Thanks George, Mark, S.Kalyanaraman and Piotr,
for taking my question seriously.
( I would think that a least some of You are linguists. And I also
would like to say that, since I'm interested in linguistics I do read
books by linguists. And since it's so apparent that the opinions
among linguists differ so markedly (if it is the general picture of
linguists opinions that are relected here;)), I really do think that
I'm entitled to think for myself and have my own opinion and also
take side)
Thanks Mark for this:
<The possibility that
<the majority of the ancestors of proto-Germanic speakers had
<replaced
<a native non-IE language with what became Germanic is real.
As I understand it other linguists also believe this. E g I read
Östen Dahl from Stockholm:
http://www.ling.su.se/staff/oesten/papers/Theorigin.pdf
Eg he writes:
"The Older Futhark inscriptions are few and in general very short.
Many of them
consist only of the futhark itself or of a single word, often a name.
Their interpretation
is sometimes obscure; some have not been interpreted at all. The
latter obviously
cannot be taken as evidence for a uniform Scandinavian language in
fact, for all we
know, their language could be non-Germanic."
This is of course just a loose quote and perhaps I shouldn't review
his article here but in the introduction he says that he will argue
that " the Common Nordic
hypothesis is neither plausible
given what we know about language and language change in general nor
supported by the linguistic data at hand."
I really think he makes his case
very well. The difference between so called urnordic and the later
east scandiavian languages *are* striking. So be it that the older
uthark inscriptions are scarse and obscure in many cases, but
nonetheless.
Just as striking is the uniformity of the written East Scandinavian
language in the beginning of the former millenium. And Dahl gives out
a nice theory how come.
And I think Östen Dahl is soo right about this:
"The period in which the transition from Early to Late Runic occurred
is a "dark"
period with little known about linguistic or non-linguistic
developments."
--- In cybalist@..., "S.Kalyanaraman" <kalyan97@...> wrote:
> Together with Anatolian, the adstratum of Mycenaean may have also
to
> be explained. Any recommendations on bibliographical references for
> Mycenaean etyma?
Perhaps this book could be something:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A46541-2001Oct11?
Please don't kill me for this. I haven't read the book, but the
review of it looks balanced and the book could be interesting.
Best wishes
Anders