From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 1957
Date: 2000-03-30
----- Original Message -----From: Mark OdegardSent: Wednesday, March 29, 2000 10:10 PMSubject: Re: [cybalist] Odp: NordwestblockI have no quarrel with your comment on dating Grimm's law. What bothers me some is that we are not permitted to call it Germanic until the first sound shift; this is variously dated, but 500 BCE seems to be the consensus. What did they speak before then? Certainly not PIE. Considering that proto-Slavic is dated before this, there are moments when you think the literature is saying Germanic is the youngest of the daughter branches.
500 BC is just a guess, not even a very educated one. In fact, we have no good evidence for the absolute dating of Grimm's Law. Caesar's spelling of Charivaldus (= xari-waldaz = 'Harold') shows [x] (or maybe [kh]) from pre-Grimm *k. Those who associate the Cimbri with Himmerland suggest that shortly before 100 BC Grimm's Law wasn't fully implemented yet -- something I can't believe. Gothic shows both Grimm's and Verner's laws (the latter partly eliminated from paradigmatic alternations but sufficiently well preserved where analogy couldn't have got at it); this means that all the archetypically Germanic sound changes took place before the separation of Gothic et al. I've no clear idea when GL operated; could be just as well 500 BC (or later) as 2000 BC (or earlier).Proto-Slavic before 500 BC? Depends how you define PSl. If PSl is the most recent (and relatively homogeneous) common ancestor of all the attested Slavic languages, then I'd date it at ca. 400 BC. But certainly ca. 500 BC the area in and around our famous Pripyat' Marshes was swarming with Baltoid and Slavoid dialects, from which PSl was to emerge. Same for Germanic: Proto-Germanic proper is the latest common language ancestral to the attested members of the branch (datable at ca. 200 BC); but the familiar sequence of sound changes needed to transform PIE into PGmc gives us some extra time-depth for Germanic as opposed to the rest of IE (as none of the other branches share those changes). Unfortunately, we cannot measure that depth with any precision.All the IE branches are very old, no doubt about that. Some of them SEEM to be younger than others simply because their speakers didn't learn to write early enough. By the time they did, a good part of the branch had become extinct and we only know the top 'clade' (or a small set of loosely related clades with the intermediate languages lost forever, as in the case of East Baltic, West Baltic and Slavic).Piotr
At the moment, my thinking is that Germanic at one point was very very small, and well off by itself. Alternatively, it was part of a larger supergrouping of which only it survives. This theoretical supergrouping might include the Northwest Bloc, or it might not. One of the historic peculiarities of Germanic is that the various dialects (excepting Gothic, but to include what became North Germanic) 'contaminated' each other for a long period, extending well down into historic times.One thought is that the Romans, by their activities in Gaul and later in Austria/Hungary, created a very real power vacuum in Northern Europe, one filled by ambitious Germanic war-chiefs. By the time of the Roman Empire, the Veneti seem to have disappeared, while the continental Celts are docilated and turned into Romans.--Mark.