The Neolithic Hypothesis

[Miguel Carrasquer Vidal]

JoatSimeon at aol.com wrote:

>>mcv at wxs.nl writes:

>>Definitely *much* more.  West Germanic started to split up c. 500 BC
>>(Mallory's Jastorf Iron Age)

>-- This is a strange statement, given the virtual uniformity of West Germanic
>until the Migrations period.

I don't think we have any attestation of any West Germanic
language before c. AD 700, so I wonder what this "virtual
uniformity" is based on.

>The Jastorf Iron Age culture also shows a high degree of uniformity.

But apparently, it didn't extend to Scandinavia, where East and
North Germanic were spoken.

>The
>first runic inscriptions, from the 3rd-4th century on, are still virtually
>proto-Germanic.

Debatable.  Enc.Brit. : "The scantiness of the material (fewer
than 300 words) makes it impossible to be sure of the
relationship of this language to Germanic and its daughter
languages. It is traditionally known as Proto-Scandinavian but
shows few if any distinctively North Germanic features and may
reflect a stage, sometimes called Northwest Germanic, prior to
the splitting of North and West Germanic (but after the
separation of Gothic)."

It should be noted that this so-called "Northwest Germanic" phase
postdates the "Gotho-Nordic" phase, which accounts for the
similarities between North and East Germanic.  We have:

           Proto-Germanic
          /              \
     West Germanic       North-East Germanic
                  \     /                   \
            ("North-West Germanic")       East Germanic
                  /     \
     West Germanic      North Germanic

>>The split with North and East Germanic was considerably earlier than that,
>>possibly as early as 1500 BC (start of Scandinavian Bronze Age).

>-- hell, in 1500 BCE there probably wasn't much difference between proto-
>Germanic and the other northwestern IE languages, much less within proto-
>Germanic.

I don't think so.

>>Yeah, I've read Mallory, p. 49, too.  Avestan and Sankrit are similar, but
>>they're not in any way "virtually the same language".  The differences are
>>far greater than between Swedish and Danish.

>-- apparently not with any profit.  The languages (or, better, dialects) are
>clearly mutually intelligible; the differences are comparable to those between
>English dialects.  Broad Yorkshire and Deep Texas are considerably more
>distinct.

>Or don't you think that "tam amavantem yazatem" is similar to "tam amavantam
>yajatam"?

Of course it is.  But the fragment was chosen deliberately to
stress the similarities between Gatha Avestan and Vedic.

I suggest you compare the Sanskrit and Avestan entries in C.D.
Buck's dictionary to get a more balanced impression of the
similarities and differences between the two languages
(admittedly, Buck's entries are mostly Classical Sanskrit and
later Avestan).

A direct comparison between Gathic and Vedic verbs is found in
Beekes' "A Grammar of Gatha-Avestan", pp. 200-216:

"17.1. In the following pages the Gathic verbal system will be
compared with that of the Rigveda.  This is important, because
Gathic has the same system as Vedic, whereas in Late Avestan the
aorist is moribund [...]
17.2. Results
We find the following numbers:
159 verbal roots in Gatha-Avestan;
36 roots have no corresponding root in Sanskrit;
7 roots have a doubtful correspondence in Sanskrit;
116 roots remain that have a corresponding form in Sanskrit;
[...]
78 roots remain that have an exactly corresponding formation in
Sanskrit for all their stems (often only one stem is known in
Gathic)"

This stresses both the similarities (the verbal systems are
virtually identical) and the differences (almost 25% of the
Gathic verbal roots are not etymologically connected to Vedic
verbal roots).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv at wxs.nl
Amsterdam