23-10-03 13:04, tgpedersen wrote:
> All true, but not relevant. I'll recap:
>
> phase 1) Germanic is one language, Proto-Germanic.
>
> event: Germanic breaks up.
That's simplistic. "One language" is always actually a cluster of
dialects, even when it remains in a state of relative equilibrium (and
we are talking about non-codified pre-literate languages, where all
dialects are essentially equal!). You can't reduce a protolanguage to a
fixed point in time and space. How many of the dialects that could be
called Proto-Germanic died out and how many (if more than one)
contributed to reconstructible Proto-Germanic (as opposed to actually
spoken Proto-Germanic dialects), there's no way of knowing. The break-up
was a _process_ rather than an _event_. As the Germanic-speaking area
increased, new dialectal differences arose and grew, mostly because of
limited communication over great distances (which halted the spread of
linguistic innovations), contacts with non-Germanic languages, etc.
> phase 2) Germanic consists of three languages (presumably), Proto-
> West, East, North.
>
> phase 1) is before event is before phase 2).
People so favour triads and trinities. This classification is again a
gross simplification. East Germanic is largely an unknown. Apart from
Wulfila's Gothic we have no documented varieties of East Germanic, and
whatever onomastic and epigraphic attestation exists hardly suffices to
define common East Germanic innovations (as opposed to characteristic
features of Biblical Gothic). North Germanic seems to be a well-defined
genetic unit within Northwest Germanic, but "West Germanic" is less
clearly defined and may be "paraphyletic" (not reducible to a single
ancestor more recent than Proto-NW-Germanic). Any number of early
Germanic dialects, could we but know them, may not have been
classifiable in terms of our tripartite model.
> 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?
Proto-Germmanic a group of related dialects? It may have been spoken all
over the area in question, but how can we know for sure?
Piotr