[tied] Re: Categorial collapse

--- In cybalist@..., alexmoeller@... wrote:

>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
> To: <cybalist@...>
> Sent: Wednesday, August 28, 2002 10:45 PM
> Subject: [tied] Re: Categorial collapse
>
>
> --- In cybalist@..., alexmoeller@... wrote:
> >
> >
> > BTW have you also heard someone say <für ihr> "for her"?
> >
> > Torsten
> >
>
> BTW are you sure you heard "mit die Schaufel" in _South_
> Germany?
>
> [Moeller] no. it was too "im Norden":-))
>
> Maybe frisian substrate?The frisians are even in Tacitus to
> find.

I'm thinking of something earlier than that. We know that the Sciri
and Bastarnae whom Tacitus is not quite sure if he wants to classify
as Germani were on their way to the Black Sea in Eastern Europe
already in the 2nd century BCE. They must have had a language similar
to that of Scandinavia at the time. Now if it is from the Bastarnae
that the ethnically mixed crowd under "Odin"'s command took their
language, they will have arrived in Scandinavia with a creolized
language. If it were different enough from "Old Germanic" in
Scandinavia, we would have a similar situation to that in Bulgaria,
or later in England. In other words, "categorial collapse"; when the
subjugated Scandinavians and North Germans learned the new language
(as Snorri said they did), for some reason the inflections for case
might have been too different, and voila, they make mistakes, to this
very day, in North Germany (later "colonized" by High German), and
total collapse of the case system in Scandinavia (this only appears
later, since power & writing are still in the hands of the new elite
for a long time). In South Germany, things are different, since this
was the Hercynian Forest, thus new land. No large people to
assimilate.
This is only _my_ opinion!

Torsten