Re: Early Spread of Germanic

"P&G" <petegray@...> wrote
<<The forms of speech actually spoken across Germany are not mutually
comprehensible. The standard language is for almost all Germans an artificial
language at greater or lesser distance from their natural speech, learnt at
secondary school. The "one language" they are alleged to have spoken in
Scandinavia at one time, is likewise more a collection of related forms of
speech.>>

I'm not sure of the context here. But in terms of my question, that brings
up something of a different problem.

Certain shared innovations identify "Germanic" and "NW Germanic." Were both
those groups already collections "of related forms of speech" when e.g.,
Verner's Law "spread"?

Piotr wrote earlier:
<<...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...>>

This idea of an eventual "shared innovation" needing to "spread" makes sense.
Obviously, a sound change that will become a defining "shared innovation"
does not happen all at once in everyone's speech. Such changes, no matter
how natural, couldn't possibly occur to every speaker independently all at
the same time. How a change starts is logically not the same as how a change
spreads. So it makes sense that even those characteristics that are most
"genetic" to a language must have also been transferred horizontally at some
early point.

One obvious way this happens is that everybody lives close enough together to
hear the change in other people's mouths and start adopting it. Soon
"everybody" starts using /f/ for /p/.

But why would sedentary farmers or solitary herders keep in touch with sound
changes going on with other sedentary farmers or solitary herders even 10 or
20 miles away? Piotr mentions that Jastorf seemed about the right size for
this kind of community effect. I don't doubt that, but I think other
mechanisms help explain how dispersed and isolated speakers conform their
speech to new styles (and spread what will become linguistic shared
innovations.)

One of those mechanisms, before writing, might be the marketplace. This is
where surpluses and merchants and itinerant crafts people and religious
functions would bring dispersed rich and poor people together and help to
conform the language. We speak a lot about trade routes, but trade routes go
nowhere unless they head to markets.

One thing about marketplaces also is that they do not locate on the basis of
raw distance. Natchez, 20 miles down the Mississippi, may be "closer" than
my neighbor on the other side of the mountain.

So the proximity and contact needed to spread the innovations that identify
Germanic and NW Germanic may not have been a function of only of distance but
also of access - rivers and roads. If that access were to be cut-off for any
reason, we might expect NW Germanic and Gothic to go off their separate ways.

Steve Long