Re: [tied] Whence Grimm?

  Somewhere in a review in his 'Kleine Schriften' Kuhn is upset with
an author who, although he did accept Kuhn's thesis of an un-Grimm-
shifted Nordwestblock language recoverable from placenames, applied
it, in Kuhn's opinion wrongly, to place names east of the Weser-Aller
line, thus within the northern part of the Jastorf area, in Kuhn's
(and many others') interpretation the Urheimat of Germanic. The
placenames in question are composite, with eg a first part with an
initial p-, identifying it as non-Germanic, and a second part which
is Germanic. Kuhn thinks these half-Nordwestblock placenames in the
Jastorf area are evidence of a back-colonisation from the conquered
Nordwestblock.

I'm not so sure. As I showed earlier with a list of words in p- from
Feilberg's dictionary of the dialects of Jutland, that area must have
spoken another language before they were colonised by Germanic-
speakers in the last half of the first century BCE. The placenames in
the northern (in Germany) part of the Jastorf area that upset Kuhn
would point to the same, that this area was colonised by Germanic
speakers too. That leaves the southernmost part of the Jastorf area,
a German province that begins with Th..., as the home of that
Germanic earmark, the Germanic sound shift.

According to Peschel: Suebi, Marcomanni, Hermunduri that area at that
time experienced an influx from the Przeworsk, or Oder-Warthe
culture. Something that sets their graves apart is that men of the
elite are buried with their weapons, as if they were going to need
them after death. I wonder what kind of religion they had.

So, perhaps one should now try to assign the various components of
the Germanic vocabulary to "southern Jastorf" and "Przeworsk"
respectively. Since the Przeworsk culture must have been the
dominating one, basically there are two possibilties: Germanic, the
result of that mix, is:

1) Przeworski on a Jastorf substrate

or

2) Jastorf with loans from Przeworski

I am reminded of the river Tanew, possibly < *danew- which Piotr
brought into the discussion a long time ago. Now as far as I know,
Przeworsk didn't stretch all the way to the Tanew, but was in contact
with cultures that did. If there is a connection the Grimm sound
shift was a speech habit the Przeworski's brought into this new
culture.

Now the question is whether I continue with this quest, Oder Warthe?

Torsten