What is Relatedness?

[Marc Pierce]

Hi,

Nobody else appears to have tackled this yet, so here's my shot:

East Germanic is pretty secure.  It's set off by the following: (1) a long
e from Proto-Germanic long e1 (North and West Germanic have either long a
or long o); (2) lack of r as a reflex of PGmc *z; (3) thorn + l
corresponds to NWest Germanic f+ l; (4) some miscellaneous verbal things,
like a passive inflection, a fourth class of weak verbs, and a
reduplicated class of strong verbs.  There's some other stuff, too: Gothic
lacks umlaut, and consonant gemination before PGmc *j, and so on.

There are a couple of points of North and East Germanic unity (Holtzmann's
Law and so on), but I think they're pretty well outweighed by the evidence
for NWest Gmc.

Your next question sounds like Ingvaeonic (or North Sea Germanic), which
is a separate group within West Germanic, not as an intermediate stage.
There's a book on this topic, by Tom Markey, published in the 1970's in
the IBS series.

Marc Pierce

On Tue, 11 Jan 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> What is the basis of this tree in Germanic?

> 	How secure is East Germanic?
> 	Why is it not just an early form of N. Germanic?
> i.e. what are the points that distinguish it?
> 	Is there any merit to the idea that there was a separate branch of
> Germanic including Anglian, Jutish and pre-Frisian, intermediate between N
> & W Germanic, andf that modern English and Frisian are the result of a
> fusion between this and W Lowland Germanic?

[ moderator snip ]