Re: Nordwestblock, Germani, and Grimm's law

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, johnvertical@... wrote:

>
> > --- On Mon, 1/18/10, Torsten wrote:
> > My point is that in order for two different forms to appear,
> > seemingly affected and non-affected by some soundlaw, there must
> > be a connection in the mind of the speaker between those two
> > forms, ie. the soundlaw is alive and still functioning in his
> > mind as a mark of a *sociolect*. And this is what I imagine
> > happened in case of the incoming Gemani in NW Germay and Holland:
> > they spoke a sociolect of a common language in which Grimm's law
> > had already applied.
> >
> > *****GK: How would this differ from what I said earlier, viz.,
> > that the doublets remained as part of the developing "local"
> > Germanic language because the Grimm-shifted incoming Germani
> > mixed with the NWB-ers and in the linguistic interplay many of
> > the old place names survived as part of the common stock, while
> > the NWB'ers adopted the Grimm-shifted speech of the colonists. On
> > this perspective the actual Grimm shift could have occurred in
> > the colonizing area a long time before their invasion of the NWB
> > territory.*****
>
> So are you in agreement that NWB would have been speaking a
> language related to Germanic? Etymological nativization does
> require a close linguistic relationship. If their languages were
> distantly (or not at all) related, ie. opaquely to the layperson,
> there would be little motivation for NWBers to adopt Germanic
> soundchanges just because they were invading (no more than foreign
> components of English-based creoles will undergo GVS).
>
> How close exactly even distinct primary western IE branches would
> have been at the time is another question...
>
> A third option is that NWB and Germanic had shared these vocabulary
> items for a longer while (which could be via genetic affiliation,
> older encounters, or both of them interacting with a third source)
> but this may be possible to rule out if the distribution of the
> Grimm-shifted items is too similar to the unshifted counterparts
> (which I gather it is?)
>
> Fourth (with similar falsification options) is the possibility that
> the doublets were formed by NWB speakers adopting originally
> Germanic names (same old *f *T *x > *p *t *k we see in Slavic or
> Finnic).
>
> Fifth, it is also possible that Grimm's law *as such* was/had been
> spreding outside of Germanic proper into the NWB varieties, and the
> intermingling of forms is their own doing.
>
> Sixth - just to go thru all the possible explanations I can think
> of - we can even combine the last two. Suppose at the time Grimm's
> Law was coming into form, some para-German offshoot was entering
> the area, with Germanic proper only settling in later? This clearly
> requires extra complication compared to Germanic itself being the
> culprit, but if we can find doublets that have an IE etymology but
> no real Germanic offspring, it might be arguable.

Actually your option six is what Kuhn proposed: a seemingly non-IE ar-/ur- language, followed for a relatively short time by an IE language, followed by Germanic.

The only real body of evidence we have is that collected by Kuhn; the one for p- I've collected here
http://www.angelfire.com/rant/tgpedersen/KuhnText/list.html
going through them, you get the impression that their connection with IE is weak; almost no cognates outside Celtic, Germanic, Italic and occasionally Greek, furthermore the cognates in Celtic are odd, showing matching p- in both p- and q-Celtic, and the cognates in Latin show relatedness to the set of 'mots populaire'.

It seems to me, but this is odd, that the best explanation would be for Jastorf to non-IE, and Przeworsk to be Germanic. That would explain why we don't see any Grimm double forms from direct-descent IE words, which we would see if Jastorf had been IE-speaking, but only of local North European (plus occasionally Latin and Greek) words.

As for the now famous, but untypical equation (Meid) OI lar, NWB place name Plore, Germanic floor, flur, I think it's a wanderword *plaN-, suffixless plar-, plur- .

> Oh BTW, do the alternations seen in these cases offer any evidence
> for the ordering of Grimm/Verner?

Kuhn has some speculation on it wrt Weser/Werra and Ems/Emergouw etc, I wasn't convinced.


Torsten