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Onfim

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322 pointssimonebrunozzi49 comments

The page sort of underplays the importance of these artifacts. Bark notes are one of the few primary sources for study and reconstruction of the language of that time—as in, what little is known, we greatly owe to these notes. Meanwhile, afaik there are like a handful or two of places where notes were found, and the total number of notes is on the order of a thousand-and-something, often in ruinous state: if the letters are even discerned, still cracks in the notes sometimes interfere with the scratches of the writing. Children's learning notes are uniquely helpful because they lay out some of linguistic features right there: e.g. the alphabet. (It's possible that Onfim's are the only such notes—dunno for sure but I remember Zaliznyak saying they were a pleasant surprise.)

Novgorod Republic was a Slavic state of its own, and IIRC the Novgorod dialect was one of the main dialects of Old East Slavic, informing the later differences between northern and southern dialects.

Also, most notes aren't literature but letters of trading, marriage arrangements and such. So they don't tend to expound at length—and while afaik colloquial usage is very helpful for reconstruction, there's still not much of it. Consider that poetry especially helps with reconstruction, since it directly reflects pronunciation.

Btw, for Russian-speakers interested in the history and workings of the language, and linguistics in general, I recommend Zaliznyak's lectures and interviews available on YouTube. He was great at spreading the scientific view, on the backdrop or relatively scarce popular scientific journalism and noisy, harmful and politicized folk etymology.

underplays the importance of these artifacts

That’s a problem with Wikipedia articles. Historical and social topics tend toward beige deserts of insight. The neutral point of view discourages attempts towards writing bearing intellectual synthesis and insight.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Wikipedia. It’s rather Wikipedia is a dull read. Duller than it’s sources typically and regularly duller than what a quick Google turns up.

Wikipedia is perhaps a minimum viable HN submission. But it doesn’t bring expert opinion with it. Wikipedia articles are often 100x ideas with 0.01 execution.

I disagree, I appreciate the just-the-facts approach which leads to brevity and clarity. It may not lead to a complete understanding (such as the info provided by your parent comment), but chances are that following links in Wikipedia will find a lot of the same info.

I feel a lot of science writing appeals to emotion and has to overplay their subject matter to get readers, burying many interesting or relevant details deep in a long article. Wikipedia may be dry, but it avoids that.

Of course, different people like different styles, so some people learn better or enjoy narrative and story, others want dry facts. But it’s not a problem with Wikipedia.

My critique of Wikipedia is as a primary source on Hacker News. This article is an example of 100x idea : 0.01 execution. It’s little more than the official correct answer on the back side of a Trivial Pursuit card despite not being that kind of fact. It’s the kind of fact where expertise provides context to an evocative subject.

To be clear, what is missing is not a treatment amenable to popular taste. What is missing is passionate geeking out by a person who’s devoted months, years, or a lifetime to a slightly larger understanding of the subject.

> The page sort of underplays the importance of these artifacts. Bark notes are [...]

The page is not about bark notes in general. It links to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birch_bark_manuscript and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Novgorod_dialect. All those things are very important, but they are better placed in those specialized articles rather than one boy's biography.

These kind of things capture my mind so much. It's so easy imagining being that boy drawing something, compared to many other great-men historical artefacts.

A similar, but much more recent example, is the graffitiesque engraving by (the young) Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius in a stone pillar at the his local cathedral [0]/[1] in the end of the 1700's.

[0]: https://old.liu.se/berzelius?l=sv [1]: https://www.facebook.com/linkopingsdomkyrka/photos/a.4234860...

In the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there's great graffiti carved into the stone from British soldiers in Egypt to fight Napoleon.

See also the Viking graffiti in Hagia Sophia (apparently, the Byzantine Emperors liked to keep an elite guard of Viking warriors, known today as the Varangian Guard):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_inscriptions_in_Hagia_So...

I love how universal children's drawings are. when you're small, everyone looks like long legs with a head on top

And hands and feet with explicit fingers and toes that are large, too, at some point.

I've always wondered what the developmental psych is behind that. Maybe their perspective of adults?

I listened to a podcast that interviewed Barbara Tversky, a psychology researcher specializing in spatial reasoning.

She mentioned at one point an explanation of this is that your sensory/motor neurons are not evenly mapped across the surface of your body. That is, your brain devotes far more sensory neurons to your fingers than say, your back. The "resolution" is higher in certain important areas, and this might explain why kids' drawings almost universally have giant hands with fingers, and giant heads, and de-emphasize things like the torso.

That might be overthinking it. Hands are (infamously) tricky to draw. It's a natural mistake when drawing to make the things you spend most of your time drawing the largest. It's embarrassingly easy to spend a lot of time drawing someone's hand or face and zoom out to realize you've gotten it completely out of proportion. To me that's quite enough to explain why hands are often drawn out of proportion.

If it was hard to write it should be hard to read?

If you're insulting my writing, we'd both be better off if you were more explicit (I have to admit that second sentence is a bit of a mess). Otherwise I have no idea what you're on about.

I don't think this has anything to do with childhood. It's just a matter of illustrating the shape. Fundamentally, most people don't so much draw things as crudely diagram them.

Pretty similar to the graffiti on St. Sophia of Kyiv walls

https://www.kaggle.com/yoctoman/graffiti-st-sophia-cathedral...

These graffiti are in Ukrainian. I can read some of them without problem.

119: Се писал Манеш (This written by Manesh)

142: Господи поможи рабу своєму Івану Пере (Lord, help your slave Ivan Pere)

145: Господи поможи рабу своєму Константину і ізбав нас от всякої біди (Lord, help your slave Constantin and save us from everything bad).

Technically, they are not in Ukrainian (well, not in what we call Ukrainian today), but in Old Slavonic.

> Господи

Which is actually written as г҃и (but without a visible titlo in case of 142).

> всякої біди

More like "вьсѧкоѧ бѣдѣ" (but I'm not sure, that's just how it looks like to me)

But, yeah, anyway, most people who know modern Slavic languages that use Cyrillic scripts should be able to comprehend some of the writings. While the languages have evolved, lots of words (or, at least, their stems) are recognizable. Although there's always a danger of false cognates.

Quite the artist.

I find it amusing that he couldn't manage to stay aligned with the edge of the "paper" on the left

(Also, pitchfork hands)

This sort of underlines how important writing is, even "trivial" writing. Want to help more people? Want to live forever? Write stuff down.

At first I was going to laugh at Onfim's inconsistent amount of fingers, but I realize just now that he probably couldn't count very well.

What is the rider doing to the figure on the ground? https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/%D0%9E%D...

I'd guess stabbing with a polearm.

This: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon#/m...

The article says "One of the drawings features a knight on a horse, stabbing someone on the ground with a lance"

It's not that long and worth reading!

hitting his enemy.

It seems people in old Novgorod didn't speak a Slavic language, but something they picked up from the Varangians.

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.

so where are russian words?

What you wrote is mix of Cyrrilic alphabet, the Greek alphabet, early Cyrillic/Glagolitic letters like Ѣ and Ѧ.

And why you wrote Ѧ ЗВѢР'Е', while on the picture it's Ѧ ЗВѢРЄ? Does Russian alphabet have Є letter?

>so where are russian words?

Like, all of them? At least, "words comprehensible to a Russian-speaker".

>Does Russian alphabet have Є letter?

Ukrainian still does. It's closer to the Old Church Slavonic. And the Ѣ was only dropped 100 years ago by the commies.

Regardless, nobody is saying that the beresty are modern Russian, just that it's in a Slavic language (and one comprehensible to modern-day Russian speakers). What's your point, exactly?

> Does Russian alphabet have Є letter?

This should resolve your confusion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Ye#Old_Slavonic.2C_O...

I believe, U+0415 ("E") is a valid character to use there. Sadly, there's no way to denote that the text is in Old Slavonic and should use different script so this "E" would be rendered visually similar to "Є".

While Unicode code points typically correspond to graphemes, that's not always true. Similar issues exist with Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages, as Unicode (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Graphemes_vers... - it has an example with Latin small letter "a")

Slavic had a number of alphabets. They drastically differs, compare Glagolitic and Cyrillic scripts. Now we (I'm Russian) in Russian use Cyrillic script which was heavily modified since invention. Seems like Onfim use Cyrillic script but many letters was made obsolete (like Yus). So, Onfim speak Slavic language and use Cyrillic script.

Novgorod bark notes are among primary sources for research on old Slavic language. In the very first paragraph there are two links to the page that explains what Old Novgorod dialect is.

That impression is incorrect.

Interesting but Eastern orthodoxy is boring...

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