
Onfim - simonebrunozzi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
======
aasasd
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.

~~~
brudgers
_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.

~~~
205guy
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.

~~~
brudgers
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.

------
filleokus
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](https://old.liu.se/berzelius?l=sv)
[1]:
[https://www.facebook.com/linkopingsdomkyrka/photos/a.4234860...](https://www.facebook.com/linkopingsdomkyrka/photos/a.423486007694250/894686973907482/?type=1&theater)

~~~
yesbabyyes
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runic_inscriptions_in_Hagia_Sophia)

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

~~~
Loughla
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?

~~~
gamegoblin
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.

~~~
andrewflnr
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.

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

~~~
andrewflnr
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.

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10101
Pretty similar to the graffiti on St. Sophia of Kyiv walls

[https://www.kaggle.com/yoctoman/graffiti-st-sophia-
cathedral...](https://www.kaggle.com/yoctoman/graffiti-st-sophia-cathedral-
kyiv)

~~~
brutt
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).

~~~
drdaeman
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.

------
arghwhat
Quite the artist.

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

(Also, pitchfork hands)

------
m463
This sort of underlines how important writing is, even "trivial" writing. Want
to help more people? Want to live forever? Write stuff down.

------
baalimago
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.

------
reeeeee
What is the rider doing to the figure on the ground?
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/%D0%9E%D...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/%D0%9E%D0%BD%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BC_%28200%29.gif)

~~~
rjknight
This:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon#/m...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon#/media/File:S.George_\(Novgorod,_mid._14_c,_GTG\).jpg)

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

~~~
jacobush
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](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...](https://www.history.com/news/vikings-in-russia-kiev-rus-varangians-
prince-oleg)

Maybe an (incorrect) assumption because "Vikings" ruled Rus for a long time.

~~~
latko
It is Slavic. As a Russian speaker I can understand some phrases of the text.

~~~
10101
oh really. Which phrases you understand?

~~~
legerdemain
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.

~~~
10101
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?

~~~
drdaeman
> Does Russian alphabet have Є letter?

This should resolve your confusion:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Ye#Old_Slavonic.2C_O...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Ye#Old_Slavonic.2C_Old_East_Slavic)

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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Graphemes_versus_glyphs)
\- it has an example with Latin small letter "a")

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lihaciudaniel
Interesting but Eastern orthodoxy is boring...

