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Thank you, Colin, for this beautifully written and researched intro to runes!

The thing you noticed, that "the internet is a terrible place to learn about runes", stands true about any endeavor of learning about specialized terms, in any specialized field of study and/or practice

I unhappily made the same observation when checking the first 12 pages (first 120 results) about "Product Strategy" (specialized term from the field of Product Development) - most of these results, about 90%, are low quality, copy-pasted, promo websites (trying to sell a course, an app etc) or outright junk.

That is why one way I discovered for actually learning relevant things in specialized fields is to connect, follow, support, study bodies of work of researchers & practitioners in these fields. The term coined for this by the Learning & Development professionals is "people-based learning"

I am grateful for everything that you share, every edition is illuminating. Thank you!

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Thank you, Bülent! I agree – it's getting harder and harder to find information written by humans for humans in the spirit of love for the material and for sharing it. I appreciate your support!

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Mar 16, 2023Liked by Colin Gorrie

Very interesting read. One thing that struck me is the word gagaga and the common ending with the unidentified tribes/areas of Oht gaga and Nox gaga in the Tribal Hideage

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Interesting, that's not a connection I had thought of before!

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So I'm trying to digest this fascinating information and want to be sure I'm on the right track of understanding. It seems that rune is a style or "min" of alphabet. Using an analogy, an easier way for me to understand, it's like Fosse Choreography, which is a style of dance that has specific and identifiable characteristics separate from other styles of choreography, but is not the dance itself. Am I on the right track or have I gone off down a different rabbit hole?

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I'll confess I don't know much about choreography, but that sounds right to me! Excellent analogy!

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Funnily enough I grew up in a minnesota town that has an actual runestone that was found in the area, has its own museum and everything that I can remember going to often as a kid, so that runestone was how I actually first learned about the existence of runes.

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Hi Colin,

Thank you for writing this post. I also have an interest in the Elder Futhark alphabet (as well as etymology of other PIE languages), and I wrote my first post answering a question that Jackson Crawford describes in his videos as:

Q: If the Elder Futhark alphabet borrows letters from 4 neighboring alphabets (Greek, Latin, Etruscan, Lepontic), then why does it not also borrow the same ABCD order? (ABGD for Greek)

My answer examines the creation of this runic alphabet and what I think it means. I would be grateful to hear your thoughts.

Thank you,

Nick DeSoto

“Dad in SoCal”

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