--- In cybalist@..., tgpedersen@... wrote:
> If furthermore Germanic branched somewhere around 200 BCE-0 CE, it
might have come into existence at that time (I think that Germanic in
its origin was a trade pidgin, which developped into a creole,
therefore it makes sense to talk of a time of creation of that
language).
Trade pidgins (and creoles arising from them) don't inherit the
inflection and morphology of their "source languages". If Germanic
had passed through a pidgin stage, no trace of PIE case or person
endings would have survived, let alone complex morphophonological
patterns like ablaut. Such things develop from scratch in creole
languages, as e.g. in Tok Pisin:
Pik bilong dispela man i kam pinis [PIG BELONG THIS-FELLOW MAN HE
COME FINISH] 'This man's pig has come',
... or Sranan:
Me teki fisi seri [ME TAKE FISH SELL] 'I sold fish'.
All the words are English, but the grammar has nothing to do with
English. This is what documented creoles look like.
> Both Jordanes and Procopius claim Goths were of Getic descent.
The lure of "similar-sounding".
> As for the derivation *got- > *get-, it looks just like umlaut
(from *-isk-) and then unrounding, doesn't it? [...] Therefore (ta-
dah!) I proclaim Pedersen's first law: There was Umlaut in Getic
(that oughta shut Glen up;-)).
Do you have *-isk- in <getae>? Is there anything like *<getisk->
attested anywhere? Laws are based on credible examples, not on
wishful thinking.
Piotr