Word: ohman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Gumshoe Scholar. Proceeding like a scholarly private eye, Wahlgren got in touch with J. A. Holvik, professor emeritus of Norse at Concordia College. Moorhead, Minn. Holvik went to the Ohman farm; which now belongs to Olof's sons, and made a copy of the old man's scrapbook. He also learned that Ohman had owned a Swedish encyclopedia...
Armed with this information, which less sophisticated scholars seem to have missed, Wahlgren besieged the farm. The Ohman sons, who are sick of the whole business, would not let him see the scrapbook or the encyclopedia, but he satisfied himself that Farmer Ohman really had both of them. Then he gumshoed around the neighborhood and found that Ohman, though uneducated in a formal sense, was a smart man who often expressed an urge to fool the scholars...
...Soon. After settling this critical point, Wahlgren sat down with a Swedish encyclopedia which was the duplicate of Farmer Ohman's. In it were four pages about runes, and he found to his delight that the information in them would have enabled Ohman to carve the inscription on the Kensington stone. Its language, he decided, was ordinary Swedish embellished with just those "linguistic petrifacts" (archaic- features) that Ohman could have found in his encyclopedia...
...would not have kept Ohman from making just the mistakes...
...word for ship, for instance, generally had the ending "um" in the 14th century. The encyclopedia said that this ending was dropped in late runic times, but it did not say how late. So Ohman dropped it, though it really persisted for about 200 years after 1362. The encyclopedia also said that the letter "h" was used in late runic writing. Again, it did not say how late. So Ohman used "h" 200 years "too soon...