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

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 26691
Date: 2003-10-29

29-10-03 14:22, tgpedersen wrote:

> Whichever way, according to Peschel there is an archaelogical break
> after Jastorf, sometime in the first century BCE, and you assume the
> same language continued to be spoken.

What's that got to do with the split between West and North Germanic?
The archaeological break, even if it marks a linguistically significant
event (it doesn't have to; you can have a major cultural upheaval
without a language shift) is centuries too old. It might be somehow
correlated with the _beginnings_ of NW Germanic as a distinct branch --
I simply don't know. Early Runic inscriptions down to the fifth century
are practically common NW Germanic; dialectal differences are hardly
observable. It's quite likely that the real break in the dialectal
continuum was caused still later by the westward spread of Slavic
towards the end of the Great Migrations period. Anyway, in the second
half of the first millennium North Germanic finally broke off from the
continuum by developing a whole series of important innovations that
didn't spread to West Germanic.

Piotr