Re: [tied] Re: Language - Area - Routes

----- Original Message -----
From: tgpedersen@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, February 02, 2001 12:53 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: Language - Area - Routes

>> The North Sea approach is indeed difficult, but here continuity existed
on land, with a network of similar dialects reaching down the neck of
Jutland into Mecklenburg, Lower Saxony and Frisia.

> And where, pray tell, is the evidence for that?

The lack of significant regional differentiation in late NW Germanic is
demonstrated by the Early Runic inscriptions. Before ca. AD 600 (that is,
before the period of syncopes, umlauts, assimilations, unification of verbal
endings etc.) we have virtually the same language in what are now northern
Germany, Denmark, the Scanian provinces of Sweden and Norway. Early Runic is
often called "Proto-Nordic", but it could with equal justice be called
Proto-West-Germanic. It actually gives us some idea of what the common
ancestor of both groups looked like.

> You are presupposing what you set out to prove. Where is your evidence for
"expansion of the Danes"?
It is true that there have been found the remains of bog sacrifice of
weapons from many battles at that time, but from that to concluding that an
invasion had succeeded, there is a long jump.

OK, what's your alternative story, and what's the evidence for it? "Denmark"
became known as such in the ninth century, and the name may be interpreted
as "the borderland of the Danes". I'll find some references to
archaeological sources.

> Did you also discuss how they managed to keep the *d-n- etc people from
spreading into the Baltic river systems all those thousands of years ;-)

It took some time for economic macroregions to form in the wake of the
initial Neolithicisation of Europe. There was surely some competition, too.
Pre-Proto-Germanic traders may have found the best routes already
monopolised and jealously controlled by other peoples. Central Europe was
not a vacuum, you know. It was Neolithicised somewhat earlier than the
Baltic coast.

> Besides I read somewhere that the Euxine flooding was not local, but
caused by the latest rise in sea level. This meand Sundaland and Euxine
occurred simultanéously (now I can't find it, of course).

No they didn't. The Black Sea flood was a long-delayed consequence of the
postglacial sea-level rise. The Bosphorus remained blocked long enough for
the level of the Euxine to drop by some 200 m and for a freshwater lake half
the size of the present sea to form in that part of the Tethys basin. The
waters of the Mediterranean cut through the barrier about 5500 BC (give or
take a few decades), that is at least two and a half millennia after the
submergence of the Sunda Shelf, which was an instant result of the Holocene
warming.

Piotr