From: Jens Elmegaard Rasmussen
Message: 26608
Date: 2003-10-23
On Thu, 23 Oct 2003, tgpedersen wrote:
[...]
> All true, but not relevant. I'll recap:
>
> phase 1) Germanic is one language, Proto-Germanic.
>
No, no, not for a long time it wasn't - it was some prestage of
Proto-Germanic. It only became Proto-Germanic immediately prior to its
break-up.
> event: Germanic breaks up.
>
> phase 2) Germanic consists of three languages (presumably), Proto-
> West, East, North.
No, no, it consists of different stages of pre-Proto-West, pre-Proto-East,
and pre-Proto-North Germanic. We only get Proto-West Germanic immediately
before one of the subbranches of West Germanic develops something of its
own not shared by the rest of what has survived. And correspondingly for
East and North.
> phase 1) is before event is before phase 2).
Certainly.
>
> Now the question is: before the breakup, was Proto-Germanic spoken in
> all of Northern Germany and Southern Scandinavia (option 1) or was it
> spoken in a much smaller area from where they expanded into NGer and
> SScand?
I don't see any way of knowing. Even if the entire area could be made out
to be linguistically Germanic by some broad definition, much of it may
have had varieties of Germanic that have not survived. The language
immediately ancestral to all the Germanic we know does not have to cover
all the Germanic that ever was. The closest relatives of protolanguages
are proto-nothing because they die out.
Jens