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 theyre finding is written in the Old Norse language.
The history tells how some of the Delawares 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 Sherwins, but the application Paine and Omdahl are using is new. The two are using Sherwins eight volumes to decipher the Lenapes 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.
Sherwins books have been overlooked because of World War II and because the last six of Sherwins 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 Sherwins 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.
Patrick Stewart! I remember that. :)
However, English has only one existing cognate language ~ Freis in Freisland, and it doesn't sound anything like English. Freis itself doesn't have as many dialects as your standard Germanic languages do.
Colonial Dutch, in the British colonies, was derived from a handful of Dutch dialects and within two generations it'd broken up into the requisite 32 different dialects, although many analysts argue it actually created a brand new 33rd dialect spoken West of Albany.
One of the characteristics of English that makes it the dominant language wherever it is spoken is that it doesn't form dialect forms very easily ~ if at all.
Yes, Pidgin Delaware came into being probably pretty quickly in the early 1600s.
But I still don’t see how that explains Algonquian—where you have languages as different as Lenape and Blackfoot descended via regular rules of historical phonology from a common ancestor.
Oh that I *really* can't agree with.....American English dialectology is another hobby of mine!! :)
In the Northern Cities shift (Chicago, upstate NY, etc), the entire short vowel system is moving. American dialects are diverging further than they ever have right now.
Mutual intelligibility tests have show that we are having big problems understanding each other!
The Orthodoxy at first tried to downplay or deny the find.
But at least they don’t go to the lengths that China’s anthropology department goes to scrub the archeological record.
Sorta.
Kennewick Man was, if I recall, buried pretty much to prevent further study?
[Blam has the info somewhere if my memory is shot on that.]
Thanks. I'm reminded of this book (more Japanese) and, the timing is close to the Costa Rico site:
BTW, a decent book.
BTW, the write up in Wiki actually references a situation where SEVERAL Algonkian languages formed a new creole.
This stuff goes on all the time, particularly if you don't have large vocabularies, or if you have a large vocabulary already shared by other language groups.
I think this is the reservation where the Indians made offers to purchase my wife's mother.
A good beatdown takes care of that problem.
There's 9,400 year old Spirit Cave man (a mummy) found in Nevada:
Ah, my memory is shot!
Thanks ComputerGuy!
I get plenty of help — I get links in FReepmail all the time, which I usually use unless they’re already posted. Also, decimon posts more of the topics than I do, most weeks, and only partly because I’m passive-aggressive and FReepmail links to him. :’)
Thanks Kevmo.
Snore, egg, starboard, etc.
Check out a History of the Vikings by Ferguson - a recent great book on them in paperback now.
America B.C.A fascinating letter I received from a Shoshone Indian who had been traveling in the Basque country of Spain tells of his recognition of Shoshone words over there, including his own name, whose Shoshone meaning proved to match the meaning attached to a similar word by the modern Basques. Unfortunately I mislaid this interesting letter. If the Shoshone scholar who wrote to me should chance to see these words I hope he will forgive me and contact me again. The modern Basque settlers of Idaho may perhaps bring forth a linguist to investigate matters raised in this chapter. [p 173]
by Barry Fell
(1976)
find it in a nearby library
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