[tied] Re: Why did Proto-Germanic break up?

Haven't they all left descendants in one way or another? Even if
most of the lexicon is derived from one ancestor language, others
usually leave their mark in some way, especially place names.
Chicago, Illinois, Mississipi, Maumee, Huron, Iowa -- the preceeding
are all unaltered Amerind words or Gallicizations and Anglicizations
of them. And loanwords can enter the vocabulary of the expanding
language to express a new concept, like the Indian war-hammer/battle-
axe that became the term for the American multi-platform cruise
missle (Tomohawk), which also became a verb as in "Let's tomohawk
that SOB's bunker before he gets away." (I do not want to start a
debate on the Iraq war in this list, it's just something I heard an
American politician say on the news and it popped into my head as I
was mentioning Amerinidian words.) Anyway, aren't a lot of the
words unique to a single Indo-European language relics of the old
local language? I realize sometimes they are Indo-European words
abandoned by the other family members but retained by another, but
certainly there must be some not accounted for in this way. Does
anyone know more about it?

Joe

P.S -- The above was the reason I posted all that stuff about the
peopling of Italy. There have to be a *few* Etruscan, Sicel etc.
words floating around in the dialects somewhere, I would think.


--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 25-10-03 15:05, elmeras2000 wrote:
>
> > Only
> > those splits that led to language varieties that were recorded

in

> > such a way that they have entered the basis of later

scholarship, or

> > even - the best cases - were allowed to live and become separate
> > languages of the present-day world, can be seen as part of the
> > breakups we care about. This shows that the much in the business

of

> > prehistoric dialectology is based on whims of chance and

therefore

> > extremely suspect.
>
> Palaentologists have a convenient name -- taphonomy -- for the
> subdiscipline concerned with the processes thanks to which living

things

> become part of the fossil record, and with how the enormously

heavy odds

> against an animal or plant becoming a museum specimen affect the
> information that our reconstructed phylogenies are based on.

Taphonomic

> considerations _should_ be important in linguistics too, but many
> scholars apparently prefer to ignore the unknown. I've seen maps

of,

> say, early Iron Age Europe showing (pre-)Proto-Germanic here,
> Proto-Celtic there, then Proto-Baltic, Proto-Slavic etc. as large
> coloured areas that border on one another and leave no place for

less

> familiar groups. It's more than likely, however, that the

continent was

> a crazy-quilt in which most of the patches would represent extinct
> languages that have left no documented descendants.
>
> Piotr