Re: Nordwestblock, Germani, and Grimm's law

> --- On Mon, 1/18/10, Torsten wrote:
> My point is that in order for two different forms to appear, seemingly affected and non-affected by some soundlaw, there must be a connection in the mind of the speaker between those two forms, ie. the soundlaw is alive and still functioning in his mind as a mark of a *sociolect*. And this is what I imagine happened in case of the incoming Gemani in NW Germay and Holland: they spoke a sociolect of a common language in which Grimm's law had already applied.
>
> *****GK: How would this differ from what I said earlier, viz., that the doublets remained as part of the developing "local" Germanic language because the Grimm-shifted incoming Germani mixed with the NWB-ers and in the linguistic interplay many of the old place names survived as part of the common stock, while the NWB'ers adopted the Grimm-shifted speech of the colonists. On this perspective the actual Grimm shift could have occurred in the colonizing area a long time before their invasion of the NWB territory.*****

So are you in agreement that NWB would have been speaking a language related to Germanic? Etymological nativization does require a close linguistic relationship. If their languages were distantly (or not at all) related, ie. opaquely to the layperson, there would be little motivation for NWBers to adopt Germanic soundchanges just because they were invading (no more than foreign components of English-based creoles will undergo GVS).

How close exactly even distinct primary western IE branches would have been at the time is another question...

A third option is that NWB and Germanic had shared these vocabulary items for a longer while (which could be via genetic affiliation, older encounters, or both of them interacting with a third source) but this may be possible to rule out if the distribution of the Grimm-shifted items is too similar to the unshifted counterparts (which I gather it is?)

Fourth (with similar falsification options) is the possibility that the doublets were formed by NWB speakers adopting originally Germanic names (same old *f *T *x > *p *t *k we see in Slavic or Finnic).

Fifth, it is also possible that Grimm's law *as such* was/had been spreding outside of Germanic proper into the NWB varieties, and the intermingling of forms is their own doing.

Sixth - just to go thru all the possible explanations I can think of - we can even combine the last two. Suppose at the time Grimm's Law was coming into form, some para-German offshoot was entering the area, with Germanic proper only settling in later? This clearly requires extra complication compared to Germanic itself being the culprit, but if we can find doublets that have an IE etymology but no real Germanic offspring, it might be arguable.

Oh BTW, do the alternations seen in these cases offer any evidence for the ordering of Grimm/Verner?

John Vertical