The Neolithic Hypothesis

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

Rick Mc Callister <rmccalli at sunmuw1.MUW.Edu> wrote:

>>It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase postdates
>>the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the similarities between North
>>and East Germanic.  We have:

>>           Proto-Germanic
>>          /              \
>>     West Germanic       North-East Germanic
>>                  \     /                   \
>>            ("North-West Germanic")       East Germanic
>>                  /     \
>>     West Germanic      North Germanic

>	I've read in some places that the languages formerly spoken in
>present Jutland, Schleswig & Holstein were "in between" North Germanic &
>West Germanic and that when the Angles migrated to England, that a gradual
>linguistic frontier was replaced by a barrier of non-mutually
>comprehensible languages.
>	On one level this has a certain logic but on the other hand,
>English & Frisian do seem much closer to Low German. I can appreciate that
>Frisian may have been affected by Low German and Dutch but English wasn't.
>	Another contradiction that I've seen are charts that list East
>Germanic with North Germanic.
>	Why all the confusion? Has all of this been straightened out?

The confusion stems from the fact that at different times
different dialects which were still to a reasonable degree
mutually intelligible interact with each other differently.

I believe the general consensus is the one I sketched above:
first a split between West Germanic (in what is now N.
Netherlands, N. Germany and mainland Denmark) and North-East
Germanic (in S. Scandinavia) [but still some contact across the
Kattegat], then the split between North Germanic and East
Germanic (Goths etc. moved of from Scandinavia to the Baltic and
then on to the Ukraine, Balkans, Italy and Spain, etc.), while
West Germanic and North Germanic kept interacting, most strongly
of course southernmost North Germanic (-> Danish) and
northernmost West Germanic (Ingvaeonic = Jutish, Anglian, parts
of Saxon, Frisian -> English, Frisian).

There are reasons for thinking that the similiraties between N
and E Gmc are older than the similarities between W and N Gmc,
but I'd have to look them up.  In any case, these successive
layers ("Gotho-Nordic", "North-West") make it more difficult than
it already should be to pin down Proto-Germanic to a particular
date.  All I can say is that North Germanic feels like a
"shallow" group, comparable with Slavic (c. 1500 years), while
West Germanic appears to be more diverse, comparable with Romance
(c. 2000 years) or slightly more, while Germanic as a whole
definitely feels older than Romance, so 3000 years cannot be too
far off.  In fact, given the interactions that went on, Germanic
might be older than it looks.  Glottochronology, even
seat-of-the-pants glottochronology like the above, is seriously
hindered by the fact that most languages never cleanly "separate"
to begin with.

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam