From: tgpedersen
Message: 11693
Date: 2001-12-06
>Germanic speakers, the Getae Thracian-speakers, therefore they are
> Which all means, I suppose, that arguments like "the Goths are
--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> This is partly true, but note that Wolfram himself speaks of
the "Goths" (or Greutungi and Tervingi) in the narrow sense -- Gothic-
speakers or "ethnic" Goths, as opposed to other peoples and
linguistic comunities inhabiting Ermanarik's kingdom (and there were
surely a large number of them, some no doubt bilingual or
multilingual). Linguistic assimilation probably often accompanied the
adoption of the Gutonic mores by a non-Goth -- a natural process in
such circumstances.
cf Priscus' account
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/9858
which states that Gothic at Attila's time was used as a lingua franca.
>Anyway, when we discuss Gothic loans in Slavic, Gothic etymologies,
>or Wulfila's Gothic Bible, we mean an identifiable (and once
>prestigious) East Germanic language.
Very true, but now (300+ CE) we have reached a stage comparable to
that where a pidgin becomes a creole. I think also we shouldn't
underestimate the amount of intellectual effort that has gone into
Wulfila's translation w.r.t. creating a Gothic written language:
which forms to use, weeding out of "incorrect" forms (in his or his
collaborators' opinion). All Bible translations I've otherwise heard
of were archaizing, so they probably came up with something as old
and as dignified as they could find. I read once in what everybody
would agree was a kooky site that all these old languages (Greek,
Latin, Sanskrit) had actually never existed, that they had all been
constructed by monks in the middle ages. But in spite of all it set
me thinking: how much of the various source material we discuss here
was already redacted by people with just as many cc's between the
ears as we? Are we sometimes being fooled by our ancient colleagues?
(But this was a digression).
>
>
> Piotr
As to the "creole" nature of Germanic, note the use of (what later
became) "do" in the past tense; and as an aside observation
(something which was discussed once here in cybalist) the use of "do"
in negative and interrogative (and emphatic) sentences in English.
Actually a similar construction is used in German; it was explained
in a book I once read as follows:
Ole kauft Brötchen "Ole buys rolls"
Ole hat Brötchen gekauft "Ole has bought rolls"
Ole wird Brötchen kaufen "Ole will buy rolls"
Ole soll Brötchen kaufen "Ole must buy rolls"
etc
therefore
Ole tut Brötchen holen "Ole buys rolls"
lit. "Ole does buy rolls"
What "tun" does here is what "do" does in English: it acts as a
place-holder, something you place where the verb should be, but you
would prefer it wasn't, ie. to avoid sentences like "Donated you them
her?" where the meaning-heavy verb is past your ear before you notice
it, because you expected a noun or an adverb, so you don't have time
to back up your parser (Germans are not overly fond
of "Überantwortetest du sie ihr?" either) In the German use of "tun"
the main verb gets to be where the Germans like it to be: after the
object. In English: between subject and object.
Perhaps we should also note the frequent use of <doen> in Dutch.
This all makes me wonder how old the use of <do> as an auxilliary is
in the Germanic languages (<do> is dead in Scandinavia, apart from
<daad> "deed"). If they went all the way back (and remember that this
is (originally) spoken English and German, thus not necessarily
recorded) a contemparary "Early Germanic Without Tears" may have
contained the statement: "<do> is used as a clitic in the past tense,
but as a full auxilliary verb in negative and interrogative
sentences".
There is not a broad consensus, but a good deal of researcers place
the first Grimm shift around 0 CE. Which made me wonder: If the
second (Hochdeutsch) Grimm shift has to do with the opposition South
German "language of hierarchy" vs. North German "language of trade",
what is the first shift connected with? Where is the
invisible "favorite foe" language that Proto-Germanic opposed (and
Wolfram makes it clear that early Gothic society differed from the
surrounding tribes in its positive attitude towards hierarchy)?
An aside: in a trading community (England, Holland) you don't get
away with insulting people and using force against them. That would
destroy your livelihood: your credibility as a trade partner. In
languages of hierarchy it is the opposite: you must assert yourself;
if you don't, you're soon poor and then dead. Therefore such a
language would tend towards a forceful, aspirated pronunciation; you
toe the line every time w.r.t. whether you can spit your opponent in
the face while pretending to communicate with him. In Denmark, the
Copenhagen dialect has very aspirated stops (in anlaut) ["tsivoli"],
the various dialects in Jutland have stops resembling those of French
or Dutch (Jutland and Fyn are the places in Denmark where things get
done, produced and traded, Sjaelland and Copenhagen are places where
posturing is important: no production (for trafico-geopolitico-
whatever reasons, and politics is everything).
But also: if Germanic had its origins in Iranian speakers
communicating with their Bastarnian-speaking underlings, what can you
expect from people calling "rich" <fs^umans> and having titles like
<xs^aTija->. A nice linguist is not supposed to notice, but Iranian
sounds Orc and Klingon to me (straight out of Tolkien).
So, what was the invisible langage relative that proto-Germanic
was "posturing" against? (Yes, I feel the Hochdeutsch language
is "posturing" against Plattdeutsch, Dutch and English. What other
language has <pf> as a phoneme? It makes you think "Where is the
<p>?. Anybody say "<p>" around the corner? Note that the Langobard
language had done the second Grimm shift, although they came from the
Baltic, way north of the Benrath line. Did Hochdeutsch start as a
sociolect (as it also is now), not a dialect?)
Was it a trade language? I think it was Bastarnian. That's why one
doesn't find Germanic names in Bastarnaland; Bastarnian was Germanic
without the shifts. And what is Germanic without its shifts? Just
another kentum-dialect. No one notices it. Unless of course one
should come across words of the "30% language". And would you ascribe
it to Germanic then or to the "30% language"?
And another thing: stressing the first syllable is a North European
area feature (Germanic, Baltic Fennic, Latvian, but cf also Hungarian
and Czech, non-European Finno-Ugric languages are not first-syllable-
stressing). But in Germanic, first syllable stress came after Grimm
and Verner. Thus (I propose): Grimm and Verner happened on the Don,
first-syllable-stressing after the arrival in (Pannonia? and Bohemia?
and) Germany and Scandinavia. Note that Snorri says that Odin taught
them the way they make verses now; but that is end-rhyming as opposed
to Stabreim (alliteration). But alliteration works best in a language
with first-syllable stress, and end-rhyming in languages with free or
end-stress, so the original language of these lands must have been
first-syllable-stressing, and "Odin"'s language wasn't
Torsten