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

[dirk at SMRA.CO.UK]

--- In gothic-l at y..., keth at o... wrote:
> 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,

I am really no expert, but as far as I know we can only speak of
Germanic from about 500BC, because the beginning of "Germanic" is
tentatively dated to the middle of first millennium BC after the first
Germanic sound shift was completed (Grimm's law). I know even less
about Celtic, but my impression is that linguists speak of a Celtic
language already long before this.


> >
> >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.


I agree and I did not say that Germanic is a mixture of Celtic and an
un-known non-IE language at all, but Germanic came into existance
through the merging of a proto-Germanic IE culture and a non-IE
sub-stratum, but even this view is far to simple I guess.




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.


Walter Pohl said in 'Die Germanen' (2000) that most philologists
nowadays place the origin of Germanic on the continent, at the
southern coast of the Baltic Sea. Juergen Udolph, has in
1994 identified an even more specified area between the Thuringian
forest, Harz mountains, Baltic Sea with an open border to Westphalia
(or so). A compatible view was also recently advocated by the Swedish
linguists Prof. Claas-Christian Elert and Oesten Dahl.


Cheers,
Dirk





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/