Re: Tudrus

From: Torsten
Message: 67119
Date: 2011-01-18

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "t0lgsoo1" <guestuser.0x9357@...> wrote:
>
> >The beginning of your post was all about my supposed belief that
> >Yiddish is Platt (for the 29th, 30th and 31st time), so I deleted
> it.
>
> No, you misunderstood.

I don't think I did.

> My idea is that Bastarnian must have
> been some kind of Germanic similar to other Germanic idioms
> in the sense that it must have lacked whole lotta phonetic
> transformations that made Germanic idioms of the 1st
> millennium evolve as Deutsche dialects of the 2nd millennium.

Okay, that is your idea.

> In this respect, Yiddish is too far away, whereas a remnant
> Bastarnian group there, in the virtual vicinity of Northern
> Deutsche dialects as well as of the Vikings, logically must
> have had some Northern influences; yet Yiddish don't seem
> to be in such a situation.

Bastarnian, before its speakers were chased out by Burebista, was spoken in the Poieneşti-Lukaševka area to the *southeast* of the Przeworsk territory. Whatever residual contact Bastarnians had with the Sciri language in Przeworsk would have been with its southern dialects. No contact with the northern ones.


> >The Germanic language Mitteldeutsch/Oberdeutsch arrived in
> >Swabia and Bavaria with Ariovistus and his Suevi.
>
> OK. But read texts in the dialects spoken by generations
> of the same populations many centuries later on, namely
> in the time of the Carolingian emperors: Althochdeutsch.
> Still an enormous difference if you compare OHG german
> and Yiddish.

Yes. And?

> (Low German is rather closer to it.)


> >And that is not just my proposal, this is the mainstream
> >position. On maps of early finds in Germania, there are
> >none south of Kassel. For Roman imports, this is known
> >as the 'Loch im Westen'. What you think of as the homeland
> >of your beloved Ober-/Mitteldeutsch is actually (in my
> >proposal) a Bastarnian diaspora (and ever since, they
> >wanted to go home to Moldova - boohoo ;-)).
>
> What are you talking about?

I am talking about the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariovistus
invasion which took place in the 1st century BCE.


> In the 1st-2nd-3rd centuries,
> of course there was almost no "Germania" south of the
> Limes.

Irrelevant. You should read up on history (and now you get a hysterical fit and add a whole Reader's Digest article about the 1st-2nd-3rd centuries situation).

> The invasions beyond the Limes occurred in a
> much later epoch, in the 5th-6th centuries, and the
> real colonization of South Germany was in the 7th
> century.

I don't think so.

> Not in Ariovist's time.

In Ariovistus' time, yes.

> Common knowledge that
> those who colonized South Germany, Austria, Switzerland,
> Northern Italy and Northern France had lived in Northern
> Germany, Scandinavia, Poland.

No linguistic trace of Scandinavians there.

> But it's a matter of enormous time gap and of distances
> of hundreds and thousands of km between areas. Goths
> who lived in Russia moved far away to Italy, France, Spain,
> Vandals and their associates, Alans, moved to Algeria,
> Tunisia and Libya. The same happened to Gepids, Langobards
> etc. You assume some Bastarnians stayed in Poland.

No, I don't. I believe in the standard result that the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przeworsk_culture
lasted until the 5th cent CE. And I propose that the upper layer there spoke Bastarnian, which was Proto-Hochdeutsch, ie. a language from which all later High and Central German dialects, including Yiddish, descend.

> OK:
> give us some details. And explain why all Germanic tribes
> moved south-westwards, and only Bastarnae preferred to
> stay there.

That was not the case. The Suevi, Marcomanni, Triboci, Nemetes and Vangiones, plus the Slavic Harudes followed Ariovistus south towards Alsace. Some tribes of the area followed later. Some stayed, but they all had a new upper class speaking Bastarnian.


> >32nd time. Wouldn't it be wonderful if I did, because then
> >you could argue against that with ease, instead of following
> >Torsten's complicated proposal?
>
> Torsten's proposal isn't complicated at all.

Since you haven't understood it yet, how would you know?

> His proposal is
> OK, provided that he demonstrates Bastarnae's staying there,

The (northern) Bastarnae had ceased to exist as an independent people, whoever still spoke it after the Germani vacated Przeworsk was either a Jewish merchant or part of a surviving Proto-Hochdeutsch speaking splinter group.

> keeping their Germanic idiom until a considerable mass of
> medieval colonists imigrated there became their nextdoor
> neighbors (either protected by the Teutonic Knights or by
> Polish kings) and prompted those Bastarnae learn... Deutsch,
> in order to become "up-to-date", and forget their own
> old-fashioned gibberish that couldn't have been pleasant in
> the German newcomers, Bauern, Handwerker, Kaufläute,
> i.e. Bach's, Haydn's and Mozart's ancestors. So that those
> Bastarnae *afterwards*, having their ancient Germanic
> and slavicized idiom ... "eingedeutscht", might have been
> in the position to teach their... Khazar "pupils". Even in
> this case: why should have been necessary for those
> Ashkenazes to be taught German by "Przeworsk Bastarnae"
> when there were those numerous German newcomers,
> including German Jews who could read "die heilige
> Schrift"? :-)

The Germanic idiom (Bastarnian/Proto-Hochdeutsch) that they kept would have been kept up to date by the trading network so that by the time of the Ostsiedlung it would not be much different from the MHG of the settlers.

> >Because, as I said, there was no Hoch- or Mitteldeutsch
> >speaking population in what is now seen as its homeland,
> >southern Germany,
>
> This is irrelevant, for God's sake!

Of course it's relevant. You asked me to explain my proposal, and that's what I did .

> Relevant is what happened
> and where in the 12th-13th-14th-15th centuries! I.e., after
> Walter von der Vogelweide and after Friedrich Barbarossa!

Yes, that is the standard theory and you believe in it strongly.

> In Ariovist's epoch, the South-Western part of today's Germany,
> Switzerland, Austria, Western Hungary and entire Yugoslavia
> was... "Romania"!

No, it wasn't. None of the South-Western part of today's Germany,
Switzerland, Austria, Western Hungary and entire Yugoslavia was yet Roman at that time, in the 1st century BCE. This is elementary history, and I'm really getting tired of your amateurish elementary mistakes.


> It was the backyard of the "SPQR"! The
> city of Augsburg (60 km west of Munich) was a "municipium
> romanum" called Augusta Vindelicorum (and it's doubtful
> that those Celtic Vindelici and Patavensi still spoke their
> Celtic dialects in that epoch. Germanic tribes were con-
> centrated in the North, and after 9 CE, when Varus was
> defeated by the former magister equitum Arminius, the
> Cherusc in Teutoburger Wald (somwhere between Osnabrück
> and Xanten), Roman attempts to occupy territories to the
> East (of the Limes) ceased. (Coincidentally, I saw yesterday
> a beautiful German TV documentary on those events, and
> the archeological sites over there, even one, discovered
> quite recently beyond the limes, and showing civilian life
> according to Roman standards.)

Thank you for the Reader's Digest article about developments in the 1st century CE, which is completely irrelevant to my scenario, which takes place in the 1st century BCE.


> But even after the Germanization of all of what became
> "Deutschland" 7-8 centuries later on, we can't talk of
> MHG and Yiddish.

In the standard proposal.

> There is another long timespan: about
> six centuries. (Your judgment is similar to a Greek
> acquaintance who maintains his Greek doesn't differ much
> from that of ... Homer. :))

I hope at least the ouzo was good.


> >before the Ariovistus invasion, and after that constant
> >migrations from Przeworsk to Southern Germany would
> >have kept stirring the pot.
>
> Of what relevance is this to your topic?!? Do you imply that
> Germanic people from Poland "exported" some Yiddish-like
> Germanic dialect to the Alps in Ariovist's time or in the
> 3rd-4th-5th century?

Yes! In Ariovist's time! Exactly! Finally George gets it! (Not, in the next posting he'll be ranting and raving again about what he thinks I have said)

> >By migrating from the Przeworsk culture to Southern
> >Germany, chasing off the Helvetii and making Caesar
> >nervous. Simple, huh?
>
> Then you must be convinced that Germanic idioms did
> not change between AD zero and AD 1400.

I'm not.


> So, you imply
> that Germanic tribes in Caesar's time spoke dialects that
> barely differed from what's called Oberdeutsch and Yiddish.

No, they were predecessors of Oberdeutsch and Yiddish and may have differed greatly.


> It is true that the carnival season already started, on
> November 11, 2010, but, come on, I hope you don't play the
> Kölscher Jeck with me! :-)

Zzzzzz.


> >Wrong.
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypsistarians
>
> What do these ancient worshippers have to do with
> people speaking German Yiddish between the 14th
> century and 2011? (I mean linguistically, not genetically.)

They traded with the Bastarnians. They would have been represented in the motley army Mithridates sent to attack Italy through the Balkans, of which the main part was Bastarnian.

> >I would reply to that if I knew what you were trying to say.
>
> Not all Khazars (i.e. populations of various extractions
> living in the khanate/kingdom of converted Khazaria)
> became Talmudist Jews. Some of them stayed *up to day*
> Caraite (they have their own communities even in the
> US). A hypothesis says that those three Kavarian
> warrior tribes from among the Khazars who led the
> Proto-Hungarian exodus from Ukraine around 896-900
> to Pannonia could have been "simple" Jews who opposed
> Talmudization of the mainstream (back home, around
> the Khazar king); tribes that were assimilated by the
> rest and christianized esp. after St. Stephen (1000) and
> other Hung. kings baptized all those tribal rests that
> either wished to stay "pagan" or adopted the Eastern
> rite of Constantinople. (BTW, not only presumably
> Jewish Khazars resettled along with the Proto-Hungarian
> confederates, but also... muslim parts of population;
> even after the founding of Hungary (then called "Turkey").
> For example, toponyms containing the word böszörmény
> is a hint to that (from < busurman = muslim).)

According to Wexler, that theory is fantasy.


> > but your speculation does,
> > Wrong.
>
> Of course it does: see all your parts of posting I
> cited above!

No it doesn't.

> >Remember that Bastarnian = Hoch-/Mitteldeutsch
>
> Yeahs sure, and the earth is a disc. :-)

Is that your new theory?


> >It didn't become Hoch-/Mitteldeutsch, it already was.
>
> Bastarnian of the 1st or 3rd century was Mitteldeutsch!

Bastarnian of the 1st cent BCE was as precursor of Hoch- and Mitteldeutsch = High and Central German, in my proposal.


> Wait for a few weeks until it's Rosenmontag, when this
> statement will be adecvate. :-)

Yawn.


> >That latter sounds about right, except it would go back further.
>
> I see. :)
>
> > 33rd time.
>
> And to no avail: "gutta cavat lapidem" doesn't work;
> you must be wearing a high-quality Sarmatian cataphract
> armor. :-)

And George is back in his 'Torsten thinks Yiddish is Platt' mania.


> >Third time: By invading Southern Germany.
>
> And "importing" thither their... Yiddish-like avant la lettre
> idiom. I see.

Yes. Most of them were illiterate, if you can believe that?


> >Physical contact through trade, from Magdeburg and Regensburg.
>
> Yes of course. But it depends how intense the contact
> was, how thorough. And, OTOH, Jews wishing to learn
> and to use German as their everyday's idiom didn't
> need any "Bastarnae" intermediary: Germans of all
> kind, from trade, from immigrants etc. were there,
> in close relationship for them, including German
> Jews, i.e. Jews who moved from Germany to the East.
> And that happened during a long timespan of *centuries*,
> yet thousand years later than all Germanic migrations
> from the North and North-East and East regions of
> Europe into the territories of the imperial "SPQR".
> It did not happened when Ariovist was struck by the
> mood to move back and forth geographically.

Yes, that is the standard theory which you adhere to.


> >>In a superficial way - which you seem not to realize.
> >
> >Ok.
>
> It is not okay: read old German texts and compare them
> with MHG and late MHG and NHG (e.g. Luther's). The
> differences are so big that one has to get special training
> in order to understand texts of the 8th-9th c. What German
> or Yiddish native-speaker understands the meaning of
> "ben zi bena, lid zi geliden, sose gelimida sin" without the
> help of Google, Wikipedia or a book containing the text
> and its translation? Despite its being perfect German.
> The time span between "ben zi bena" is shorter until
> the era when it became "(Ge)bein zu (Ge)beinen" (at
> least 3-4 centuries) than the time span between Caesar
> and Karl IV, the German king who gave some protection
> to Jews in the 14th century (and in whose time there
> existed that kind of German making possible for Yiddish
> to evolve).

Another Reader's Digest article on the standard theory.

> >Ok. Off-topic.
>
> It is 100% on-topic. Only that you don't see the relevance
> of that paragraph or you are... reluctant to admit you
> see it. Tertium non datur.

It was off-topic.

> >As Pekkanen points out, ancient writers stress that
> >the Bastarnae were numerous.
>
> Of course. Dacians and Thracians were n times more
> numerous, yet after the 6th century, nothing, nada,
> zilch. All of them became something else (Bulgarians,
> Yugoslavs, Greek, Romanians, Italians etc.). Or those
> proud Turkic tribes called Petchenegs and Cumans
> (Polovtsians), that controled vast territories, disappeared
> altogether as linguistic and cultural entities. Prior to
> them, their cousins or ancestors, the Avars to whom
> belonged much of today's Hungary, Yugoslavia, Slovakia,
> Czechia and Austria. And how many other examples.

Erh, okay.

> Yet Bastarnae stayed there like rock resisting slavization
> and, moreover, being the real Oberdeutsch-speaking
> Germanic group at least 1,000-1,200 years before
> lingua diutisca changed into Mittelhochdeutsch! And
> you are not joking, are you? :)

Why would they be Slavicized by their own douloi? The German-speakers in Austria-Hungary weren't.

> >The
> >http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Przeworsk_culture
> >ended in the 5th century CE. So it is irrelevant to the
> >scenario *you* want to talk about.
>
> I only repeated what *you*'ve been talking about post after
> post: namely that the *area* of the former Przeworsk
> whatchamacallit is relevant for your new-fangled
> Bastarnae turning Yiddish theory. If that history map
> kept at Wiki-Commons is correct, then that area is a
> part of the territory where Ashkenazic Jews adopted
> and developed the Yiddish Oberdeutsch dialect. But
> without Bastarnae.

Yes that is the standard theory which I grasped some months back.

> Show me evidences for the
> assertion that there Bastarnae survived as a German-
> speaking (Oberdeutsch-speaking) population until the
> 14th and 15th century.


> Show me the written German,
> Polish, Lithuanian sources (in Latin and in these languages).
> I don't know, perhaps they exist.

Wexler, pp 3-4

'Equally sparse are the non-Jewish references to Jews and their speech. The first such report of Jews in the Slavic lands and their use of Slavic was made by the 9th century Persian geographer ibn Xordāðbeh. Writing in Arabic, he mentions multilingual Jewish merchant travelers, known as 'Radhanites'. These merchants, though not necessarily residents of any Slavic country, traveled between Western Europe and China via Kiev.9 It is difficult to determine the extent to which these peregrinations led to permanent Jewish settlements, though in the Slavic lands traversed, Jewish settlements came into existence by the 11th century, e.g. in Regensburg, Erfurt, Černihiv and perhaps Przemyśl. Local sources also record the presence of Jews in West Slavic lands by the 9th-10th centuries.10 A Hebrew letter composed in Saloniki perhaps in the year 1000 speaks of a monolingual Slavic-speaking Jew from the East Slavic lands.11 In addition to uncovering the ocation of the earliest Jewish settlements, there also remains the problem of ascertaining whether these early settlements continued to exist up until the arrival of the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews. It is unlikely that many Jewish communities in the Ukrainian lands could have survived the destruction of the Tatar invasions in the 13th century; the Jewish settlements in Thrace and Macedonia probably also suffered decimation along with the general population as a result of the wars between the Bulgarian, Greek and Latin Kingdoms in the early 13th century. Moreover, the veracity of many of the accounts about Jews in the primary historical sourcesâ€"both Jewish and non-Jewishâ€"is open to question, since the events described were usually copied down many centuries after they took place and transmitted by copyists who often confused Slavic toponyms and glosses due to ignorance of the original languages.12 For this reason, the historian, Bernard Weinryb, was inclined to discount most of the early documents in reconstructing a Jewish presence in the Slavic lands (1957, 1962a, 1962b). I wholeheartedly accept Weinryb's call for caution when drawing conclusions from historical sources, but submit that had Weinryb been in a position to consider the linguistic evidence,13 he might have posited a Jewish presence in the Slavic lands before the 10th century. The linguistic evidence gathered here should give greater weight to the historical documentation that Weinryb saw fit to question some twenty-thirty years ago.'

In other words, Jews were present in Eastern Europe before the German Ostsiedlung started. Wexler assumes they would have spoken Slavic, but he has presents no evidence that they couldn't have spoken Early Yiddish.


> >Not 'only'. It's just a proposal.
>
> OK. But the proposal must be based on and followed by
> research and finding of sources that attest some traces.
> If no word about Bastarnae, then at least something
> like this: "Amongst us, there is a stubborn population
> speaking some kind of gibberish that sounds like lingua
> diutiska, but they aren't Germans of the kind we
> encounter in Quedlinburg, Magdeburg, Nürnberg,
> Passau or Salzburg".

No, because those people, because of the steady updates by trade from Germany would have spoken a dialect not much differet from that of the Ostsiedler.

> >Because they arrived in their new home, Southern Germany,
> >with the same army which brought the new Southern Germans,
> >ie Suevi and Bajuwari, there and they spoke the same language
> >by then.
>
> But the Bajuwari and Suebi of the 7th century did not
> speak the kind of German their inheritors spoke in
> the relevant times (7-8 centuries later on) for the
> emergence of Yiddish, then how on earth would Bastarnae
> have spoken "the same language" other 7-8 centuries
> earlier?

They would have spoken a predecessor.

> In your imagination, Germanic idioms spoken
> in the era of Cimbri and Teutoni were the same as
> the deutsche Sprache of the "ben zi bena" and the same
> as the deutsche Sprache of the Nibelungenlied and of
> Martin Luther's?!?

No, it was a predecessor.


> >It's high time you stop believing I believe Yiddish is not
> >MHG-descended and start arguing about what I actually
> >said.
>
> You got me wrong: I don't doubt that.

What don't you doubt; that I don't believe that? But then why do you keep telling me (now 34 times) what you think I already believe?


> But I'm shocked
> by your assertion, your conviction (though, aren't you
> kiddin' me? :)) that Bastarnians' brethren who moved to
> South Germany already spoke MHG!

When did I say something idiotic like that?

> That means that
> all phonetic transformations, all sound shifts that happened
> way later on already existed in their vernacular.

Yes, that is what that would mean if someone was dumb enough to state that.

> >Excellent George Knysh impression.
>
> Perhaps I'm his alter ego. :)
>
> >They didn't. The northern Bastarnians, the Atmoni and Sidoni,
> >had fled to the Przeworsk area, maintaining their speech
> >among the population there as an upper sociolect.
>
> I understand what you mean. But you seem not to
> understand why the heck that was impossible (without
> ... time traveling in a time machine such as the one
> H. G. Welles wrote about).
>
> >It already was (the predecessor of) Oberdeutsch.
>
> Of course predecessor of Oberdeutsch. But in a completely
> other way than you deem fit for your (absurd) theory:
> a process of transformations in a time span of about
> 12 to 14 centuries until, out of Mittel- and Oberdeutsch
> Mundarten, some microscopic "bud" of the future
> Yiddish vernacular evolved (coz Yiddish itself changed
> much until it became the one spoken by Isaac Bashevis
> Singer or Elli Wiesel).

Yes, that is the standard theory.

> >Oh, you are being sarcastic.
> >No, there were no Berlitz-Schools and Goethe-Institut in
> >Passau, Freising, Salzburg and Prague because no one spoke
> >any Germanic language in those towns at that time.
>
> Of course they didn't. But in the 12th, 13th, 14th century
> they did. And they even did speak sorts of German that
> got more and more intelligible to a German-speaker of
> the year 2011, especially when, along with Hochdeutsch
> knowlege, there is some dialectal knowledge of Ober-
> deutsch and Mitteldeutsch as well.

Yes, as time got closer to 2011, people's speech evolved into something that was intelligible to people in 2011.

> >Because, as the quote from Wexler's book pointed out, we
> >don't have much evidence from that time.
>
> Carloads of evidence after the 12th century.

You heard of the guy who was looking under the lamppost for a key which he knew that he lost elsewhere, because the light was better there?


> Wexler and all the other scholars don't doubt
> the way how Yiddish evolved.

Oh yes, he does. He is full of doubt, unlike you.

> The scarcity of
> sources and evidences refer to other aspects of
> the history of the east-European Ashkenazim.

No.


> To each school of interpretation, the language is
> clear: it stems from within the German (deutsche)
> population. And of course those tribes 6-7-8
> centuries earlier, contemporary of "your" Bastarnae
> also played a role: since they were the ancestors
> of the later "diutisk/teodisk" populations. Not all
> of them, but some, namely those who stayed forever
> in what has stayed Germany and hasn't become
> "Welsch" (French, e.g Franks and Burgundians, and
> Italian, Goths, Gepids and Langobards).

Yes, that is the standard theory.


> >But they were the cultured stratum. They had their poetry
> >and all kinds of material bling. How could German survive
> >in Austria-Hungary?
>
> Because German was the ruling class, die "Herrenmenschen"!

Like the Bastarnians in Przeworsk.

> There is no such thing as "Austrian" from the ethnic and
> linguistic point of view: they are Germans, Deutsche. Even
> if you compare the dialect of Vienna and Western Hungary
> with that of Munich - i.e., two extremities within the Bavarian
> dialect, compared to much of the German language, these
> seem to be one homogenous dialect, in spite of lexical and
> phonetic differentiations.

Thank you for the RD article.

> But on the other hand, all those areas that were surrounded
> by massive Hungarian-speaking populations, especially after
> the establishing of the so-called "dualism" (1867), were
> tremendously put under a pressure, so that most of them
> were Magyarized in few decades. Hungary still has a
> German minority of around a quarter of a million (in the
> mean time more numerous than the German population
> in Romania, of which perhaps over one half migrated to
> Germany since the fifties). Yet very few are in good command
> of German (unlike the Germans in Romania, who always
> managed to have their compact communities and *schools*
> and *religion* in German, which is of utmost importance -
> in contrast with those about 3 millions of Russia Germans
> whose German-language knowledge is poor to non extant;
> I don't know how many of them, perhaps over 1 million
> moved to Germany in the last 30 years or so).

Would you like to switch the subject to something you feel more comfortable with? We can do that.


> >No, cause there aren't any chronicles for that time.
>
> I did not ask you of Ariovist's epoch, but of the 11th,
> 12th, 13th, 14th, 15th centuries.

No, you asked me to explain my proposal which takes place in Ariovistus' time. And there aren't many chronicles for that time.

> I don't know them,
> since I never dealt with Poland's and Lithuania's and
> Silezia's and Bohemia's history in detail, but I know
> there is whole lotta stuff (now and then I enjoy
> reading an article or another or to watch good TV
> documentaries on such subjects that are available
> in Germany and Austria, since the whole medieval
> stuff belongs to the history of the "Holy Empire of
> German Nation", it's German history. "Digests" of
> it is taught in schools here, is common knowledge.
> The Czech saint Nepomuk is also venerated in
> South Germany and Austria. Prague was for a long
> period a... German city, incl. for a while the capital
> of the empire. At the same time it was one of the
> most important medieval strongholds of European
> Jewry).

Yada-yada-yada.


> >The thought hasn't occurred to them to connect that
> >dialect to Bastarnae.
>
> It can't occur to them, since they are scientists, i.e.
> they deal with the stuff in a no-nonsense, scientific,
> rigurous way, they can't afford to mix up epochs and
> events, much the less ignore linguistic evidence.

You mean like in short sentences without digressions? And if you want to accuse me of mixing up epochs and events (like you did between the 1st cent BCE and the 1st cent CE) or ignoring linguistic evidence, why don't you come out and say it, instead of hiding behind the scientists of your imagination?


> >You can't do long-distance trade without waystations.
> >Raststätten, you know. To use them, you need credit.
> >To use your credit with the locals, you must speak
> >their language.
>
> Of course. And this is documented for the relevant
> centuries (the MHG and NHG) centuries. That's what's
> relevant. What was earlier, 8+8 centuries earlier, is
> of no relevance to MHG and Yiddish.

Yes, that is the standard theory.

> You've seen various
> discussions, explanations on cybalist pertaining to the
> transformation and evolution of Germanic languages.
> Did you encounter any judgment any nexus to prompt
> you think Bastarnae's language can be put in a direct
> link to Yiddish, that is without the entire history of
> 12-14 centuries of Germanhood in the southern half
> of the German territory?

Yes I did because I've written appr. 15% of the postings myself.

> >Well, thank you. The rest of my theory is just as good,
>
> "When wishes were horses, then beggars would ride." :)

Bla-bla-bla. Facts?

> >Yes, but you don't have to talk to those you schlacht.
> >Which means there was no need for the Polish Szlachta
> >to use High German terminology, so why did they?
>
> I've got no idea who is right, but the link between Geschlecht
> in the sense of *Adels*geschlecht and the Szlachta is 100% OK.
> The Szlachta is the nobility, not the hoi-polloi. And
> Adelsgeschlecht does not mean... sex, nor slaughter, but
> "noble lineage, noble clan".
>
> >Szlachta is the entire nobility, not a single Geschlecht.
>
> ADELSgeschlecht! The semantic stress falls upon Adel =
> nobility, aristocracy. So, not any kind of Geschlecht
> (there is also Bauerngeschlecht, Patriziergeschlecht in
> the free cities with privileges from the Kaiser etc.).

In what German dialect does 'Geschlecht' mean "Adelsgeschlecht"?

...

>
> >You won't get off that easy. Why is the Polish Szlachta
> >using German(?) terminology? Because it is actually
> >Bastarnian?
>
> No, because of the tremendous medieval influence
> exerted by Germany (i.e. "the Holy Empire"). AFAIK,
> Polish also has the medieval term szoltys from the
> German Schultheiss, that is more known under the
> shortened forms: Schulze, Scholz (this one is South
> German) and Schulte (this one is North-German, Low
> German).

It doesn't make sense to adopt the central terminology of a profession from outsiders. The only situation that would happen is if the outsiders are present at the introduction of that profession.

> And the Poles passed it on to Romanians
> (esp. in the principality of Moldavia) sholtuz. In
> similar ways, due to similar medieval circumstances,
> certain German notions were borrowed by Hungarian,
> Croatian-Serbian, Romanian etc. E.g. the Hungarian
> word for "citizen" is polgár from Bürger, although
> Hungarian has its own word for Burg: vár (which is
> Indoeuropean, akin to *uer and to German Wehr-,
> wehren).

Yes, yes.

> Ask linguists specialized in Germanic and German
> languages if they deem a word Schlacht-, Schlecht-
> as possible at the Bastarnian level of linguistic
> chronology.

They would reject the question as irrelevant, since we don't know anything of the Bastarnian language apart from three names of their leaders. Besides I am a linguist by education myself.


> I myself doubt that. I assume that
> the transformation of a *slacht- into Polish Szlacht-
> would be no problem, but what about the ...
> semantic of it? The semantic link is the idea of
> "nobility, aristocracy". It is this element that fits
> Szlachta into... Geschlecht (Adelsgeschlecht) and
> not into "slaughter". (But I don't know: perhaps
> Polish lords linked the idea nobility to that of
> warriors whose chief dealing was dealing blows
> with the sword, spears etc. to the enemy who
> was thus ... slaughtered. On top of that, Schlacht
> means "battle". But this is again Deutsch: AFAIK
> earlier Germanic words for "battle" looked
> different. :))
>
> >Not true. Danish chroniclers since Saxo hate
> >Saxons/Germans with a passion. I know you can't
> >explain that to Germans, but I'll try anyway.
>
> Yes, but methinks the Wehrmachts and Waffen-SS
> invasion of Denmark in the '40s must have played
> a stronger role in the collective memory and
> resentments.

No, as I said, Danish historians since
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxo_Grammaticus
see the German as *the* enemy (beside the Swede).

> And a bit earlier, Denmark lost
> some areas to Germany (perhaps it resented
> losing Hannover as well).

We have never had Hannover, and nobody here resented losing German-speaking Holstein, other than perhaps the royal family. What they did resent was losing the once completely, then partially Danish-speaking Schleswig, to the degree the Kaiser Wilhelm was getting the cold shoulder at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredensborg_Palace
whenever the family (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_IX
had managed to marry off one daughter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_of_Denmark
to the king of England and another
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Feodorovna_(Dagmar_of_Denmark)
to the tsar of Russia) met there every summer, because the Germans were attempting to eindeutschen the Danes in Schleswig, which didn't happen, to the consternation of the Germans, since they believed the Danes would happily accept becoming Germans (there was a famous cartoon in a satirical magaziene here then: Kaiser Wilhelm had sent a telegram to the Royal family after having been to Fredensborg, to the effect that he felt as a 'Sohn des Hauses'; the cartoon, with the caption 'En Søn af Huset', was of the Kaiser sitting like a kid, and dressed as such, with his familiar Schnurrbart, at the foot of the throne, in a sort of arranged family tableau in the style of the time). I suspect Gustaff Kossinna's idea of picking Demmark as the home of all Germanic peoples came from some desire to placate the Danes, it doesn't fit the linguistic and archaeological facts.

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Torsten