On 2008-11-02 19:41, tgpedersen wrote:
> Neither the rivers of Poland nor the rivers of Northern Germany have
> undergone the Grimm-shift, so that shift, which defines Germanic-ness
> in languages, must have taken place somewhere else.
In Poland, some of them haven't, some have. It doesn't surprise me that
e.g. Drwe,ca (= Drewenz, one of the *druwontia: names), was not
affected, because it flows through parts of Poland thought to have been
inhabited by the Balts in Roman times. Some of the evidence is
indecisive (e.g. *f from *p would have been replaced with Slavic *p,
"undoing" Grimm, because the Slavs had no /f/ phoneme), but there are
also a number of names showing the effects of Grimm's Law.
Potr