Re: etmyology of Germani

From: tgpedersen
Message: 20683
Date: 2003-04-02

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...>
wrote:
> > But note also that although there is plenty of evidence for
Germani
> > under Hunnic command, and Priscus mentions Hunnic was used along
> with
> > Gothic as a lingua Franca, there are no (officially recognized)
> > Hunnic loan words in Germanic (they would be Turkic, and closest
to
> > Chuvasic), and, until recently, no archaeological remains of the
> > Huns' stay in Europe had been found.
>
> One more possible argument: the time of Proto-Germanic, and
therefore
> of the split into West, North and East Germanic is usually set
> somewhere between 1 BCE and 1 CE. And in my scenario "the Woxdan
> priest" left Thuringia in the final decades of the 1st century BCE
> pressured by Roman conquest in the vicinity, leaving his
Thuringians
> to fend for themselves (which they did rather badly against the
> Saxons soon after, says the Thuringian Chronicle, which is why
there
> are no "-leben" names between Thuringia and Denmark).
> And Proto-Germanic also bears the hallmark of a (camp?) creole:
> serious reduction of paradigms; all past tenses, except for the
> perfects of a few (strong, irregular) verbs have been wiped out and
> replaced with new forms based on periphrasis (cf. the fate of
nominal
> inflection in Bulgarian under Turkic rule).

And the Iranian languages have p, t, k > f, þ, x before stops (and
r?) which might have caused the Grimm shift (which would be a
generalization of that Iranian "speech habit").

Note that the Thüringsche Chronikon claims the Thuringians descend
from the Thyragetae (thyrage-tae), which, if true, would show early
umlaut.

Also (nice linguist don't use nursery words, but this was tempting)
note ordinals used in Thuringian children's games 'ef' "the
first", 'duin' "the second", 'anduin' "the third" (Hertel: 'Thüringer
Sprachschatz', 1895), and compare with the corresponding numerals in
Eastern Iranian languages (including Ossetic, the descendant of
Alanic)

http://www.zompist.com/euro.htm#ie

(although I can't figure out how the word for "third" fits in?).


Torsten