Re: Origin of Proto-Germanic Distinguishing Features

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, darth.caton@... wrote:

> I can offer the beginnings of a testable
> hypothesis as to why Germanic has some features that seem strange
> relative to the other branches of IE.

<Snip>

> The putative difference between Germanic and the rest of IE as
> related to vocabulary is the subject of the thread that brought me

to

> this discussion group in the first place. Whether or not we

accept

> 30% as the number of non-IE words in some subset of Germanic, it
> stands that there are an anomalously large number of words that

are

> not IE, and I think most would agree, a larger number than in

other

> branches. I say this because I saw Piotr's claim to the contrary,
> but have seen no lists of such words for, say, Slavic or Greek or
> Italic.

>(I exclude Indic because there are a lot of non-IE words,
> but we know where those came from, i.e. Dravidian).

No! In the earliest Vedic Sanskrit, Dravidian loans seem to be
conspicuous by their absence! An Austro-Asiatic (dubbed 'Para-
Munda') source is suspected for many, but based on their form rather
than extant cognates.

> But vocabulary is not the only difference between the Germanic

branch

> and the other branches. Germanic languages are well-known for
> exhibiting certain notable odd characteristics. One of them is

the

> Germanic languages' much greater tendency to agglutination,

relative

> to most other IE languages (though this feature has appeared in

rare

> cases elsewhere in individual languages). Another more infamous

one

> is Germanic's preservation of IE ablaut, which happened because
> stress in Germanic moved to the initial syllable.

> Unlike most other
> branches, adjectives come before nouns,

Noun-Adjective: Celtic, Romance
Adjective-Noun: Germanic, Slavic, Greek, Indic

I'm not sure about Iranian. Farsi has noun-adjective, but what
about Avestan?

Adjective-Noun is seen as a consequence of the SOV word order, which
is very common in Nostratic languages, and is generally assumed to
have been the PIE word worder.

> and there is leveling of past
> tenses relative to other IE languages.

Russian (admittedly not typical of Slavic) has only one past tense
(unless you unite prefective and imperfective in a single system),
Classical Sanskrit dropped the semantic distinctions of the past
tenses. The two synthetic past tenses of Farsi are only
distinguished by a prefix, though there are other, analytic past
tenses.

Latin (or rather, pre-Latin) dropped the old imperfect and merged
the aorist and perfect. However, that doesn't guarantee that it was
ever restricted to having a single past tense.

You forgot to claim vowel harmony. There's a good deal of umlaut,
especially in Scandinavian. However, it's regressive in Germanic,
rather than progressive as in Finno-Ugrian or Turkicised Greek.

Of course, Welsh is also full of umlaut!

Richard.