African Linguistics in Central and Eastern Europe, and in the Nordic Countries

Non peer reviewe

Noun class parallels in Kordofanian and Niger-Congo: evidence of genealogical inheritance?

The current consensus is that vernacular names assigned to the runes of the Germanic fu_ark and to Irish ogam characters are indigenous creations independent of Mediterranean alphabet traditions. I propose, however, that ogam-names are based on interpretations of Hebrew, Greek or Latin letter-names given by Jerome, Ambrose and others, and introduced into Ireland by Christian missionaries (fifth to sixth centuries). Subsequently, under the influence of Irish Christian missionaries in northern Britain, names were also created for runes (seventh to eighth centuries). Before then, there had been no comprehensive system of rune-names, but the introduction of names led to the composition of the Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem. Although few would dispute that it shows Christian influence, the Anglo-Saxon poem is still thought to be based on a pre-Christian __common Germanic__ Urgedicht, which is more faithfully represented in the comparable Scandinavian rune-poems. The implication of my thesis is that no rune-poem existed before the Anglo-Saxon poem and that it is this poem, with its Christian allusions, that is likely to have been the original version and to have formed a basis for the Scandinavian poems, in which pagan allusions are examples of scholarly antiquarianism