Re: [tied] Re: False Scandinavian Origins

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 12856
Date: 2002-03-25

 
----- Original Message -----
From: x99lynx@...
To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Monday, March 25, 2002 7:53 PM
Subject: [tied] Re: False Scandinavian Origins

> ... I know that Piotr said this was a personal opinion, but his opinion carries a lot of weight around here.  So I'm asking if that opinion has room for other possibilities.
 
Why not? as long as the narrative remains linguistically convincing (I can't help seeing things from a linguist's perspective). For one thing, the Germanic branch is rather close-knit in terms of common innovations, so there must have been a rather long period when the Germanic-speaking tribes lived sufficiently close to one another for shared changes like Grimm's Law and Verner's Law (and several lesser Laws) to spread easily. The geographical range of the Jastorf culture seems to have been just the right size; at a later date, it was the focal area of Northwest Germanic innovations in which Gothic no longer participated. By that time, the rest of the Germani had already dispersed as far south and east as the Danube and the Black Sea coast, and their cultures had been thoroughly transformed. How they interacted with the "Veneti", the Celts, etc., are separate issues, too complicated to be discussed in a single posting.
 
> If the Eastern Germanic of the 4th Century AD Goths was indeed continental in origin, wouldn't this be a better starting point in looking for the origins than an Amal elite?   If the Amal did not speak East Germanic, did the underclass "Rugi" or "Vandals?"  Did the Vandals speak East Germanic? ...
 
The putative Scandinavian elite had little to do with the origins of the Gothic _language_, which I presume would have been the same with or without the Amals. IMO, East Germanic is not a valid genetic grouping, being characterised as the "basal" group of Germanic dialects that did not undergo the characteristic Northwest Germanic developments (but not sharing any unique innovations of their own). The only satisfactorily documented EG language is of course Gothic, but it stands to reason that any early Germanic language that was sufficiently distant from the NWG core area about AD 1 is EG by virtue of not being classifiable as NWG. That probably includes the language(s) of the Vandals and a fortiori those of the Sciri and the Bastarnae. I wouldn't swear that the last-mentioned languages were "fully Germanic" (rather than "para-Germanic") in the sense of having undergone all the diagnostically Germanic sound changes -- the onomastics evidence is not quite conclusive. Most of the Vandalic ethnonyms, on the other hand, are echt Germanic; so is Gothic as we know it.
 
Piotr