28-10-03 15:51, tgpedersen wrote:
> Peter Trudgill shouldn't have said that when his data were so biassed.
He shouldn't have _written_ that. Verba volant, scripta manent.
> Enough of these details. What do you think of the dispersal date of
> the Germanic subbranches?
The ancestor of Wulfila's Gothic split off from NW Germanic about the
first century BC. It's difficult to say anything about hypothetical
splits earlier than the separation of Gothic (other that they may well
have taken place) -- the evidence is too sparse. I'm not even sure
whether East Germanic is a real subbranch, i.e. a valid genetic taxon:
perhaps it's better to treat it as a mere cover term for anything that
doesn't show NW Germanic innovations (Gothic being the only
well-documented example). I'd say that NW Germanic remained a dialect
continuum until about 400 BC; linguistic differentiation between North
Germanic and the rest probably began to show about that time. The
fragmentation of West Germanic was much slower. English now stands apart
thanks to its geographical isolation but the continental part of West
Germanic is still a dialect continuum (which it has always been) rather
than a set of clearly distinct languages.
Piotr