Re: [tied] Germanic

Mutual understandability is a concept hard to handle.

Examples :

1. Danish people are said to understand Swedish

but Swedes are said to hardly understand Danish.

2. Speakers of standard Arabic hardly understand

Algerian Rai singers but Algerians have no trouble

understanding standard Arabic films.

3. I know a Russian guy whose father is a Moksha Mordvin.

He told me his father was able to have "fluent" conversation

with another Hungarian prisoner of war.

One spoke Moksha the other one Hungarian

and they manage to understand each other.

Personally, I can hardly believe how this is possible.

4. My aunt who lives in central France sometimes comes to see my mother.

She feels like going abroad and

wonders when these dawn northerners will start speaking French.

the discontinuity is not strong, from my point of view.

My personal experience is that I can read Dutch and Spanish

and understand a high percentage of what is written

even though I have never studied these languages at school.

I think open-minded-ness, personal skills, context, gestures,

peri-linguistic pragmatics features enable understandibility

to arise in conditions where it is not obviously possible,

from a "pure" linguistic point of view.

Nobody is "totally" isolated,

but everybody has typical features.

Norse and Westic Germanic can exist

in the midst of other languages without disappearing.

----- Original Message -----

From: Rick McCallister

To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com

Sent: Friday, August 31, 2007 12:13 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Germanic

If Germanic goes back to 8000BC, then please account
for the fact that Germanic langauges were mutually
comprehensible until c. 1000 AD.
Unless you're going to make a Dixon-like argument that
Germanic is the product of ever fissioning and
refusing tribes, then your argument seems a bit
far-fetched. But even if you use Dixon, you'll still
have to account for why they didn't fuse with their
neighbors, I can't imagine ancient Germanics were that
isolated --even the Scandinavian chronicles include
Saami ancestors.

--- "fournet.arnaud" <fournet.arnaud@ wanadoo.fr>
wrote:

> > And to suppose "Germanic" requires to identify
> > which "Germanic" language is involved (ter
> > repetitas) ?
>
> ****GK: Were there already clearly distinct Germanic
> languages in 58 BC?
>
> ============ =
> A.F
> Proto-Germanic is a branch of PIE languages that
> separated from PIE
> at the least of the least 4000 years before -58 BC
> (And most probably at least 8000 years before -58
> BC)
> I can't believe it remained unchanged until -58 BC
> until we suddenly discover that Saxon, Frankish,
> Norse,
> Gothic are different around + 400.
> We have to try to know what kind of Germanic
> language(s)
> is involved.
>
>
> I disagree with this method that consists of
> creating
> catch-all words such as "Gauls", "Belgians",
> "Germanic"
> that are fuzzy and uncontrollable
> that in the end describe about nothing
> that allow all kinds of unfalsifiable theories,
> that overlook available data .
> etc
> This is not science.
>
>

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