Comment by jacobush
5 years ago
I thought the text looked almost legible. (I.e. Germanic.) But it was just an illusion because scratching in birch naturally will look rune like. Apparently Onfim used Cyrillic letters, but spoke a Germanic language. So my wrong guess was still sort of right but by accident. :-D
Edit:
but it is Slavic?!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect
Can you please say where you found it was a Varangian dialect?
Edit 2:
https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus-vara...
Maybe an (incorrect) assumption because "Vikings" ruled Rus for a long time.
It is Slavic. As a Russian speaker I can understand some phrases of the text.
oh really. Which phrases you understand?
The writing is crooked and childish, partly owing to the fact that it's scratched with a stylus on tree bark, but to anyone who reads Russian or another adjacent Slavic language, pieces of the text are immediately comprehensible. It's even easier to make progress if you've seen Church Slavonic writing and text abbreviations, which are ubiquitous on religious imagery present in basically every Eastern Orthodox church throughout Russia and other countries with Orthodox churches.
The "I am a beast" letter says the following:
(text box) ПОКОЛОNО ѿ ОNΘΗМА КО ДАNΗЛѢ (free-floating) Ѧ ЗВѢРЕ
After accounting for the mixture of letters from the modern Russian alphabet, the Greek alphabet, antiquated Slavic letters like Ѣ and Ѧ, and the unfamiliar orthographic abbreviation ѿ (which is a tau Τ planted on top of an omega ω), the first inscriptions say, using modernized orthography and syntax, "поклон от онфима к даниле" and "я зверь," or "greetings from Onfim to Danilo" and "I am a beast."
The remaining inscriptions are an exercise for the reader.
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