The Neolithic Hypothesis

[Eduard Selleslagh]

M. Carrasquer wrote:

>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.

E. Selleslagh:

I completely agree with your diagnostic.
Another way of rough dating, which unfortunately cannot include Italic, is
by looking at the 'layering' of linguistic territories in Europe: they are
indeed bands tilted from SE to NW. If one assumes that this happened during
successive migrations (propagation of languages or people or both, or
whatever) from roughly the N shore of the Black Sea to the North
Sea/Atlantic Ocean, whereby every new layer came geographically 'on top'
(more to the NE) of the previous one because the more SW band was already
occupied, the oldest are the Celts (not considering the Upper
Palaeolithic/Neolithic natives like the Basques), then the Germanic peoples
and finally the Balto-Slavic ones (and much later on the Finno-Ugrians in N
and E Europe).  That leads me to the following presumptions:
1.The split of Germanic into W and NE is probably older than that of
Balto-Slavic into its components.
2.but younger than that of Italo-Celtic (for those that believe in it) into
Celtic and Italic,
3.but still a lot older than Romance, a late colonial phenomenon.

Apart from that, the rather important differences between N Germanic and E
Germanic seem to indicate that even the splitup of NE Germanic is pretty old
(much older than that of Low - High German anyway).

E. Selleslagh