From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 269
Date: 1999-11-14
----- Original Message -----From: markodegard@...Sent: Sunday, November 14, 1999 8:50 PMSubject: [cybalist] Re: Voting Results: The Branch Most Closely Related to GermanicI'm the one who voted for none of the above. I felt a little contrarian when I voted.It could just be that Germanic and Celtic each stand alone, albeit not so alone as the Anatolian branch, and whatever similiarties they have with other groups can be explained as areal influences.
While this is mostly an artifact of the linguists' terminology, Germanic can be called the youngest of the IE branches, in that we are not allowed to apply the word to any group prior to ca. 500 BCE. I've seen Golab being cited as giving1000 BCE for the approximate date of the genesis of proto-Slavic; before then, they were in unity with Balto-Slavic.
Germanic is as peculiarly conservative as it is radically innovative. Of the original stock of IE consonants ('obstruants' is the fancy word here), Germanic has retained most of them, albeit having changed them as with the Grimm-Verner laws; the analogy here is to music, where you arrange the score for different instruments and change the key: the original notes are the same, but the realization of the sound is quite different. It's as if pre-Germanic was off by itself, in its own little sprachbund. There's also the issue of the Germanic substratum, which seems to be quite old.
In one of my books, there is a map that shows Corded Ware horizon sites extending up the coast of Norway clear past the North Cape; the accompanying article notes that this archaeological data is otherwise little noted in the literature. As to what this has to do with the genesis of Germanic, I could only guess. Since the Germanic substratum has never, ever been related to Uralic, and since the CW horizon is so universally assumed to be IE (I heed Mallory's cautions here), the suggestion that the substratum may derive via Scandinavia offers some interesting food for thought. My own theory here is that much of this part of the world built its economy around pristine Atlantic salmon runs: working hard for just a few weeks once a year and using minimal food preservation technology (air drying, salting, smoking), you could gather a year's worth of protein.
As I write this, I am not in the mood to spin speculative scenarios. But the story of Germanic is not yet completely written, I think.
Mark Odegard.
I'm not all that sure about the position of Germanic myself; that's why I started this poll. My votes for Italic and Celtic (that is, in effect, for Italo-Celtic) were half-hearted. My second favourite theory is that Germanic is a sole survivor of a whole nother subfamily of IE which once occupied a large part of northern Europe and whose speakers perhaps arrived there via the east Baltic area, Finland and southern Scandinavia, rather than from the south or southeast.Piotr