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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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 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.
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.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
I find it on-topic because every time someone submits an archiving project like Neocities, there's always someone scoffing and saying 'burn it all down, throw it away, who cares, it's all worthless; this is better off forgotten'. And yet, look what a treasure trove a child's drawings have become for linguists.
HN has matured as much more than just "hacker news". Everything that is interesting as a place here and I hope it continues to be like that for a very long time.
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.
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
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.
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")
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?
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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.