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

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "merbakos" <gigolojoe0@...> wrote:

> 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.
>

Germanic has 30% non-IndoEuropean roots. It's anybody's guess how
many languages these represent. How accurate would a pre-Columbus map
of the native languages of America based on place names alone be?

Schrijver (following others) thinks he has found three languages
embedded in Germanic (language of Old European hydronymics, language
of geminates, language of bird names), but he doesn't try to place or
relate them to existing families.

Torsten