immigration, Germanic and Indo-Aryan

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
> They might be old, but that doesn't make them Germanic. Place names
> etc which do not make sense in the language of those who live there
> are perceived by them as 'old', in contrast to those in their own
> language which are made up of recognizable elements.
>
> Cf. the end of Snorri's prologue, where gets into place name

research

> http://www.sunnyway.com/runes/prologue.html
> 'Odin kept by him the son called Yngvi, who was king of Sweden after
> him, and from him have come the families known as Ynglingar. The

Æsir

> and some of their sons married with the women of the lands they
> settled, and their families became so numerous in Germany and thence
> over the north that their language, that of the men of Asia, became
> the language proper to all these countries. From the fact that their
> genealogies are written down, men suppose that these names came

along

> with this language, and that it was brought here to the north of the
> world, to Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Germany, by the Æsir. In
> England, however, there are ancient district and place names which
> must be understood as deriving from a different language.'
>

Wow, that's pretty sophisticated. Snorri was already wary of folk
etymology, he seriously considered notions of language migration,
language adoption because of elite dominance, substrate elements, and
an "Asian" origin of Germanic. Of course, the immigration of Germanic
from the east was already pretty far removed in time from Snorri, a
few thousand years, so I don't want to give his opinion too much
weight as a testimony, but all the same, his statement is there.
Contrast this with India, where strictly nobody and no single line in
the whole of Indic literature refers to any proto-Indo-Aryan
immigration, as Elphinstone already observed in the 1840s and as has
only been confirmed since.

Kind regards,

KE