Re: [tied] Inguaeonum [was Celtic Jutland]

Piotr writes

> Simplifying things as much as possible:
>
> "West Germanic" is divided into:
>
> (A) Ingvaeonic (the North Sea cluster) = Anglo-Frisian
> (English + Frisian) and Low German (including Old Saxon)
> (B) Istvaeonic (the Weser-Rhine cluster) = Old Low
> Franconian and its daughter languages, including Modern
> Dutch and Afrikaans
> (C) Erminionic = a large bag where we place the rest of
> West Germanic, in particular Old High German and whatever
> derives from it (including Modern German and Yiddish)

I've heard of all of these, tho' Ingvaeonic is the only one I can
recall and spell from memory.

> I'm not in favour of regarding West Germanic as a valid
> genetic grouping. Rather than that, NW Germanic consists
> of Scandinavian and the messy residue which cannot be
> reduced to a single ancestral language. What I mean is that
> it makes sense to speak of Proto-NW-Germanic and
> Proto-Scandinavian, but not of Proto-West-Germanic.

I don't quite understand. Fine, call it NWG and Scandinavian. It seems
you are merely renaming West Germanic NWG, but I think you mean
something else. Are you bracketing out OHG etc into its own group?

As for messiness, I am not the least bit disturbed by it. We probably
know *too much*, and are seeing cross-isoglosses at a rather fine
level (I've seen the maps that correlate dioceses/abbeys and dialect
isoglosses).

> Similarly, while NW Germanic has some kind of genetic
> coherence (one can point to shared innovations defining the
> group), "East Germanic" is just a cover term for anything
> that is Germanic but not NW Germanic (actually, Gothic is ]
> the only documented form of Germanic that meets this
> description, though it's virtually sure there were many
> more such "basal Germanic" languages).

Of course.

I've also seen mention of someone's division into NG and SG, with East
Germanic being unified with NG. Everything else is 'South Germanic'.
This theory seems to get short shrift from just about everyone.

This is just personal experience from a few days in the Netherlands,
vs. a few days in Germany. Once you figure out Dutch has an extra
article or two, it almost (but never quite) makes sense as
bizarrely-spelled English, while German remains absolutely a different
language no matter how long you look at it. I'm talking about
newspaper headlines, shop signs, and the such. The sensation I felt is
probably what a monolingual Italian gets when puzzling out Spanish, or
vice versa.