From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12912
Date: 2002-03-28
----- Original Message -----From: x99lynx@...Sent: Tuesday, March 26, 2002 9:03 PMSubject: [tied] Re: Spread of Early Germanic[Steve:] But Gothic did some development of its own, am I right? I mean that it is not Proto-Germanic. So one might see a splitting in that sense, especially if we leave other East Germanic languages off for now as conjectural.[Piotr:] Certainly. Gothic (or, to be more precise, Wulfila's literary form of a fourth-century Vesigothic dialect) is the preferred citation source for early Germanic forms, simply because it's old and fairly well documented. This doesn't mean that Gothic can be identified with Proto-Germanic. In some ways it is admittedly more conservative than Northwest Germanic; e.g. it preserves reduplicated preterites which were almost completely lost in NWG. In other respects, however, it is more innovative than (roughly contemporaneous) Early Runic or even later Old English and Old High German. For example, the historically known variety of Gothic shows no Vernerian alternations in the verb system. Since outside the levelled-out paradigms the effects of Verner's Law occur as expected, the elimination of verb alternants must be regarded as a Gothic innovation. Gothic also reduced some unstressed syllables earlier than Early Runic did (Goth. gasts or haúrn are less conservative than ERun. gastiz, horna; cf. PGmc. *gastiz, *xurna). The main taxonomic problem here is that we do not know to what extent other "East Germanic" languages shared the Gothic innovations. If we knew the answer we could decide whether they all derive from some kind of Proto-East Germanic or represent separate non-NWG lineages.
[Steve:] And, if I understand you correctly, you are saying there was a continuum of dialects that spread geographically to the point that NW characteristics could not extend as far as those outlying Germanic dialects that would become "East" or non-NW.Let me ask then, given that Germanic "appears" to reach the eastern Danube or Black Sea about the 2d Century BC, is it possible that the reach of the NW core was not limited by simple distance, but rather by separation?
I understand that the conjectural non-NW status of intervening tribes might provide a continuum of dialects all the way to the Black Sea or at least to Gothic. But if early Gothic is not on the Black Sea at this point (the NW emergence - 200BC?), where would it have been along that continuum?
The reason I'm asking this is because I'm looking for a hard separation between NW and East, rather than a dialectical continuum where NW's influence simply tapered off geographically. More like the situation between, say, the break in Slavic between northern and southern Europe. If a geographical break could account for the difference between Gothic and NW, then doesn't that also match the historical distribution of the languages when they are finally are attested?So the basic question is, I guess, how sure is it that the "background" of dialects that would become "non-NW" had to exist in say 200 BC? Could there simply have been a distinct geographical separation between the two branches? Especially because NW and Gothic are all we are really left with for sure when the languages become historical?
Remember that what I'm originally asking about is what one would be allowed to think, given what we don't and do know (...entertaining possibilities) about whether Gothic could have originated in south Europe before the time of the historical "Goths."[Piotr:] The answer is difficult for a number of reasons. First, the linguistic separation of (Proto-)Gothic from (Proto-)NW Germanic took place just some 300-500 years before Wulfila, and the languages in question were still very similar to each other. The degree to which they differed is compatible both with a (short period of) hard separation and the effects of distance. Secondly, the linguistic maps of the late Roman and post-Roman periods were extremely unstable. Areal configurations changed rapidly and secondary breaks may well have occurred, separating Gothic from its closest relatives. The same happened in the case of Slavic. Early South Slavic was a conglomerate of genetically heterogeneous dialects brought together thanks to historical accident. They did not derive from a common "Proto-South Slavic" ancestor but partly converged within a new dialect continuum after being cut off from their northern cousins by events like the Magyar intrusion.With these reservations, I must say I find the continuum scenario more plausible than a hard separation. If Gothic had consolidated as a distinct language somewhere in the south at an early date, I'd expect it to reveal a good deal of adstratal non-Germanic (Dacian, Sarmatian, etc.) influence, especially in the lexicon. I can't see anything of the kind, just some sporadic loans and calques, mostly from educated Greek rather than any SE European vernaculars. There is evidence, both archaeological and linguistic, of regular contacts being maintained between the Pontic and Danubian areas and northern Europe until the Hunnish invasion. Some very early borrowings from Iranian and Greek diffused into West Germanic, and their form does not suggest any non-Germanic intermediary. If you're interested in such topics, I recommend D.H. Green's book _Language and History in the Early Germanic World_, if you don't know it already:
[Steve:] Also, why do you call Bastarnae and Skiri "para-Germanic?"[Piotr:] I just admit the possibility (without insisting on it) that they separated so early that Proto-Germanic defined as the most recent common ancestor of Gothic and NWG is not _their_ ancestor. The prefix "para-" would then mean "closely related to Germanic, but not Germanic in the narrow technical sense".Piotr