Posted on 03/06/2011 12:45:36 PM PST by blam
600-Year-Old American Indian Historical Account Has Old Norse Words
By Larry Stroud, Guard Associate Editor
Published on Thursday March 15, 2007
Vikings and Algonquins. The first American multi-culturalists?
BIG BAY, Mich. — Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s, but also are deciphering Delaware (Lenape) Indian history, which they’re finding is written in the Old Norse language.
The history tells how some of the Delaware’s ancestors migrated west to America across a frozen sea and intermarried with the Delaware and other Algonquin Indians. Myron Paine, 72, and Frode Th. Omdahl, 51, met on the Internet six years ago when they were each looking for a rare book, “The Viking and the Red Man,” written by the late Reider T. Sherwin. Together they found copies of all eight volumes with the same name, published mostly in the 1940s.
Using Sherwin as a reference, they found that much of the Algonquin language consists of Old Norse, including Old Norse root words often strung together to make new words that were adopted by Algonquin speakers.
Paine and Omdahl were featured speakers on “Norse Tracks in America” at the first Ancient American Artifact Preservation Foundation annual conference in Big Bay, Mich. in 2005. Paine spoke again at the ’06 conference.
Paine is a lifelong student of history who has a doctorate in agriculture engineering. He taught in two universities, and served as a state and regional Extension engineer covering 10 Great Plains states.
He later worked as an electrical engineer for three aviation companies, a career that included being a primary writer of test reports for the certification of the Cessna 208 aircraft, the Caravan. He grew up as a farm boy in South Dakota, where the “white faces among the Mandan Indians” intrigued him.
Omdahl is a native of Stavanger, Norway who now lives in Asker in the same country. He is educated in journalism, graphic design and marketing communications. A lifelong student of history and an eager genealogist, Omdahl got interested in Norwegian emigration to America.
Researching his family history, he also caught interest in “the first wave” of Norwegian emigrants to America, 800 years before the next “wave.” That the Algonquin Indian languages have many words identical to Old Norse is not a new discovery, as evidenced in books other than Sherwin’s, but the application Paine and Omdahl are using is new. The two are using Sherwin’s eight volumes to decipher the Lenape’s ancient picture stick writing, the Walam Olum. For each picture stick, Lenape historians recited or sang a verse.
“The memory verses of the Walam Olum were created by people speaking Old Norse,” Paine said. “The Walam Olum is a 600-year-old American history composed of pictographs and memory verses. The history tells of fighting the mound builders, Iroquois, and of the arrival of white men.
“Our efforts to decipher the Walam Olum have found a striking correlation of the Walam Olum words to Old Norse phrases,” Paine said. “This relationship strongly supports the hypothesis that Old Norse speakers visited eastern ancient North America and left very tangible evidence of their presence.”
“The Algonquin language is Old Norse,” Sherwin wrote in the preface of his Vol. 4. Sherwin, a native of Norway before he moved to the U.S., began comparing the languages because he heard a New England place name before he saw it in print, and was told it was of American Indian origin.
Sherwin disputed this because he recognized the word as one he had long known — and the meaning was the same. Finding a New England map, Sherwin, familiar with dialectical Norwegian, which is much closer to the Old Norse language than literary Norwegian, immediately recognized dozens of place names as Old Norse. They had the same meanings in both Algonquin and Old Norse.
Michigan and Milwaukee are two examples from his books. Those are names said to be Algonquin, with Michigan meaning “middle sea basin” and Milwaukee meaning “good, beautiful land.”
In Old Norse, “midh” means “middle,” or “lying in the middle”: and “sjoe-kum” or “sjoe-kumme” means “sea basin” or “sea reservoir.”
“Lake Michigan lies midway between Lake Huron and Lake Superior, hence the translation would be correct,” Sherwin wrote.
Milwaukee, in Old Norse, is “milde aak(r)e,” meaning “the pleasant land” — an almost perfect match for the pronunciation and meaning in Algonquin, Sherwin said. Omdahl points out that in old Norwegian languages and dialects, “‘aa’ is pronounced as something between the ‘a’ in ‘war’ and the ‘o’ in ‘horse.’”
“Today it is one of the typical Scandinavian letters — an ‘a’ with a tiny ring over it,” Omdahl said.
“Sherwin’s books have been overlooked because of World War II and because the last six of Sherwin’s books were self published, so only a few books went into libraries,” Paine said. “An original catalog error shelved the books in the rarely used dictionary section of libraries instead of in the linguistic section where they belong.”
“After 16 generations of memorization, the consistency of the recorded sounds is remarkable,” Paine said. “This provides strong evidence that the Walam Olum is an authentic historical document that was first created by people who spoke Old Norse — or a language strongly influenced by Old Norse.
“The last seven verses in chapter 3 of the Walam Olum describe the Norse people of Greenland walking to America on the ice,” Paine said.
The verses describe a mass of people walking to the west to a better land, across the “slippery water, the stone hard water.” The migration corresponds with the “Little Ice Age.”
“I invite everyone to view the evidence online at www.frozentrail.org,” Paine said. Respected author Ida Jane Gallagher of Mount Pleasant, S.C., who spent 28 years working beside authoritative professionals researching ancient America — with much of that work in New England — also compares Sherwin’s Algonquian and Old Norse words and confirms Norse migrations in her book, “Contact With Ancient America,” co-authored with Warren D. Dexter andpublished in 2004.
Eye color is pretty much controlled by SEVERAL GENES. http://www.thetech.org/genetics/ask.php?id=29 There are also some physical controls ~ like is the pigment in front of the lens, or behind the lens, and are there pigment deposits in/on/around the Iris for “yellow” when the main deposits elsewhere are “black”.
Supposedly my former MIL has a rare eye disease that is only found in Seminole Indians. Never heard anything about it outside their family so I take it with a grain of salt.
I have to wonder:
If the Norse movement into North America was significant enough to have the effect on language the article indicates it had, why did it not have a more visible effect in other areas, for instance metal working.
The Norse of the time knew how to work metal, so why were the Amerinds still using flint hundreds of years later?
“Two experts on ancient America may have solved not only the mysterious disappearance of Norse from the Western Settlement of Greenland in the 1300s,”
I think the politically incorrect version of why the Norse settlers disappeared was that they were eaten by eskimos.
I gasp when thinking about the horrible discrimination these refugees of Global Cooling must have faced. What kind of reparations are due from the Indigenous Peoples? Surely trillions given 600 years of compound interest. If it makes a difference in the life of one child it will all be worth it.
“‘aa’ is pronounced as something between the ‘a’ in ‘war’ and the ‘o’ in ‘horse.’”
There is no between, the way I pronounce war and horse.
I have 1st 'rights' to the Oslo Casino. I have haplogroup 'V' as do 52% of the Skolt Sa'ami.
"When he arrived at the site, “I saw an elongated group of markings along the right side,” he recalls. “I’d just read a book on Norse runes, and my first thought was that these were archaic runes.”
He later read about carvings found in Ireland and Wales, usually on the edges of grave markers, that made use of an ancient Celtic alphabet of connected lines and slashes known as Ogam.
The Si-Te-Cah did
Lovelock, Nevada, is about eighty miles northeast of Reno. It was in a cave near here, in 1911, that guano miners found mummies, bones, and artifacts buried under four feet of bat excrement. The desiccated bodies belonged to a very tall people - with red hair.
There are also two kinds of red hair found among East Asians. One type occurs because of the hair thickness ~ it works as an interference pattern and you'll see strong hints of red. Another type occurs because the person has a great deal of the Western European yellow-brown/red-brown pigment.
Since both populations have been able to travel around the Pacific litoral for the last 15,000 years, even a very few number of survivors should have left behind some genetic markers still discoverable in native American Indian populations ~ and, lo and behold, they have.
Without getting into that very much what it means is that finding red heads on the Pacific Coast is not at all surprising!
Koreans and Japanese, or folks starting off from those places in the last 1400 years could easily have made it to America taking the same old route around the Gulf of Alaska and all the way to South America. They'd probably have some red hair from white ancestors in East India where the ruling class in Japan had lived some 400 years earlier.
Tak altså mange! Udmærket nyheder. Hvad synes i om Wisconsin? Var der hvilken som helst lamaniter? Hvem var den Høj Cumorah folk?
Manassas Virginia is the next site South where it would have been easy to get at.
The mineable iron in Pittsburgh was found by folks who knew what to look for ~
Copper is another story ~ go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan ~ it's just laying around, as it was in SE Indiana, and a couple of other spots. However, you need zinc or tin to make it really useful.
Another item ~ the East Coast of North America is highly acidic. These guys could have been turning out all sorts of iron implements, but they'd been dissolved into the soil by the time other Europeans got here.
If there were just 20 years of delay between their arrival in America and their ability to settle in one spot (rather than wander around fighting Iroquois, Mohicans and others, the old timers with the knowledge would have been gone!
|
· join list or digest · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post a topic · subscribe · |
|||
Antiquity Journal & archive Archaeologica Archaeology Archaeology Channel BAR Bronze Age Forum Discover Dogpile Eurekalert LiveScience Mirabilis.ca Nat Geographic PhysOrg Science Daily Science News Texas AM Yahoo Excerpt, or Link only? |
|
||
|
· Science topic · science keyword · Books/Literature topic · pages keyword · |
|||
...but there was this Indian milk-wagon driver in the town.
Sailors really get around.
So the Algonquian word "tomahawk" may actually honor its inventor,one Irish-Norseman, Tom O'Hawk.
Seriously, there is no reason that the surviving Norse accounts of the trips to North America must be the whole story--there could have been other voyages and other settlements that were forgotten. But it is a long way from the confirmed Norse settlement at the northern end of Newfoundland to the Great Lakes or other Algonquian areas. (A medieval Norwegian coin turned up in an archaeological dig in Maine--but I don't know if that means some Norse got to Maine, or whether the Indians in Maine got the coin through trade with other tribes.)
I just finished a book by the guy who excavated the Viking settlement at L'Anse Aux Meadows. He pointed out that the vikings frequently used "bog ore" for their iron work. I wasn't familiar with the term before, but bog ore is found around bogs and springs with iron-bearing ground water. L'Anse Aux Meadows had an abundance of bog ore and they found evidence of a smithy there.
The author also believed there were at least three other trips to L'Anse Aux Meadows by Vikings after Leif Erikson, based on information he gleaned from some of the Icelandic sagas (he pointed out that there are no known surviving examples of literature from Greenland).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
