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

At 4:22:57 PM on Friday, October 31, 2003, Gordon Selway wrote:

> At 2:34 yesterday afternoon GMT Jim Rader wrote:

>> Gordon <gordonselway@...>

>>> 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?

>>Given the Norse influence on Scottish Gaelic toponymy and
>>lexis in the historical era, how would you detect
>>prehistoric Germanic presence in the Hebrides? When you
>>weed out the loans that are obviously from a later
>>distinctively Norse era, what's left that looks
>>unmistakably Germanic?

> I am reporting someone else's tale, not my own (and
> perhaps it could have been made more explicit). I think
> the argument was that there had to be some Germanic speech
> if the Gaels took over Germanic names, rather than
> devising Gadelic ones of their own (as of course happened
> for some settlement and other toponyms).

But that takes us right back to Jim Rader's question: what
is the evidence that it happened prior to the Viking period?
Germanic toponyms in the Hebrides, even Gaelicized ones, are
not in themselves evidence of such a thing.

Brian