<bron8.htm> [Bronze Age Text]
|
The pictures depict school lessons from
ancient Scandinavia. Above, Bronze Age Bohuslän.
A bull and two men form a team to drag some heavy object. The Tifinag letters S-M-T-K are the
consonants of the Old Norse word samtak
meaning "united effort." Below, a detail of a
Bronze Age composition at Finntorp, Bohuslän, depicting two fishermen and
their boat. The Tifinag letters may
be read as matching the Old Norse I
loegfaki vid vatn = "Fishermen on the
water." The Tifinag letter "w" some-times represents Old
Norse "v, " and sometimes Old Norse "f." The phonetic
rendering yielded by reading the Tifinag letters often seems closer to
Anglo-Saxon, where the sound "w"
replaced the "v" of
Norse, and modern dialects of Jutland in west Denmark also retain the "w" sound (Fell 1982). |
