*p>f Revisited - When was German invented?

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

In a message dated 3/8/99 08:49:13 AM, rma wrote:

<<[ Moderator's comment:
  And what of the very similar, though completely separate, Armenian shift?
  --rma ]>>

Once again, I'm just following through on the commentary made in Bernard
Comrie's book that attributes the "First Sound Shift" in German to the
conversion of IE sounds into "the nearest equivalents" of a prior non-IE
language.  It is interesting to see where it goes.  (I am aware that there is
a "reconstructed obstruent system" based on a breakdown of glottalized/voiced
and unvoiced stops that explains the Germanic/Armenian shifts as "archaisms"
rather than innovations.)

If the Germanic consonant "shift" is due to conversion from a non-IE language,
then how can the Armenian shift can be explained?:

1.  An obvious explanation that comes to mind is that Armenian was another
language that "converted" to IE from a similiar non-IE language with roughly
the same sound shifts.

Mallory in "In search of the Indo-Europeans" summarizes the case for Armenian
originating in the Balkans.  Neolithic and Bronze Age archaeology show a clear
lines of continuity from the mouth of the Elbe to the mouth of the Danube with
evidence of such material cultures as "Globular Amphora".  Strabo, the Greek
geographer of the 1st Century AD, tells us that tradition says Armenia was
founded out of Thessaly (a town called Armenium); and that Armenians continue
to follow Thessalian habits in clothes, etc.  If non-IE speakers occupied a
corridor running from the mouth of the Danube up past the gap west of the
Carpathians and up to Jutland "sometime before 1000 BC" - then the Armenian
shift might represent a conversion of some of those non-IE speakers to IE just
as it did - perhaps later on - in Germanic.  The result was however more
proximate to and therefore more "Greek."

When Armenian migrated it managed to preserve the shift because it became
isolated from the IE mainstream that would have removed those vestiges of the
old sound system - just as Germanic remained relatively isolated.  Or became
isolated when the eastward spread of the Celts cut off the NW-SE routes across
the eastern midsection of Europe.

2. Perhaps another explanation is that Armenian - in its Balkan form -
represented a Greekified German, already converted to IE but heavily
influenced by Greek and later on tranformed by Urartian and Iranian
influences.

Although it has always been contested by certain historians, the "Getae", who
lived north of the Danube were explicitly identified by Strabo and others as
being neither Thracian nor Kelts.  Strabo obviously identified the Getae with
Germanic tribes:

"As for the southern part of Germany beyond the Albis, the portion which is
 just contiguous to that river is occupied by the Suevi; then immediately
 adjoining this is the land of the Getae,...  who occupy the whole plain from
 north of the Danube to Germany..."  (Geo 7.3.1 et seq)

The Getae are identified as "Dacians" occasionally, but what this tells us
about them I don't know since Dacian is hardly pin-point identifiable.  Oddly,
the "Massagetae" are located in the Caucasus region by Herodotus, 400 years
earlier, on the far side of the Scythians.  This puts them relatively close by
the Armenians.

If Phrygian is descended from Thracian, as the classical historians suggest
and Mallory notes, then the Armenian connection with the Pontus and the
western shore of the Black Sea could explain proto-Germanic settlers coming
along with that migration.  Strabo states that Thracian and Getae
intermarried, an apparent variant on the "Basternak"  identity later mentioned
by Tacitus and Ptolemy for the inhabitants of the Danube Delta, the "Peucini"
- also often associated with the Chernyakovian material culture which by the
first century BC had strong Gothic elements.

In connection with this, Miguel Carrasquer Vidal has written in past post:

<<The original Proto-Germanic phonological system must have been similar to
the Armenian one, with *t = *th, *d = *t['], *dh = *d, yet another archaic
feature of Germanic, though not quite as archaic as Hittite and Tocharian.>>

And...

<<I've also grown rather dubious about Greco-Armenian.  The similarities
between Greek and Armenian (mainly in vocabulary) must be secondary, resulting
from interaction in the Balkans, but Armenian must've split off from the main
body of IE containing Greek earlier.>>

Note that in the above analysis Greek is already a separate language.  If we
shorten the dates - so that Greek appears in Greece roughly at the same time
Linear B makes its appearance - than Armenian is an independent language with
strong affinities to German but in a position to make strong lexical
borrowings from Greek.  Or that the conversion from non-IE itself was the
result of Greek or a closely related language.

The reality check says that no written evidence of Armenian exists before
200BC and that the Armenians (per Mallory) date their own origins to 800 BC.

Finally, are there any IE languages that have closer early syntactic
similarities to German/Armenian than Greek?

Regards,
Steve Long