[gothic-l] Re: Ethnicity and religion/runes

[keth at ONLINE.NO]

Hi Dirk,
Surely you don't mean that Germanic had its Genesis as an indeendent
language after Keltic had become established ?
That would mean assigning a much younger age to Germanic
thabn to Keltic.
Btw, I saw in Webster's dictionary that it is okay to write
Keltic with a "K" in English too. (the Greeks wrote it with
the "kappa")



>
>Hi Keth,
>
>that is a misunderstanding. I certainly did not say that Germanic came
>from Celtic. My view is that Germanic culture owes a lot to borrowings
>from their Celtic neighbours, where it is often impossible to say
>which language a certain tribe/people spoke. It seems to be the latest
>view in Germanic history that Germanic people developled from
>different iron age cultures with the influence from Celtic La Tene
>cultures beeing a common 'unifing' trait. As for the Germanic
>language, because of its composition of IE and non-IE components,  I
>believe that it developed as IE-speakers moved northwards from
>landlocked eastern areas, merging with non-IE sea-dwellers at the
>Baltic Sea coast. This is of course a massive over-simplification.

Certainly Keltic material culture influenced Germanic culture.
But Germanic as a language must have had its own independent
Origo. It cannot be explained as a mixture of "Keltic" with
some other unknown non-Indoeuropean language. If such a
possibility was obvious, then it would have been in all textbooks.
It is however a common feature of the various textbooks, that
Germanic is treated on equal footing with the other branches
of Indo European, such as Italic, Albanian, Tocharian and Greek.
Germanic must have arisen from a Indo-European substrate that
was different from these other branches. Where Germanic arose,
or "bootstrapped itself" remains unknown. That is because
people are moveable entities (of course), but naturally
I am very interested to hear where you think Germanic arose.

Cheers
keth



You are a member of the Gothic-L list.  To unsubscribe, send a blank email to <gothic-l-unsubscribe at egroups.com>.

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/