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Just coming across this now:

Report from The Siberian Times (7/4/18), "Boy, 11, finds ‘1,000 year old message’ written in runes on pendant made of mammoth bone":

This "jewellery" comes from the Namsky district in Yakutia, also known as the Sakha Republic.  The bone is inscribed with four words that are thought to be in the Orkhon-Yenisei type of runic Turkic.  Such writing is normally found on the rock art of Yakutia, but rarely on talismans, amulets, and ornaments.

Namsky district is close to Yakutsk, the coldest city on earth, and near the basin of the Yana River, which is the coldest place on the planet outside of Antarctica.

The Old Turkic script – also known as variously Göktürk script, Orkhon script, Orkhon-Yenisei script –  is the alphabet used by the Göktürks ("Blue Turks) and other early Turkic khanates during the 8th to 10th centuries.

The script is named after the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia where early 8th century inscriptions were discovered in an 1889 expedition by Nikolai Yadrintsev.  Orkhon inscriptions were published by Vasily Radlov and deciphered by the Danish philologist Vilhelm Thomsen in 1893.

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Remarks by Peter Golden:

They are finding these things all over the place. Literacy in Turkic runic or Runiform, as Klyashtornyj contended some time ago, was probably more widespread than many thought. There are fragments of pots, bowls, and other items of daily use with Runic inscriptions on them. The alphabet shown in the picture can be Orkhon or Yenisei runiform (the latter only slightly different than the former). There were a number of such scripts circulating in the Turko-nomadic world of Eurasia. Usually, they are broken up into the Orkhon, Yenisei and Talas groupings, but the latter has a number of sub-branches (extending to the North Caucasus and Balkan Bulghar groupings). I.L. Kyzlasov’s Runičeskie pis’mennosti evrazijskix stepej (Moskva: Vostočnaja literatura RAN, 1994) remains a useful study of the different scripts, although more materials have appeared since then and some further refinements are undoubtedly necessary. Hatice Şirin User, Başlangıcından Günümüze Türk Yazı Sistemleri {Turkic Writing Systems from the Beginning to our Days} (Ankara, 2006, second printing Istanbul: Bilge Kültür Sanat, 2015 ) devotes some pages to the Orkhon, Yenisei, and Talas systems, before turning to other writing systems used by the Turks (e.g., Syro-Sogdian in its various forms (e.g. Manichaen), Brāhmī, etc.

As for the origins of the Central and Inner Asian runes, there are conflicting theories:

According to some sources, Orkhon script is derived from variants of the Aramaic alphabet, in particular via the Pahlavi and Sogdian alphabets of Persia, or possibly via Kharosthi used to write Sanskrit (cf. the inscription at Issyk kurgan).

Vilhelm Thomsen (1893) connected the script to the reports of Chinese account (Records of the Grand Historian, vol. 110) from a 2nd-century BCE Yan renegade and dignitary named Zhonghang Yue (Chinese: 中行说; pinyin: Zhōngháng Yuè). Yue "taught the Chanyu (rulers of the Xiongnu) to write official letters to the Chinese court on a wooden tablet (simplified Chinese: 牍; traditional Chinese: 牘; pinyin: dú) 31 cm long, and to use a seal and large-sized folder". The same sources tell that when the Xiongnu noted down something or transmitted a message, they made cuts on a piece of wood (gemu). They also mention a "Hu script". At the Noin-Ula burial site and other Hun burial sites in Mongolia and regions north of Lake Baikal, the artifacts displayed over twenty carved characters. Most of these characters are either identical with or very similar to the letters of the Turkic Orkhon script. Turkic inscriptions dating from earlier than the Orkhon inscriptions used about 150 symbols, which may suggest that tamgas first imitated Chinese script and then gradually was refined into an alphabet.

Contemporary Chinese sources conflict as to whether the Turks had a written language by the 6th century. The Book of Zhou, dating to the 7th century, mentions that the Turks had a written language similar to that of the Sogdians. Two other sources, the Book of Sui and the History of the Northern Dynasties claim that the Turks did not have a written language. According István Vásáry, Old Turkic script was invented under the rule of the first khagans and that it was modelled after the Sogdian fashion. Several variants of the script came into being as early as the first half of the 6th century.

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The word "rune" is a distinctively Germanic term:

The runes were in use among the Germanic peoples from the 1st or 2nd century AD. This period corresponds to the late Common Germanic stage linguistically, with a continuum of dialects not yet clearly separated into the three branches of later centuries: North Germanic, West Germanic, and East Germanic.

No distinction is made in surviving runic inscriptions between long and short vowels, although such a distinction was certainly present phonologically in the spoken languages of the time. Similarly, there are no signs for labiovelars in the Elder Futhark (such signs were introduced in both the Anglo-Saxon futhorc and the Gothic alphabet as variants of p; see peorð.)

The term runes is used to distinguish these symbols from Latin and Greek letters. It is attested on a 6th-century Alamannic runestaff as runa and possibly as runo on the 4th-century Einang stone. The name comes from the Germanic root run- (Gothic: , runa), meaning "secret" or "whisper". In Old Irish Gaelic, the word rún means "mystery", "secret", "intention" or "affectionate love." Similarly in Welsh and Old English, the word rhin and rūn respectively means "mystery", "secret", "secret writing", or sometimes in the extreme sense of the word, "miracle" (gwyrth). Ogham is a Celtic script, similarly carved in the Norse manner. The root run- can also be found in the Baltic languages, meaning "speech". In Lithuanian, runoti means both "to cut (with a knife)" and "to speak"^] According to another theory, the Germanic root comes from the Indo-European root *reuə- "dig". The Finnish term for rune, riimukirjain, means "scratched letter". The Finnish word runo means "poem" and comes from the same source as the English word "rune"; it is a very old loan of the Proto-Germanic *rūnō ("letter, literature, secret").

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Old English run, rune "secret, mystery, dark mysterious statement, (secret) council," also "a runic letter" (runstæf), from Proto-Germanic *runo (source also of Old Norse run "a secret, magic sign, runic character," Old High German runa "a secret conversation, whisper," Gothic runa), from PIE *ru-no-, source of technical terms of magic in Germanic and Celtic (source also of Gaelic run "a secret, mystery, craft, deceit, purpose, intention, desire," Welsh rhin "a secret, charm, virtue"). Also see Runnymede.

The presumption often is that the magical sense was the original one of the word, and the use of runes as letters was secondary. However, this derivation is questioned by some linguists: "[T]he obsession with magic of many runologists can be explained more from the psychology of the scholars than from the intrinsic contents of the inscriptions. … [F]or almost all [of these scholars] the aura of mystery which they ascribe to the fuþark was a supplementary attraction in an otherwise austere field of labor" [French scholar Lucien Musset, quoted in Elmer H. Antonsen, "The Runes: The Earliest Germanic Writing System," in "The Origins of Writing,"University ogf Nebraska, 1989] .

The word entered Middle English as roun and by normal evolution would have become Modern English *rown, but it died out mid-15c. when the use of runes did. The modern usage is from late 17c., from German philologists who had reintroduced the word in their writings from a Scandinavian source (such as Danish rune, from Old Norse run). The runic alphabet is believed to have developed by 2c. C.E. from contact with Greek writing, with the letters modified to be more easily cut into wood or stone.

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Word History: Among early peoples writing was a serious thing, full of magical power. In its only reference to writing, the Iliad calls it "baneful signs." The Germanic peoples used a runic alphabet as their form of writing, using it to identify combs or helmets, make calendars, encode secret messages, and mark funeral monuments. Runes were also employed in casting spells, as to gain a kiss from a sweetheart or to make an enemy's gut burst. In casting a spell the writing of the runes was accompanied by a mumbled or chanted prayer or curse, also called a rune, to make the magic work. These two meanings also appear in Old English rūn, the ancestor of our word. The direct descendants of Old English rūn are the archaic verb round, "whisper, talk in secret," and the obsolete noun roun, "whispering, secret talk." The use of the word to refer to inscribed runic characters was revived by Danish writers who adopted it from Old Norse toward the end of the 1600s and used it in discussions of Germanic antiquities.

(Source:  American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th ed.)

Aside from the fact that the Turkic runes have a vague, "scratchy" resemblance to the Germanic runes, I do not know why, when, how, or by whom the term "rune" came to be applied to them.

Readings

• "Turkish written with Latin letters half a millennium ago" (8/29/16)
• "Special diligence: police and security forces in China" (4/14/18) — especially in the comments
• "An early fourth century AD historical puzzle involving a Caucasian people in North China" (1/25/19)
• "Uyghur as ornament" (9/19/13)
• "Chinese restaurant shorthand, part 6" (6/17/19)

February 10, 2020 @ 8:50 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Alphabets, Writing systems

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