re [tied] Why did Proto-Germanic break up?

At 4:22 on Tuesday Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

>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.

Sed, o Petre, 'nescit uox missa reuerti'.

> >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 AD; 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

And (to take up the thread one step further on), what archaeological
(and maybe other) evidence is there for areal separation between the
various 'branches', unless it's the sea?

But then, I seem to recall that the names of geographical features in
the Western Isles of Scotland (a) have non-Gaelic(/non-Celtic) names,
which (b) appear to suggest a NW Germanic speech presence there in
the perhaps 200 years before the common era. Or is the date derived
from a view of the splitting up of Germanic?

Best wishes,


Gordon
<gordonselway@...>