Re: Early Spread of Germanic

"Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote
"...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....

"...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."

Thanks for the reply, Piotr. Let me ask if I have this right and whether it
jives what you are saying so that I phrase my question right:

Jastrof starts to expand say about 500 BC and this is the expansion of
Germanic or the last of proto-Germanic or whatever into, let's call it, the
northern European plain roughly. At some point, this expansion begins to
result in differentiation - different dialects or languages develop as a
simple matter of distance or whatever.

Now there may have been all kinds of divisons, but the first basic division
we have linguistic evidence of is "NorthWest" and "East" Germanic. (You also
seem say that "East" really stands for something like "all others." But, on
the other hand, the "only satisfactorily documented" East language is Gothic.)

Now, my first question(s): Is there any evidence as to when this split
happened? Or rather when did the differentiating NW characteristics arise to
such a degree that a linguist might feel justified in saying the split had
happened? (Now I mean linguistically rather than, say, archaeologically.)

More specifically, is there a strictly linguistic reason to think this split
could NOT have happened around say 250 BC?

Thanks and regards,
Steve Long