Ah yes, the Man in the Moon. There is perhaps one somewhat interesting page
of Eskimo picture writing that seems to exhibit considerable repetition of
characters:
Regards,
Dana Scott
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, January 06, 2004 7:47
PM
Subject: Re: VMs: The Sun, The Moon and
The Stars
I did some searching for sun goddesses. The key point
here is a female
representation of the sun and a male representation of the
moon. There are
not too many well known religions with this
layout.
Perhaps the most well known sun goddess is Amaterasu from
Japanese myths.
But that does not fit very well with the rest of the
Vms. I did stumble on
an interesting note about Inuit from
Greenland. Here is the story about
their sun goddess
Malina:
Malina was and continues to be the sun-goddess of the Eskimo
people who live
in Greenland. Malina and her brother, the moon-god
Anningan, lived together.
They got into a terrible fight and Malina spread
dirty, black grease all
over her brother's face. In fear, she ran as far as
she could into the sky
and became the sun. Annigan chased after her and
became the moon. This
eternal chase makes the sun alternate in the sky with
the moon.
The above was stolen from:
http://www.familyeducation.com/article/0,1120,1-4222,00.html
When
I read this, I immediately thought about the three large pictures of
the
moon which all have a thick black "crescent" around the side of the
face,
maybe it is grease.
Anyway, it was not until the late 1800's that the
Inuit's settled on an a
standard alphabet, which was invented by a
missionary. You can see the
alphabet here at one of my favourite
sites (OmniGlot):
http://www.omniglot.com/writing/inuktitut.htm
More
history about the Greenlandic writing system can be found here:
http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/2/16/h16-7301-e.html#Early%20Greenlandic%20Writing
I
look at some sample Greenlandic Inuit but I did not notice any
immediate
similarities in language construction, but I am no
expert.
So, no, I don't really think that the VMs is a book on
Greenlandic Inuit
science.
Just thinking aloud,
Ted
Young
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