From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1949
Date: 2000-03-27
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Woodson
To: cybalist@egroups.com
Sent: Friday, March 24, 2000 6:19 AM
Subject: [cybalist] Nordwestblock
Steve asks:
Does anyone have any information on Nordwestblock? Are
there any books, articles, sites, anyone knows of, on the
subject? Thanks for any help.
-------------------------------
"Nordwestblock" is a name coined by Hans Kuhn (1962, "Das
Zeugnis de Namen", in: Rolf Hahmann, Georg Kossack & Hans
Kuhn [eds.], Völker zwischen Germanen und Kelten,
Neumünster: Wachholz, 105-128) for a hypothetical,
historically unattested Indo-European group. Traces of their
language are said to survive in the toponymy of the Low
Countries (as well as North Rhein-Westphalia), and as a
substrate element in Germanic. Kuhn's hypothesis was
discussed by Wolfgang Meid in 1984 ("Hans Kuhns
'Nordwestblock'-Hypothese", Anzeiger der österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, philologische-historische
Klasse 121: 2-21) and is popular especially with
German-speaking placename experts.
The "Nordwestblock" [NWB] language is taken to have occupied
a position intermediate between Celtic and Germanic, being
different from both as well as from the equally hypothetical
Pre-Celtic ("alteuropäisch") IE substratum of England and
Wales (as reconstructed e.g. by Wilhelm F. H. Nicolaisen on
the basis of British river-names). Characteristically NWB
traits include the retention of *p- (unlike Celtic or
"Proto-British"), no consonant shift (unlike Germanic), the
frequent occurrence of *apa- 'river' as an element forming
stream-names (its British and Italo-Celtic counterpart is
*ab-, visible in Welsh _afon_ and Latin _amnis_), and of the
suffix *-st- (as apparently in Venetic).
Typical examples of NWB placenames: Plor ('field, flatland,
meadow' : Old Irish _lár_ , English _floor_, German _Flur_),
Paderborn (*p-), Seeste, Riemst (*-st-).
Piotr