What is Relatedness?

[Steve Gustafson]

Marc Pierce writes:

> East Germanic is pretty secure.  It's set off by the following: (1) a long
> e from Proto-Germanic long e1 (North and West Germanic have either long a
> or long o); (2) lack of r as a reflex of PGmc *z; (3) thorn + l
> corresponds to NWest Germanic f+ l; (4) some miscellaneous verbal things,
> like a passive inflection, a fourth class of weak verbs, and a
> reduplicated class of strong verbs.  There's some other stuff, too: Gothic
> lacks umlaut, and consonant gemination before PGmc *j, and so on.

At least some of these things may simply be because the early,
geographically isolated Gothic did not participate in innovations shared by
the otherwise still common Germanic.  At the time of the texts, all the NW
Germanic languages had bulldozed the anomalous, dwindling class of
reduplicating verbs, while Bible Gothic preserves them; but I don't think
you can conclude that their loss was present at the separation.

FWIW, the sharpening of *ww and *jj is -shared- by Gothic and Norse, but the
realization is different.  Gothic has -ddw- and -ddj-, Norse -ggv-
and -ggj-.

On the other hand, the status of the diphthongs 'ai' and 'au' in Bible
Gothic may point to a vowel shift in Gothic not shared by NW Germanic.  I am
not sure to what extent they hypothesis is still accepted, that both of
these digraphs may have had two different realizations in speech, based on
ancestral forms.  When Wulfilas invented a new alphabet to write Bible
Gothic in, and added these digraphs, it seems unlikely that in the process
he would have ignored a phonemic distinction; it isn't like he also had to
be faithful to a pre-existing tradition of Gothic literacy.  If there was a
phoneme pair there, he'd have found a way to write it.

Umlaut seems to have been a Scandinavian feature that spread south and west.
Only Old Norse seems to have kept a productive and relatively consistent -a
umlaut; in the other languages, it's a relic irregularity by the time we see
them.  I-umlaut is the most consistent across the board, and remains
productive both in German and Icelandic.  U-umlaut is a consistent rule in
Norse; it appears also in some Old English dialects (but is scanty in West
Saxon), but it never seems to have spread to the other West Germanic
languages.

I suspect some rudimentary intelligibility among the NWGmc speeches may have
survived into historical times, at least on the "see that house" level.  The
modern English pronoun -they, them- is a Norse form that was melded into the
language, which suggests that Norse was not felt to be completely foreign to
Old English when the Norsemen came to northeastern England.  More than 30%
of the Swedish vocabulary is of Low German origin; and the percentage may be
higher, given the many cases where you just can't tell.  The extremely
productive suffixes -else and -het are Low German, fully domesticated in
Sweden.  This may reflect the rise of a Low-German based lingua franca among
the Baltic and Hanseatic ports, which was apparently sufficient for
communication among native speakers of both Low German and Swedish.

--

Sella fictili sedeo
Versiculos dum facio.