[gothic-l] Re: Germanic mutual intelligibility

[Frank Kermes]

Hi Dirk and Francisc,

> > > I see we agree on this, but just to round this up. Apparently,
>early
> > > Runic inscriptions of the 2nd/3rd centuries AD, show that at this
>time
> > > all Germanic dialects were still very close to common Germanic as
>it
> > > has been reconstructed by linguists. Anecdotal evidence could be
>added
> > >  from the possible ease with which a Marcomannic noble like
>Catualda
> > > seemed to have communicated with the Goth/Gutones, while Arminius
>the
> > > Cheruscan seems to have been able to talk to the Marcomannic king
> > > Marbod (around 20AD), thus implying some sort of mutual
> > > intelligibility across the whole Germania between Rhine, Vistula
>and
> > > Danube.
> > >
> > > Anyway, if mutual intelligibility was still high among the various
> > > Germanic dialects in the 2nd and 3rd century AD, I suppose
>Germanic
> > > people would still have been able to communicate with some ease a
> > > hundred years later when Wulfila (or people in his environment)
> > > translated the bible into Gothic.
> >
> > I shall now proceed to totally muddy the water!
>
> > Coming at it from the linguistics side of things, _all_ the
>surviving early
> > material shows strong signs of creolisation (particularly the
>Germanic as
> > opposed to the Gothic groups), quite probably as the result of a
>mixing of
> > Celtic and something else.
>
>
>
>Hi, that is interesting, but not at all unexpected. However, I would
>expect an even stronger Celtic influence on the Gutones/Goths. As
>Wolfram (and others) have shown, the early Goths were dominated by a
>Celtic tribal group, i.e. the socalled Hisarna-layer. At this time
>Celtic words like reiks could have entered the Gothic-Germanic
>language. The same is true for the Vandals, in fact, Walter Pohl and
>Wolfram argue that they emerged from a Celtic-Lugian group. As a
>linguist, could you provide some examples of Celtic borrowings into
>Germanic please?

Just thought I'd jump in here, since I'm reading a book that has some
bearing on this particular question.  In the chapter "Contact with the
Celts" in _Language and History in the Early Germanic World_, D H Green
deals with linguistic borrowings in both directions.  He suggests that
Celtic "Bracae" and the word for "mare" are derived from Germanic (pp.
149-150), but (more importantly for this discussion), the majority of loan
words seem to be from Celtic to Germanic.

Gothic Ambrahtos, OHG Ambaht, corresponds to "ambactus" used by Caesar
regarding Gaulish "servants."  "Reiks" is interesting, because he notes
Gaulic personal names with <-rix> as the second element, and they correspond
also to known personal names in Germanic: Celtic "Clutorix," and W. Frankish
"Chlodericus" (p. 150).

"Lead" is another word that appears to derive pretty clearly from Celtic; OE
<lead>, MHG <lot>, Old Irish <luaide> (p. 152).

Just to summarize the main thrust of his argument, the influence of Celtic
on Germanic seems to be in the area of social organization (<reiks> and
<ambrahtos>, being social classes), and technology and armament (<Hisarnes>,
"lead," <brunja>).  That would make sense if there had been Germanic groups
as "subtribes" under a largely Celtic confederation, ie. the Lugii.

I'm kind of surprised that no one has brought up multi-lingualism yet.  In
areas where groups speaking similar (but still distinctive) languages come
into contact with each other with high frequency, as in the case of
Arminius' Cherusci and Maroboduus' Marcomanni, it wouldn't be unusual for
individuals to develop different discourse "catalogs."  To use myself as an
example, when speaking to colleagues and faculty at the University here, I
consciously choose words and syntactic structures to match they way they
speak.  However, when speaking with friends I've known outside the
University for years, I switch my discourse strategies (and my speech
becomes peppered with things like "dude," and "like," and "y'know?"--hey,
I'm a long-haired weirdo).

If you intensify the distinctions between these different discourse methods,
you may end up with a situation resembling that of the various Germanic
peoples; just to make things _more_ confusing, the earliest Runic
inscriptions with their "creolized" (to pillage Francisc's term!) vocabulary
may be a sort of "public" discourse, ie. a typical modern local newspaper in
the U.S. is written at a fairly low primary-school language level so that it
is comprehesible to the widest audience.  Presumably, the runic inscriptions
were _intended_ for public display, and were likely to be read by people
speaking a great number of different Germanic dialects.

The differences between the languages of different Germanic groups might
have been more perceived than actual (here I'm entering into more
speculative speculation) . . .  An acquaintence of mine was on the phone
with a Norwegian relative, but my acquaintence speaks Swedish; they were
conversing along quite happily, my acquaintence in Swedish, her relative in
Norwegian, when her relative complimented my acquaintence on her Norwegian,
to which she replied that it was Swedish.  Her relative instantly insisted
that they switch to English; Swedish is a foreign language and she might not
understand it.

I propose that situation might have been common (or at least possible, once
you get rid of the phones), for example, in Cheruscan, Marcomannic, and
Gothic (ie. a Marcomannus thinking "right, in Gothic you have to make all
the terminal /z/'s into /s/).

Cheers,
Frank
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