Re: That old Ariovistus scenario.

> > AFAIK communis opinio remains that Germanic is to be primarily
> > associated with Jastorf in the BCE period, and that other
> > Continental cultures become Germanic to the extent that Jastorf
> > moves eastward from the 4th c. BCE.****
>
> I don't disagree with that. I think Proto-Proto. ..Germanic came
> that way (perhaps) and Proto-Germanic was spoken in Przeworsk, in
> the sense that all the Germanic languages we know some contents of
> were descended from that.
>
> ****GK: That being the case, and since I'm not a linguist, I'll
> leave it to others to decide whether your "discovery" that proper
> Germanic only begins with Ariovistus is science or kookery in
> linguistic terms.

The communis opinio on the timing of that defining characteristic of the Germanic languages, the Grimm shift, has been adjusted slowly upwards, and now many believe, taking heed or not of Kuhn's observation that we can observe the Grimm shift place take place in the westernmost parts of later Germanic,
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/27873
that it took place in the last century BCE and that the until then solidly Germanic-speaking area, from Southern Scandinavia to Thuringia broke up, for no apparent external reason, into dialects. Glottochronology, which shouldn't be trusted on absolute age, but perhaps on relative age, tells us the Germanic languages broke apart approximately at the same time the Romance languages did. We know why the Romance languages broke apart: they were created at that time by a military expansion of Latin-speakers; it is tempting to reason the same thing happened with the Germanic languages (and if we don't, we can't explain why it happened).

> Though frankly, since we have no Przeworsk texts of any kind
> (original or cited) I don't understand how your "discovery" is
> anything more than a totally arbitrary assumption.

You have posited from the word go, that anything I assume and will ever assume in the future, is totally arbitrary.

> Nor do I see how it relates to your Snorrist views.*****

I don't know what words you invent mean. But here it is: the Roman expansion under Caesar and other field commanders in the area where later Romance languages are spoken is matched on the other side of the Rhine in the area where later Germanic languages were spoken by a number (at least two) with the Germanic(?) title of Wod-an- "army leader".

>
>
> Let me see if you understand this one: Everywhere the *xarud- name
> appears you find high percentages of haplotype I (Oppenheimer' s
> 'Ivan').

> ****GK: The Wikipedia "Croats" article suggests the haplotype I
> convergence

Haplotypes don't converge. They diverge from each other over time. They imply common inheritance.

> between Croats and Scandinavians is due to events which happened
> 30,000 years ago, not in the time of Ariovistus.****

30,000 years ago is the time that haplotype broke away from the rest. Since historians, also DNA historians by default assume peace and quiet and no major take over by a foreign male gene pool where they haven't heard of one, they automatically assume that everything is founder effect, ie. that those groups were distributed the way they are today because people moved into the areas we find them in today immediately after the last Ice Age. Thus it is a default assumption, based on no further data. However, a scenario in conformity with that presented by Snorri
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/pre/pre03.htm
('The Æsir took wives of the land for themselves, and some also for their sons; and these kindreds became many in number, so that throughout Saxland, and thence all over the region of the north, they spread out until their tongue, even the speech of the men of Asia, was the native tongue over all these lands.') would explain the distribution of haplotype I (there's a map of its distribution in the Files under 'Maps, The Orgs of the Brits').


Torsten