[tied] Re: Why did Proto-Germanic break up?

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 29-10-03 14:22, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Whichever way, according to Peschel there is an archaelogical

break

> > after Jastorf, sometime in the first century BCE, and you assume

the

> > same language continued to be spoken.
>
> What's that got to do with the split between West and North

Germanic?

> The archaeological break, even if it marks a linguistically

significant

> event (it doesn't have to; you can have a major cultural upheaval
> without a language shift) is centuries too old. It might be somehow
> correlated with the _beginnings_ of NW Germanic as a distinct

branch --

> I simply don't know. Early Runic inscriptions down to the fifth

century

> are practically common NW Germanic; dialectal differences are

hardly

> observable. It's quite likely that the real break in the dialectal
> continuum was caused still later by the westward spread of Slavic
> towards the end of the Great Migrations period. Anyway, in the

second

> half of the first millennium North Germanic finally broke off from

the

> continuum by developing a whole series of important innovations

that

> didn't spread to West Germanic.
>

True. All the Germanic languages are spoken in areas with non-
Germanic place names. On this boring afternoon let me propose that
Germanic arrived in the Germanic "core area" (Southern Scandinavia
and Northern Germany, as they say) just before the common era, from
somewhere east, probably the Pontic steppe. That ought to liven up
things some.

Torsten