The child has arrived, and Vilia is not in a hurry now.
She turned around slowly and asked, "Rurik, are you hungry?"
"Not hungry, I just hurry up and see those boards."
"You'd better eat some more meat. I have other things to tell you about seeing the wooden board."
Threading the meat on branches and roasting it over charcoal fire, Rurik knew that he was eating seal meat. Because there was no time to properly process the seal meat, the meat was full of congestion. This kind of meat can only be truly delicious if grilled for a longer time and sprinkled with enough salt.
While chewing the meat, he listened to Vilia's explanation.
"You know what the writing is on those boards, and to understand what's on the boards you have to learn the letters completely."
"Yes! I will."
"Of course you will. It's not that difficult. You have a lot of time to study with me. Maybe you can master it in a few days."
"So I have to learn those letters first, right?"
"Yes. You eat the meat slowly, and I will prepare it. In the next few days, I will teach you how to identify each letter well. You must remember that those letters mark our language. When you can Master the alphabet so well that you can teach yourself all about the board without even needing my guidance.”
Vilia was afraid that Rurik would be hard to understand, so she explained further.
How could Rurik know nothing about it? Even those runes, they definitely don't have any weird pronunciation.
Because the Old Norse language that I had to learn since I was born is actually very easy to learn.
The consciousness named Liu Li resides in Rurik's body. This guy has passed CET-6. Life in that plane gave him innately strong logical analysis skills and knowledge far beyond that of ordinary people in this time and space.
Through a simple comparative analysis, he discovered that many words in Old Norse and English written thousands of years later are related to each other. As if Old Norse was a special dialect of modern English, the pronunciations of all the words were both familiar and unfamiliar, but not strange pronunciations after all.
Rurik had seen some runes before, but since there was no comparison table between runes and Latin letters, he could only feel numb when he saw those letters.
He did analyze a clear point. No matter how strange the symbol of the rune letters is, it must be separated into vowels and consonants, and have strict correspondence. Dozens of letters can be arranged and combined to interpret the Old Norse language.
Rurik's analysis is very correct, because the source of rune letters and Latin letters is the same.
The dawn of civilization first shone in Mesopotamia, and local residents established a state early. In order to maintain the operation of a huge country, writing came into being.
Cuneiform script was originally pictographic, but in pursuit of practicality and convenience, it gradually became a pure pinyin script. The ancient cuneiform alphabet was improved by the ancient Phoenicians, resulting in the Phoenician alphabet.
The neighboring Aegean region learned the Phoenician alphabet and created its own early Greek alphabet. Following ancient trade routes, the Greeks in the Balkans sold their goods to the north, naturally coming into contact with the Germans. But when Rome controlled most of Europe, the Germanic people also began to learn the ancient Roman alphabet.
Rome declined, and the Franks, the Germanic people, occupied a large area of Western Europe. They followed the standard ancient Roman alphabet. Finally, the rune alphabet, which was invented through a variety of channels, is still used only in the Baltic Sea region and Britain.
No matter how it evolves, because the runes and ancient Roman letters have a common origin from ancient Greek letters, the writing of some letters is naturally strongly related. The most important thing is that the logic of letter spelling has not changed for thousands of years.
Rurik felt even more energetic after eating the meat.
Seeing this, Villa immediately ordered: "Now follow me to that room, and I will be the first to show you a wooden board."
Rurik nodded and simply followed the stumbling priest.
Villa lit all the candles in the narrow compartment of the large chief priest's house.
It's exactly the same scene as I've seen for a while. There are still a lot of carefully polished wooden boards piled here.
Rurik stood quietly at the door, watching Vilia struggle to take out a piece of wood from among the many boards.
She wiped off the dust on it, took a final breath, and showed a satisfied smile.
She turned back to Rurik and showed the wooden board deliberately: "This is it, recording all the letters that can write our language. Next, you must be able to master all twenty-four letters."
The number of runes is twenty-four? Rurik shook his head in surprise. He had expected that the alphabet would have more letters.
Because there are as many as thirty-three Russian letters in later generations!
"Come outside with me now, we're going to study somewhere more commanding. I'll tell you how to pronounce all the letters, and I'll tell you the meaning behind it."
After a while, Rurik sat cross-legged on the soft deerskin, with a cast-iron basin in front of him, and the charcoal fire inside was slowly burning.
Villa sat in front of Rurik, holding a wooden board in his hand, and began to give him instructions one by one.
How to educate a student, Verya taught Rurik the same way he taught the lower-level priests.
Those young priests are not interested in learning more knowledge. They can at least master the use of rune letters well, because they must be proficient in the ancient incantations written with these letters in order to use them normally in sacrificial scenes.
Rurik was an open-minded student at this time. He suddenly recalled the scene in another dimension where he first learned the English phonetic notation system.
Soon, an extremely complicated feeling came over him.
Look at these twenty-four runes, they are arranged in a matrix on this rectangular oak board.
If you look carefully, the structure of some letters is only slightly different from the modern Roman letters that will be used thousands of years later.
Roman letters like F, R, I, T, S, and B, and rune letters actually have a similar writing pattern. At first glance, he can estimate the pronunciation of this letter.
Among the twenty-four runes, it seems that some are modified Roman letters, some are written upside down, or written in mirror mode.
There are some vowels, they all have strong characteristics.
The messages are all carved on wooden boards. The carvers use a small chisel to work. Due to the limitations of the equipment and the technical level of the operator, all the letters are sharp and angular.
This is not surprising, as the cuneiform script from which it originated is angular. In the ancient Roman alphabet of the Roman era, the huge words spelled out with stones were also sharply angular. Only when written on soft parchment with a quill pen, the words began to become curved.
For the Rus tribe, no clear writing instrument currently exists for them.
Of course, ordinary tribesmen have no real opportunity to write throughout their lives. In this time and space, writing is an extremely luxurious act!
