What is Relatedness?

[Eduard Selleslagh]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sean Crist" <kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 21, 2000 4:42 PM

[snip]

> Now, for your second question.  [in response to Rick McC]
> You asked:

>> 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?

> Within West Germanic, it's not possible to draw a clean Stammbaum, because
> the dialects developed in close contact with one another.  Still, we
> recognize a major division within WGmc: 1) Ingvaeonic, also known as North
> Sea Germanic, which includes Old English, Old Frisian, and, with some
> complications, Old Saxon; versus 2) Old High German.  (You used the term
> "Jutish"; we don't have any documents written in a language called
> "Jutish", but given that there's a traditional claim that there was a
> people called the Jutes who participated in the Germanic invasion of
> Britain, we can take Jutish to mean some part of the Ingvaeonic dialect
> continuum.  Anglian, of course, is a dialect of OE.)

> There's sometimes been an idea floating around that "West Germanic" is an
> artificial designation, i.e. that "WGmc" is really an amalgamation of
> dialects which don't actually descend from any single Proto-West-Germanic
> language. This idea is can be safely rejected; there are some seven secure
> cases where the WGmc languages all share early innovations which are not
> found outside WGmc (again, I can list them if there's interest, but it
> would take a lot of time). The Ingvaeonic languages all show the common
> WGmc developments, and none of the NGmc developments; Ingv. is thus
> securely WGmc and not "intermediate" between WGmc and NGmc.

> There are a few sound changes which distinguish Ingvaeonic from the other
> WGmc languages.  I won't go thru them all here unless there's interest,
> but one change which gives readily recognizable results to anyone who
> knows English and German is this: in Ingv., but not in OHG, a nasal before
> a voiceless fricative deletes with compensatory lengthening of the
> preceding vowel (this had already happened before */x/ in PGmc, but Ingv.
> extended it to all voiceless fricatives).  Examples:

> English German
> other ander
> tooth Zahn
> soft sanft
> five fu"nf
> (etc. - many more examples)

> OE and the other Ingv. languages all underwent this change; none of the
> OHG dialects did.

[Ed. Selleslagh]

Somehow, Dutch (21 million native speakers) (including S. Dutch, also called
Flemish, my mother tongue: my name means that my ancestors were from a 'gens
Salica'), and even non-Saxon Low German, is strangely missing from this
picture. Where does it fit in your schematic picture?

English Dutch
other ander
tooth tand: here the -n- has remained!
soft zacht: the ch (jota sound) - f correspondance is systematic: laugh lachen
(but English orthography is still witness of a similar pronunciation in times
past). With German:kraft kracht.
five vijf

In addition, Dutch is actually a synthesis (because of shifting of its cultural
center: Brugge > Antwerpen > Amsterdam) and a mixture of the main dialect
groups: coastal and West-Flemish and Frisian (Ingwaeonic), Hollands (in the
narrowest sense), Brabants (basically Frankish), Limburgs (closer to
Rhineland-semi-Low-German) and Saxon (E. Holland). Present unified Dutch is
mainly a mixture of Antwerp Brabants and Amsterdam Hollands, mainly as a
consequence of the massive emigration of the Antwerp intelligentsia to
Amsterdam at the end of the 16th century (Religion wars against the Spanish
Habsburgs). Limburgs and Saxon are somewhat outside mainstream Dutch, and
Frisian is considered a separate language.

It's the first time I see 'Ingwaeonic' used in such a wider sense, but I am no
specialist in this matter.

I would also like to point out that Frisian has apparently some external
characteristics of NGmc., like the preservation of -isk (Eng. -ish, Du.
-is(ch), pronounced -is) and similar Danish (Jutish?) sounding features. I
think that the idea that Ingwaeonic is halfway between N and WGmc is due to the
different use of the term (namely coastal continental WGmc).

> So if I were going to further flesh out the tree I drew above, I'd put a
> further branching under WGmc with a two-way split into Ingvaeonic and OHG.
> I wouldn't care to draw a Stammbaum for WGmc with any further detail than
> that, because there's just too much cross-contamination between dialects.

>Sean Crist  (kurisuto at unagi.cis.upenn.edu)
>http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/

Ed.