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.
So Old Norse had complex agglutinative syntax? Old Norse conjugated verbs with pronominal prefixes that changed according to the direct object?
Granted, I never studied Old Norse. But I'm writing in a Germanic language right now, so I think I have a pretty good idea of the basic grammatical underpinnings of Germanic.
And I can tell you as someone who has studied Algonquian languages (including, especially Delaware/Lenape), there is no reason at all to believe these languages are in any way the same. They just aren't even close. You can't just take a couple words that look that same in two languages and say they are related.
By the way, the latest research on the Walam Olum is that it is indeed a fake, as was suspected when the notoriously shady Rafinesque first came out with it. David Oestreicher, I believe, has done the work on this.
The closest thing I've ever found to a serious citation on that statement is a White Supremacist website.
You got anything else?
I believe the Norse were here in North America - one of their sites was found in L’anse aux Meadows. The Vinlanda Saga CLEARLY lays out their voyage here.
They MAY have moved into North AMerica from Greenland. But using the Wallum Olam as a HISTORICAL LINGUISTIC DOCUMENT?
Come on. That’s like using Erik Von Daneken as a reliable historian.
See:
http://www.native-languages.org/lenape-legends.htm
Old Norse is actually very close to Anglo-Saxon in its vocabulary and grammar.
I’m not quite a member of The Orthodoxy, but I am sympathetic in this case. I have studied Algonquian languages on an amateur level anyway, and I saw nothing on this person’s Web page that backed up his assertions.
Let’s run through the numbers. Old Norse:
1 einn
2 tveir
3 þrír
4 fjórir
5 fimm
6 sex
7 sjau
8 átta
9 níu
10 tíu
And now Lenape:
1. nkwëti
2. niša
3. naxa
4. newa
5. nalan
6. nkwëtaš
7. nišaš
8. xaš
9. pèškunk
10. tèlën
Not seeing much in common there. And numbers are very conservative linguistically—if two languages are related you can typically see it pretty easily in their number names.
Just to be clear, I’m not at all dissing the prospect that the Norse made it here. That they did is pretty well established at L’Anse Aux Meadows, and I actually believe that the Irish were here before them—because that’s what the Norse themselves said. But if we’re going to prove that kind of contact, let’s prove it with sound methodology.
Trying to make Algonquin a variation of Norse is as silly as trying to make Chinese a dialect of Latin.
Thanks. I think. :)
Sure. We even got some of our pronouns from them—was it he and she? I don’t remember.
I have been to the cave and tried to get the story more widely published. Still working on it...
If you were intrigued by Kennewick Man or other similar oddities, you’re not one of “The Orthodoxy”, not even close to ‘quite’.
;-)
The trick is critters have livers, lungs, muscles, intestines, blood vessels, hearts, brains ~ etc. Lot of commonality out there.
They do not, in general, have substantially different genes building those standard organs.
So, why did you go to a "white supremacist" website to study biological science?
I don’t know the first thing about Kennewick Man actually, so I can only plead ignorance there. :)
It was a skeleton that had features remarkably similar to caucasians, but from a time when “Only” paleoindians were here. [supposedly]
A reconstruction looked like Patrick Stewart..
Brought some laughs in forum.
The amount of variability between people is one twentieth of that or about 0.1%, one difference every thousand DNA bases (all DNA, not just genetic).
We humans are all 99.9% the same in DNA. There is as much variability within human populations as there is between those populations.
The way you get a creole is you start with two or more groups who live in the same environment and who allow their children to play together.
The kids will create a common tongue for future generations ~ at the same time they will make use of parts of words, or restructure entire sentences or idiomatic expressions into new single words.
What you need to do in comparing numbers is figure out if any 2 numbers of equal/comparable value have some of the same sound values. That's because today's language is a rather evolved creole based on words coming from a multiplicity of origins.
I went through your lists and the same numbers share a vowel or a consonant, or a blend.
English numbers rose out of a creole of the German languages of the Angles, those of the Saxons, the French, the Gallo Speakers, and some other unknown source (but probably not any of the Gaellic words for numbers). Today's English number set has barely anything at all in common with the standard German number set ~ outside of sharing a consonant or vowel. We are talking about two modern languages with just about the same amount of time separation you'd find between the particular "Norwegian" involved in the Wallum Olem and today's Algonquin language(s).
About two months ago I went through a standard number set used by the largest Indian tribe in El Salvador and compared it to Japanese.
This was simply to see if the locals down there had developed a Creole (outside of Spanish) to accommodate possible earlier migrations by Japanese crossing the Pacific. (This was just to see if there was modern evidence around of the Japanese who left behind the burial grounds recently discovered in Costa Rica). Lo and behold the modern Indian Creole and modern Japanese have numbers with at least a vowel or consonant in common AND, the Salvadoran creole language shows a uniform vowel shift. (Vowel shifts can happen pretty fast ~ e.g. English shifted in the 1600s from the European standard to the current English standard ~ which has created all sorts of problems for young American chilluns' learning modern European languages ~ they do, of course, say EVERYTHING wrong on the Continent).
Kindly link me to this article. Thanks
http://www.physorg.com/news198905435.html ~ Should get you started. These were grave sites considerably different from what American Indians were doing.
The creole hypothesis I can’t endorse. Have you ever seen a map of how far-flung the Algonquian languages were in North America?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algonquian_languages
All of these languages started to diverge from each other about 3000 B.C.—according to glottochronology and other estimates. Your hypothetical creole would have had to have been in place by that time to have created the extensive divergence between the languages we see today.
Give me a mechanism for this creolization that makes sense in this time frame. Show me with real-life examples how it happened.
Ironically, the process you are describing actually did happen once historically—when Pidgin Delaware (it never really became a creole) was formed with a largely Lenape vocabulary but with some deference to Germanic (Swedish, Dutch, English) grammar.
But not Algonquian itself, no.
Every time, I swear.
I see that and I hear Patrick Stewart.
Creoles differ substantially from pidjin ~
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