[gothic-l] Re: Germanic mutual intelligibility

[Sollers]

> > >
> > > 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/).

I'm not going to go much into "borrowings" because they are probably a red
herring.  The trouble is, the original insights into the relatedness of
Indo-European languages was a mixed blessing because it so happens that
there are closer relationships in vocabulary inside this group than inside
most language groups; even very closely related Finno-Ugrian languages can
have only a handful of similar words.

Also, borrowings tend to say more about what sort of words are needed when
languages come in contact; for example, many colour words in Italian come
from Germanic languages, despite the fact that so few words in total do so,
because the division of the spectrum (if I can put it that way) used in
modern Europe is the Germanic, rather than the Roman, division - take a look
at the words used in Latin for various shades of blues and greens.

What is more important is what happens to grammar.  There are a number of
features that are considered to characterise pidgins and the creoles that
grow out of them (a pidgin becomes a creole when it becomes the home-tongue
of a group of people):
- tendency to Subject - Verb - Object word order
- use of prepositions either with or in place of noun endings
- use of pronouns either with or in place of verb endings

My books on Old English view these features as characteristic of Germanic
languages, but in fact they are characteristic of pidgins - some writers
think of all pidgins, but I am not convinced that they apply where neither
component language is Indo-European; for example, I don't think they apply
in Swahili.

As to whether Celtic was one component, whereas the normal situation with
Greek, Latin and Slavonic languages is for modification of the word (for
case endings, plurals etc) to be by way of word ending, the most common kind
in such languages as Welsh is by modification of the vowel of the root; and
this is exactly what is found in German in the "Old Plurals".

I am by no means convinced that the first century "Germani" were "Germans"
in the modern sense at all.  The fact that the term was used by later
writers is not very helpful; after all, Claudian called the Goths Celts -
the tendency was to refer to contemporary peoples by the term used for
people living in the same area centuries in the past.

>From Plutarch's "Life of Marius", one would have to conclude either that the
Teutones etc were Celts or that there were significant numbers of Germans
living in Northern Italy in Marius' time.  The latter is known from other
sources not to have been the case - they were definitely Celts - therefore
one is pushed to the alternative.  Other arguments for the "Germani" being
Germans tend to rest on linguistic grounds; the tribal names of the Chatti
and Cherusci.  However, since the first word is so very Celtic (see "Clan
Chattan") and the second is closer to known Welsh than to any hypothetical
Germanic word (Carw, pl. Ceirw, aspirate mutations Charw and Cheirw versus
*Herutz) I am _very_ unconvinced

I disagree with the writers on pidgins who claim that the dominant culture
is always the one that contributes the main vocabulary to a pidgin/creole -
if that were true, we would be speaking French instead of English, or rather
we would all be speaking Frankish, Romance-speaking Europe included - but it
does seem to be the case that the dominant culture contributes the
"administrative" words, which is exactly what is found in the Romance
languages (taken from various Germanic sources) and in English (taken from
Norman French.. and thus sometimes Germanic in origin!)  If so, the adoption
of Celtic words of this type into German would imply political domination at
some time, which seems to me somewhat unlikely; the simplest solution would
be my suggestion, that they came into Germanic languages from their
inception

Different levels of discourse are of course important - it certainly was the
case with Vulgar and Classical Latin, which seems to have been a sort of
Syssertutsch (guesswork there for the spelling)/Hochdeutsch pairing; and
I've had experience of quasi-intelligibility of Danish and Swedish (the Dane
could understand the Swede but not vice versa).  I also suspect that a lot
of differentiation may have been semi-political; I'm not at all sure exactly
how Burgundian differed from Gothic on the one hand and Frankish on the
other, but I suspect Gundobad made very sure everybody knew the difference
between him and Theoderic on the one hand and Clovis on the other.

BTW, what's the reasoning for suggesting that "bracae" might be Germanic in
origin?  I've seen a similar suggestion over "camisia" in a book on the
development on costume, translated from French, that described the word as
"Celtic, that is to say, Germanic" (!!!)


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