Translation

The old alphabet had no word for maybe. Things were or they were not. The rune for yes was a single upright stroke — definite, a tree in winter. The rune for no was the same stroke broken. I don't know who decided a break meant refusal, but it feels right. Every no I've ever spoken felt like something cracking. Scholars argue about this. They sit in offices in Uppsala and Reykjavík and disagree about whether the Elder Futhark was sacred or practical or both. I suspect both. The sacred and the practical have always shared a bed. You carve a prayer. You carve a property marker. Sometimes on the same stone. My grandfather spoke a dialect that nobody speaks now. Not dead exactly — the words still exist in archives, in recordings made by a woman from the university who came in 1973 with a tape recorder and a notebook and he talked for two hours about fishing and weather and the names of waves, which he knew seven of, each one specific to a height and direction and time of year. I have the tape somewhere. I cannot understand most of it. The words are shapes in my mouth that don't connect to meaning — sounds my tongue knows but my brain has lost. There's a rune for that too. The scholars call it the inheritance rune, ōþila. It means property, estate, what gets passed down. Also, in some readings: what gets left behind. The linguists will tell you a language dies when the last speaker dies. But that's not quite true. It dies when the last person who heard it spoken forgets the sound it made. I still remember his voice. The language is not dead yet.