgeries and lies. If you have the time, I'd like you to study the case of the Runamo slab: [en.wikipedia.org]

I am pursuing a batchelor's in archaeology at the university of Stockholm with the ancient world as main subject, but I do have some knowledge of my own ancient history (that of the Vikings). My main speciality in that field is runes and runestones, which is (to many's surprise) a almost wholly christian thing, and has little to do with vikings.

If you some day would visit Stockholm, or I the USA (hah, such a little country, right?) then I'd surely like to meet. Just send me a mail!

There have been a number of opinions about the Heavener Runestone, its presence as acknowledged by the Indians, does not imply that it has been altered in any way - the Indians certainly didn't do it, and the chances of some one in that period of American history doing it is excessively remote - prior to Dr. Fell's attempt, the translation was quite remote from "valley of Glom" -- One of the consistent errors in archaeology, is the assumption that all graffiti artists from ancient times knew how to spell - It is my opinion that it ought to read the "l" aa an "r" - Grimm's studies make it very clear that this is one of a family of sounds that migrates (b-v-f etc) - Grom as you probably know is the onomotopoetic Russian word for "thunder" - I suspect "thunder valley" is closer to what was in mind, though it is not out of the question that the leader of the group had something like that as a name or title.
The piece about two feet long that has been translated as "blessing of the Gods for Glom", and is commonly interpreted as a grave marker, is at least 500 years old and probably much, much more since the tree that grew up around it, dropping eons of leaves and building up the soil would have been an acorn when it was left behind -- at 8 ft deep, tangled in the roots of this ancient tree, there is no possibility that it could be a forgery -- of course all this kind of thing flies in the face of accepted wisdom, however, that, in itself, lends it credence based on past events.
You will recall that Galileo had to recant his discoveries - but that didn't alter their truth. The inscriptions are found from Murphy's creek Arkansas to Colorado Springs, Colorado - the book I mentioned has examples of Ogham -
It is in a cave or undercut cliff, and in the "Panhandle" section of Oklahoma - it is large enough to accomadate a couple of people and has a large arc cut in with notches at regular intervals - there is a wall drawing of an elephant and crocodile, a notch stone near the entrance traces the day on the arch as the sun moves, and particularly denotes the equinoxes - at the dawn section of the arch, there is the familiar egyptian symbol of the Ra as the sun deity, with regular rays descending, on the opposite end is the dog symbol for "Anubis" with his tail divided (as commonly seen in Egyptian glyphs) as the flail and sceptre as commonly seen in the examples of the seated pharaoh with arms crossed holding these instruments of his authority. An Ogham inscription on the upper left laments of the aloneness of the "priest"(maybe), and his desire that "they" return for him. There is some debate on the various inscriptions found because some of them, while in Ogham script, are clearly Celtic Iberian, which more commonly used Cuneiform or Hierglyphs (even as we commonly write Arabic or Oriental words in English letters) since they had no "alphabet" of their own. - You would have to visit the sites to grasp how utterly improbable their existence is for a hoaxer - the effort in getting to them prior to the existence of roads alone is a major factor -
the sheer number and distance between is another consideration -
I would love to visit Sweden, but it is likelier that you might come here - though, if the legends about Swedish women are true, I can understand that it would be difficult to pry oneself loose from the land. In actuality, the archaeologist's discipline provides very poor tools for studying epigrapha - people who merely traded, rarely left artifacts of residence -- there are some very intriguing artifacts in the Indian mounds in Mississippi et al.
This is great fun. Keep working at it.

small added note - we commonly use the term "viking" for those who are capable of owning and handling a long boat - and not as a reference to religious faith - as I understand the term, it refers to the making of a trip - or raid - a "vik" - could be off course on that - I am of the opinion that the chronicles of Leif Ericcson's journey which describes the finding of abundant grapes, is highly accurate - though the location of ruins thus far is no where near any grape growing country - I believe that his scouts went at least as far as North Carolina where the scuppernong grape once abounded on the coast, growing high into the trees - it is the first location known to me where grapes would have been found by someone beaching a long boat easily and going ashore. The capacity of the long boat to follow the great current around Florida and into the Mississippi River and thence easily inland for many miles is beyond question - the return trip, with oars and sailors who knew how to tack to the wind would have been difficult but far from impossible - There is just too much of ancient human history that we cannot account for - and for the studies that interest me, nothng - How, for example, does one account for the fact that over 40% of the Zuni indian language is Basque - also, Basque proper names occur among the Sioux and Algonquin tribes - Basque (Euskara) is one of three languages that have no Indo-European cognates. There has to have been contact or travel in an unrecorded ancient past - Clark might have suggested that all this happened before the dying of the second sun?!

Personally I refuse to read CAS in anything other than my native Sumerian

First a number of questions:

1. Why should people from 5;th century Scandinavia use modern Russian words? It seems sily to me.

2. I still wonder why both the first part of the word (GLOMEDAL) lacks a grammatical ending and why the second part lacks the same and also why it is modern Scandinavian.

3. Why should people of the Hiberno-Celtic language group use cuneiform (hah!) or hieroglyphs when no such writing system has ever been in use in Europe and especially never by the named group of people and also, why they suddenly switched to ogham?

4. Why should "the scouts" (if he indeed had such) of Leifr Eiríksson write with old Germanic runes, a writing system abandoned almost four hundred years prior to their visit? And why should they use a variant of the runes that nobody else had used for 600 years? (and still, why use modern Scandinavian with or without strange Russian loan words)


...followed by a number of statements:

1. "Vík", in both modern Scandinavian and old Norse, means "small bay". (The capital of Iceland, Reykjavík, the bay of smokes)
"Víkingur" is a man who lives nearby an inlet or a fjord, thus often a sailor. Why the word suddenly should have changed meaning to "raid", I don't know.

2. I do not doubt that Greenlandic explorers reached further down the New England coast, but until we've found scientific proof: They didn't. Period. One can not make science without proof. Real proof. Proof that have been published in a scientific journal.

3. I have found no article or book (serious or speculative) concerning the relationship between Euskara and any American language. Please show me one. Oh, but I can show you homepages that clearly states that Euskara is directly related to Chinese, Finnish, Berber, Georgian or any other old world language. :)


You have to excuse me, but most of your statements seem like Thor Heyerdahl or Erich von Däniken gone wrong. And I also think that we've run from the topic. :)


But, when where into the topic:
The Kensington runestone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_runestone), found in Minnesota, USA is interesting since it uses umlaut (dots over vowels), something we Swedes didn't even know of before 1700. I tell you one thing more; it wasn't even invented before that. Then, also, it is written in modern Swedish, with an futhark that existed still in use in Sweden around 1900. The stone was found by an immigrant from... ...Sweden! Strange, huh?

We are indeed off the track - several misreadings from your post -

the idea that "Grom" is modern Russian is quite true - but it is an ancient onomotopoetic sound root for thunder, there are 8000 root sounds behind all indo-european languages - your studies of philology must go deeper before I can go further in that discussion - dozens of scholars who are experts in ancient norse languages have examines the stone itself - Glomedal was just the latest - I do not assume that the reading is correct, or that the transliteration of the letters is accurate, it is only convenient to use it - if you see the stone in person, perhaps you could do a better job with it -- considering the plethora of inscriptions, I should withhold judgment -
Additionally, no suggestion was made or implied that the Erickson expedition wrote anything anywhere, for if the inscriptions in the midwest are true, they are much older - The kensington stone is a well-known fraud - no news there - That basque is both linguistically and grammatically related to the languages you mention (in its oldest uncorrupted form) is an interesting thought, and I shall pursue that when I have time -- I would not expect you to know the documents on American Indian or Toltec languages - they constitute research that is less than 5 years old, and the status of publication is unknown to me, since what I have seen of them were faxes of sections from the professors at the Univ. in Fort Worth texas which had been sent to Mrs. Gloria Farley -I made no notes on them, and was able to scan what she had only briefly since my visit was necessarily short (she has since died, and was then 88
and frail) I was there mainly to meet her and see the latex impressions of the cave described in my last email. You must realize that because you have not found something has no impact on its truth or falsehood - you are also clearly very young - Your attitude at the moment is the pedantry of the beginner - and your mild insults merely cause an amused smile - All your statements mean is that you have not reached that level of scholarship where the fun begins - and that is the speculation based on reflecting on possible scenarios to deal with the anomolous.
Oh, and by the way, Spain is full of sites where Celtic-Iberian epigrapha have been identified (also north africa).
Keep up your studies, and keep your elders feet in the fire - but do not make the mistake of believing that the truth has to be in monograph from some Universitiy to be stamped, sealed, and approved. - You may discover that as you get older that which is shadowy becomes sure, and that which was sure has become almost lost in shadow. Get into Clark Ashton's poetry if you can - there is a good deal of that in there.

calonlan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> There have been a number of opinions about the
> Heavener Runestone, its presence as acknowledged
> by the Indians,

I found a rather interesting rock with inscriptions on it in my hometown, in a cemetery in Flemingville, NY. I wrote an article about it for FATE magazine, Feb. 2007:

[www.fatemag.com]

The inscription confused me, because it seemed to use Latin letters, but the words were incomprehensible: "BoB Y DiDf". I padded out the article with some additional info. on the plates supposedly found by J. Smith in nearby Palmyra. After the article was printed, I received two letters from a FATE reader, who pointed out to me that the language on the Flemingville stone was Welsh! So isn't that interesting, a Welsh presence in America -post-dating the Roman occupation of Wales, apparently, since it's not runes or ogham.

Jojo Lapin X Wrote:
> It is true that when I grew up there was a
> community of Esperantists nearby and we were
> sternly warned by our parents not to go near their
> hovels lest we be kidnapped and eaten. But this,
> of course, in no way informs my mature view of the
> matter.

It's interesting- in his last story for The Shadow pulp, "Malmordo", Walter Gibson had several weird digressions about a criminal gang which uses Esperanto. Its leader, named Malmordo, has a face like a giant rat, and he has the ability to control rats, and lives with the rats in the sewer!!! Apparently pulp writer Gibson himself was an Esperanto student/enthusiast- and as we all know, pulp writers like to pad-out their stories with weird information/digressions. Nostaligia Ventures reprinted the story in Vol. 2 of their collected Shadow:

"'Malmordo is a notorious criminal,' asserted Stacey. 'In fact, until recently, he was the most notorious criminal on the European scene. He still would be- if he happened to be in Europe.'

'His name would indicate that,' stated Weston. 'I take it that the name is derived from mal and morte, words signifying "evil death" or its equivalent.'

Slowly, Stacey shook his head.

'You are wrong,' the gray man declared. 'The term mal means opposite and mordo means something that gnaws or bites. Hence the term is a corruption-'

'In what language? put in Weston. 'Spanish?'

'In Esperanto,' replied Stacey, 'an international language. Malmordo's activities were so far flung, that before the war, the police officials in various countries used Esperanto in their interchangeable reports, in order to puzzle Malmordo's followers.'

'And did it work?' asked Weston.

'It worked quite well at first,' replied Stacey. 'Quite a few of Malmordo's workers were trapped. But then they began using Esperanto too....'" (p. 95)



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 4 Jan 09 | 07:30PM by Gavin Callaghan.

Gavin Callaghan Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> calonlan Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > There have been a number of opinions about the
> > Heavener Runestone, its presence as
> acknowledged
> > by the Indians,
>
> I found a rather interesting rock with
> inscriptions on it in my hometown, in a cemetery
> in Flemingville, NY. I wrote an article about it
> for FATE magazine, Feb. 2007:
>
> [www.fatemag.com]
> 2.html
>
> The inscription confused me, because it seemed to
> use Latin letters, but the words were
> incomprehensible: "BoB Y DiDf". I padded out the
> article with some additional info. on the plates
> supposedly found by J. Smith in nearby Palmyra.
> After the article was printed, I received two
> letters from a FATE reader, who pointed out to me
> that the language on the Flemingville stone was
> Welsh! So isn't that interesting, a Welsh
> presence in America -post-dating the Roman
> occupation of Wales, apparently, since it's not
> runes or ogham.


Hey Gavin - my pen name (as here) is Welsh - means "A clean heart" -- also my favorite Welsh Hymn, sung during the wedding scene in "How Green Was My Valley" (Roddy Macdowell, Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O'Hara) - wonderful stuff -
Maybe some Druid priests from Wales and Ireland came along to keep the Norse from cutting down all the sacred trees and making longboats out of them? LOL

Komponisto Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The Kensington runestone
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kensington_runestone
> ), found in Minnesota, USA is interesting since it
> uses umlaut (dots over vowels), something we
> Swedes didn't even know of before 1700. I tell you
> one thing more; it wasn't even invented before
> that. Then, also, it is written in modern Swedish,
> with an futhark that existed still in use in
> Sweden around 1900. The stone was found by an
> immigrant from... ...Sweden! Strange, huh?

Frank Joseph recently had a cover story about the Kensington Runestone in the Jan. 2006 issue of FATE magazine, in which he argues that the runestone is authentic.

[www.fatemag.com]

His argument is apparently based on a new book by Richard Nielsen and Scott Wolter, The Kensington Runestone: Compelling New Evidence (www.kensingtonrunestone.com). Joseph writes:

“Opponents of the Kensington Runestone’s pre-Columbian authenticity insisted that certain words, numbers, grammatical marks, and individual letters of the inscription were not found among Scandinavian runic writing until historic times, if then. The English ‘from’ for example, appears in the Kensington text, but was allegedly unknown to the 14th-century Scandinavians. [Richard] Nielsen, however, found contemporary Swedish manuscripts which do indeed use ‘from.’ The letter ‘j’,’ too, supposedly never appeared as a rune, but Nielsen produced several 14th-century examples.

“Conventional scholars further argued that the highest runic number was only 19. Yet the number 22 is cited in the Minnesota inscription. Dr. Nielsen presented 14th century runes going as high as 26.

“An early expert in Old High German pointed out what he took for umlauts over several of the Kensington runes and concluded that the stone must be fake, because umlauts were not introduced until the 17th century. The double dots do not represent umlauts, however, but were part of a grammatical convention in use throughout the 1300’s.

“Perhaps the most persuasive of Dr. Nielsen’s discoveries was the identification of an ‘e’-dialect evidenced by the Kensington Runestone inscription. Olof Ohman, the alleged faker, spoke an ‘a’-dialect used in his native Roslander; he was ignorant of the ‘e’-dialect. The text mentions a mixed crew of Goths, or men from Gothenland and the island of Skahne, where the ‘e’-dialect is spoken.

“No less than 11 medieval rune-forms on the Kensington stone were unknown to scholars in Ohman’s day, but have since proven authentic. It additionally features manuscript abbreviations of the High Middle ages unknown to Scandinavian experts in 1898.

“Smithsonian Institution scholars examined 24 rune-forms on the Kensington stone they had never seen before and consequently condemned it as a fraud. Yet, Nielsen points out, all these formerly unknown rune-forms have since been found to have been in use on the island of Gotland during medieval times. Similarly, about a dozen words judged ‘impossible for the 14th century’ were located by Nielsen and his colleagues in surviving records of medieval Dalsland, Bohuslan, and Vastergothland, all in the same area of western Sweden.” (pp. 14-5)

In the same FATE magazine article, Frank Joseph also describes the rather rough, embittering treatment which immigrant farmer Ohman endured after unearthing the stone:

“Immediately after its discovery, the Kensington Runestone was almost unanimously dismissed by professional archaeologists as a deliberate hoax, even though most had never personally examined the object of their condemnation. Despite Olof Ohman’s lifelong insistence that he found the artifact as described, he was repeatedly accused of having faked it. Because he happened to be a Swedish immigrant himself, he was pilloried as a forger who wanted to twist history for his own ethnic advantage. From the day he unearthed the inscribed boulder, Olof was a bitter man.

“Disgusted with the treatment he received for telling the truth, he consigned the runestone to his granary. His son suggested that it would make a good doorstop, but it was never so used, despite later reports that originated from his remark. In 1907, Olof gave the artifact to a young scholar, Hjalmar R. Holand. Ohman made no money in the transaction. In fact, he had never tried to profit from his discovery- strange behavior for a man supposedly guilty of fabricating a hoax. For the next several decades, Holand promoted its authenticity in numerous lectures and published books.” (p. 12)

Admittedly, sometimes Frank Joseph seems rather credulous; vide his pro-Atlantis views, and the pro-occult stance in his various books, etc. But such things are in no way contrary to a truly scientific stance; in fact, an open mind would seem to be a prerequisite for any true science. But not being a runes-scholar myself I'm not qualified to judge whether Joseph's assertions in this article are accurate.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 20 Jan 09 | 05:35PM by Gavin Callaghan.

If the assertions are properly footnoted and referenced in a manner which other scholars can follow up on and validate, then it's OK - I would very much like to see the documentation - I have not studied the Kensington, but I am aware that the the old man maintained that it is as he found it, and that's all he really knew about it to the end of his days. It is very common for "professional" archaeologists who have never examined an object, to refute its veracity because it fails to fit the parameters of present opinion. Knocking accepted ideas into a cocked-hat is one of them most delightful of pastimes - although it is dangerous (as per Galileo, et al).
The recent case of the "James Ossuary" is the most sophisticated forgery ever done in the field of archaeology - and, indeed, every one was prepared to defend its authenticity until forensics at the level of the microscopic revealed the forgery. But it was incredibly well done - the knowledge of how to date an inscription using modern scientific tools was not around at the time the Kensington was unearthed, nor is it likely that this Farmer would have had the technical knowledge to beat the science - the forger of the James had covered all the chemical bases but one, and that most extremely obscure, yet he was found out at last - why, because the value is so great financially - he was in the artifact business. The poor old Swede
was 180 degrees away from the professional fraud.