"deroubaix clyv" <
clyv.deroubai-@...> wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=683
> All the family trees of the Germanic languages are like these:
>
>
> - Common German -
> - Gothic
>
>
> - West -
> - High German
> - Low
German
> - Dutch
>
-
> Ingvaeonic - Frisian
>
> - English
>
> - North -
> - Norwegian
> - Icelandic
> - Faeroese
> - East - Swedish
> - Danish
>
> But where are the Burgundians, the Heruli, the Lombardian
> And where are the Germanic people where Caesar is talking about (like
> Usipetes, Tencteri, Suebi, Ubii
)
>
> Could you give me a complete family tree of the Germanic languages?
-----------------------
No linguist on earth could do that. What you list above is Germanic
tribes, not necessarily distinct dialects. You could add the earliest
names on record, such as the Teutons and the Cymbri, or the Sciri and
the Bastarns (if Germanic-speaking), as well as a number of other
peoples mentioned in the Classical sources, plus God knows how many
tribes whose names have not survived. What dialects those tribes spoke
and where those dialects would fit in our simplistic family tree is,
frankly, unknowable.
At the time of the Roman Empire the languages of the Germani were not
yet strongly differentiated; it's mostly with hindsight that we
classify them into branches like East Germanic ("Gothic") and
North-West Germanic (subdivided into Scandinavian and the West Germanic
group). At the time in question there was a continuum of mutually
comprehensible dialects that influenced one another as splits were
followed by periods of convergence and mixing. German has developed
from a rich mixture of miscellaneous Germanic dialects, and Old English
arose from the linguistic interaction of the Saxon, Anglian and Jutish
tribes (perhaps with some Franks and Frisians to boot) in the British
Isles.
Wulfila's Gothic dialect is the only well-documented member of the
"East Germanic branch" -- a geographical rather than linguistic
designation. I doubt if Burgundian, Vandalic or other putative
languages lumped together as East Germanic would prove to cluster round
Gothic if we had any substantial knowledge of them. We should not be
obsessed with genetic classifications and family trees when dealing
with closely related and only partly distinct dialect groupings. The
tug of war between differentiation and convergence gives rise to a
complex and dynamic configuration of dialects, and the family-tree
model is of precious little help in such cases. Let me make the tree
metaphor more vivid: the boughs and branches become clearly visible
only if you look at the structure of a tree from a convenient distance;
you can't see them under a magnifying glass.
Piotr
PS The correct name for the common ancestor of the branch is
Proto-Germanic rather than "Common German".