[gothic-l] Re: The Scandinavian Origin of the Goths and Other Germanic Peoples

[Anthony Appleyard]

  Dirk wrote:
>  Denmark is strictly speaking not Scandinavia. There can be no doubt that
>  Jutland was settled by Germanic people much earlier, before they spread
>  out across the sea to the Danish islands and than Sweden. ...

That depends on whether the Danish Straits were there at the time. As I wrote
a bit ago, after the Ice Age ended, there have been times when north Denmark
was a bit higher and the Danish islands were continuous land across and the
Baltic Sea was a big freshwater lake (called by geologists the Ancylus Lake)
that overflowed into a big river running along the dry bed of the Storebaelt.

  keth at online.no wrote:-
> What about the idea then, that a "new" language needs to arise in relative
> isolation? -- It needs a period of incubation. And what could be more ideal
> for such, than an island? Gotland for example   ;)

My belief is that the Gautar in and near Scandinavia spoke Common Germanic,
and that the characteristic features of Wilfila's Gothic developed while the
Goths were migrating.

There were likely Indo-European speakers in Germany at the time. But, as we
look further back in time, the characteristic identifying features of each
Indo-European language one by one disappear, and we get to a time whem we can
only talk of undifferentiated Indo-European.

One thing might possibly solve this: Did Germanic speakers in Scandinavia pick
up any Finno-Ugrian words from the Lapps? If so, do any of those words also
occur in German? If so, the languages of Germany may have come from
Scandinavia. (How far south in Scandinavia did Lapps spread in the old days?)

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