Re: CHAT of oghams & runes (was Celtic alphabet? )

At 4:24 pm -0400 11/4/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Raymond Brown wrote:
>>
>>At 3:08 pm -0400 10/4/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[snip]
>> >That should be three _ ttir_ - there were only 24 runes!
>>
>>Yes, sorry - it should be three (the Old English did add a 4th, but that
>>was much later).   The first symbol when I wrote the email was the a-e
>>ligature (Old English 'ash'), not the upper case E with a hat on it!
>>{sigh}
>
>When I sent the above, it was a lower-case ash, copied from your mail ...
>what does this "Ê" get thru like? (sent as lower-case ash)
That lower-case ash gets thru as upper-case e-circumflex. But if you look
above:
"That should be three _ ttir_ - there were only 24 runes!"

the letter you sent as lower-case ash last time and I received as
upper-case e-circumflex, has now just become a blank!

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At 4:31 pm -0400 11/4/02, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>Daniel wrote:
[snip]
>>
>>Um. I haven't followed this thread, so I'm not quite sure
>>what you're talking about, but _Êtt_ (fem.pl. _Êttir_) surely
>>means 'family, dynasty'. Always has afaik. "Eight" is _·tta_
>>with an |·|, not an |Ê|.
So eight is _·tta_ with a dot as first letter  ;)

>>Sorry if I don't understand what you're trying to say.
>
>Ray wrote that _Êttir_ originally meant "groups of eight".
Now I've got that upper-case e-circumflex again  ;)

Yes, when I first met the word _aettir_ [safer not to use the ligature;
{ae} should, of course, be 'ash'] I connected it in my mind with 'eight'
because the _aettir_ are groups of eight letters each.  But, of course,
this was essentially 'folk etymology' on my part - and I didn't know the
Swedish for 'families'  ;)

>I don't know
>whether this is true - none of the books on runes I've read (not very many
>I'm afraid) has hinted that _Êttir_/_”tter_ isn't the same word as modern
>Swedish _”tter_ "families".
I don't know nearly enough about Old Norse to know whether this is true or
not.  But according to Hans Jensen in "Die Schrift in Vergangenheit und
Gegenwart", the Old Norse word _aett_ could mean 'a group of eight'.  It is
Jensen who reports that Arntz assumed that _aett_ originally meant 'group
of eight' and was later understood to mean 'family' (because the words were
homophones, and 'family' was the more common word) and was thus translated
into Old Irish as 'aiccme' (family) to denote a group of five oghams.

Ray.



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   XRICTOC ANECTH
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