<bron8.htm> [Bronze Age Text]
(CLICK to Enlarge) 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). |