>>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).
You underlined that in Ariovist's time South & West of
the Limes there was no Germanized Germania. I retorted:
"of course". Now you reply to my "of course": "irrelevant".
What kind of discussion is this?
>I don't think so.
Then look up history texts dealing with the Germanic
colonization of Southern Germany; in which time periods
happened the "Landnahme" and became... German.
>No linguistic trace of Scandinavians there.
In the above paragraph I mean all the tribes that lived
beyond the Limes. Some of them moved to the South during
the "Völkerwanderungszeit", others didn't.
>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! But at the same time you say those people moved to what's
now Germany (esp. Southern Germany, Switzerland, Tyrol etc.).
In addition you say some Bastarnians didn't move and managed
to preserve their "Proto-Oberdeutsch" language in Poland.
Now go on, substantiate your assumption ("proposal"): what
hints, attestations etc. are there for such a thesis? The
fact that the German language also generated Yiddish isn't
contested by anybody. Your topic is: (A) the Bastarnian group
that never left the Przeworsk geogr. area & (B) this group,
*there*, either became Jewish or passed their idiom on to
a Jewish group, the new idiom being called Yiddish.
>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.
Again: all these tribes, once that they stayed in
Southern Germany, are irrelevant for your thesis.
Relevant are only their "nephews", who went "back"
to Poland one thousand and two or three hundred years
later. Nobody denies that. Pls. do develop your theory
on the Bastarnae who never migrated from Poland. :)
>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.
Jewish merchants in Poland anno Domini 0-until-100?
At that: speaking a protodeutsche Sprache? Geht's noch? :-)
>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.
I understood this assertions many posts ago. It's you who
doesn't understand what I understand, and it's you who
are not able to understand why this idea can't work when
a bunch of conditions can't be fulfilled. In the Mittel-
and Oberdeutsch region of Germany it was the most normal
thing on earth that the population could develop, out of
old Germanic dialects (or only based on Bastarnian :))
the language called deutsche Sprache (lingua teodisca) -
no wonder: a compact, linguistically homogenous population
of a few million people. But to assume that some small
group, lacking any institutions, written culture, influence
and whatever, in a "sea" of Slavs stayed there as an
"intact" group, incognito, and went through all linguistic
transformations at least 10 centuries, as though their
"scholars" had periodic summits together with some
"Duden committees" in Germany, well that's (I better
censor myself :)).
You don't realize, OTOH, that the assumed tiny groups
of Jewish merchants, which really had that mobility and
contacts with different populations, exactly for this
reason (and, on top of that, being in command of several
major languages, e.g. Greek, Latin, Hebrew, common
Slavic, common Turkic), couldn't depend on an isolated
Bastarnian group that barely could keep contacts with
Germans living 1,000-2,000 km away. A simple logic must
prompt you understand that rather the opposite could have
been plausible! That merchants coming from the South-West
might have been in good command of the German spoken
in those early epochs and thus were able to teach that
vernacular anyone between the Elbe and the Ural range. :)
(By and large, this fits the theory by those scholars
who maintain that Eastern Jews and their Yiddish is a
South-Western, Rhineland, German population that moved
to the East; yet way after AD 1,000.)
>You asked me to explain my proposal, and that's what I did .
But don't explain the Ariovit's adventures, don't
explain the arrival of Germanic tribes in Southern
Germany. Do explain how Jews learnt their German Yiddish
in their contacts with Bastarnians who never migrated
from that Pzhevorsk area! This is your topic in the
discussion.
>Yes, that is the standard theory and you believe in it
>strongly.
Because I have no alternative given, to it. (I mean, in a *real*
word, not in the realm of fiction literature, of course).
>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.
I meant the ENTIRE PERIOD OF TIME, starting with your
darned Ariofick and ending with the DISAPPEARANCE OF ANY
MENTIONING OF THOSE BASTARNAE: about FIVE centuries.
>I hope at least the ouzo was good.
You know, after a while, any drinker gets sober (until
the next "ouzo"). But those who are mit der Muffe jepufft
can't change their situation.
>Yes! In Ariovist's time! Exactly! Finally George gets it!
Not "finally": I got it from the first messages I read.
But I thought the man must have chosen some awkward
sentences and phraseology, giving the impresion of
confusion. But now I see that you really mean that some
Germanic fellas spoke Oberdeutsch in Ariovist's time.
>(Not, in the next posting he'll be ranting and raving
>again about what he thinks I have said)
I won't: I see that I must adjust my impression of
the Ariovist's fan, and everybody avec son plaisir,
mit seinem Steckenpferd! It's a free country. :-)
>No, they were predecessors of Oberdeutsch and Yiddish and
>may have differed greatly.
Of course, nobody denies that (and this is taught in
elementar school here in Germany, where the earlier
Völkerwanderungszeit is perhaps of a greater interest
than in Denmark). But predecessors here, not there, in
Poland. Germanic languages spoken 100 years BCE and
100 years CE have *all* of them the same relevance
to what became 1500-1800 years later on as the Mundart
called Yiddish.
>Zzzzzz.
Then start an opinion poll: ask all the members of cybalist -
how many agree with your assumption and how many don't.
>They traded with the Bastarnians.
They traded thousand times more with real Germans in
Germany! Read German history. Read of Worms, Speyer
and other cities of the first 1-2-3 centuries after
AD1000. How on earth can you assume that a non-extant
Germanic population in Poland would have taught German
a class of merchants and scholars who had at the same
time some of the highest levels of culture in that
European era? Look up facsimiles of the books in the
possession of those communities.
>They would have been represented in the motley army
>Mithridates sent to attack Italy through the Balkans,
>of which the main part was Bastarnian.
You talk all the time of situations and peoples
who had lived thousand years before the epoch which
is relevant to Yiddish speaking Jews. To you, this
enormous time gap doesn't mean anything (as though
you were a fan of Fomenko and Illig :)).
>According to Wexler, that theory is fantasy.
Of course it's a fantasy to any Jew who believes that
the whole Jewry is of ancient Yahudim descent. This
is why many scholars also say that the conversion
in Khazaria was minimal, and relevant only for a
part of the upper crust. Everybody knows that.
>>Yeahs sure, and the earth is a disc. :-)
>
>Is that your new theory?
It's yours, not mine. Your disc's name is ... Bastarnae
contemporaries of Ariovist.
>Bastarnian of the 1st cent BCE was as precursor of Hoch- and >Mitteldeutsch = High and Central German, in my proposal.
Nobody will contradict you, since virtually any other
Germanic tribe of the same epoch could have been the
ancestor of medieval and modern German. You insist on
this because some major groups that lived for a while
in territories neighboring the Elbe indeed moved to
Germany, and South Germany and beyond (common knowledge,
illustrated with maps in manuals for the 5th grade
Hauptschule here and in abridged manuals for the history
of the German language or history of the German "reich").
>Yes. Most of them were illiterate, if you can believe that?
How the heck can an illiterate group teach convince
a literate group adopt its coarse idiom?
Wexler:
>he mentions multilingual Jewish merchant travelers
You see? Multilingual.
>traveled between Western Europe and China via Kiev.9
You see? Western Europe! In Western Europe they were
able to have conversations in Frankish and Suebian.
>It is difficult to determine the extent to which these >peregrinations led to permanent Jewish settlements
Of course, since it was not enough, it can't be enough
for a such enormous change (switching from a national
language to another) only by some merchants, but neglecting
rabbis, neglecting groups of immigrating German Jews
and German Christians from the "Reich". This is why
Wechsler inserted "it is difficult", since he must have
been a no-nonsense commentator.
>though in the Slavic lands traversed, Jewish settlements
>came into existence by the 11th century, e.g. in Regensburg,
>Erfurt, Äernihiv and perhaps PrzemyÅl.
You see? Regensburg! Erfurt!
>Local sources also record the presence of Jews in West Slavic lands
>by the 9th-10th centuries.10
Of course! But Wexler doesn't dare say: "Yiddish-speaking
Jews". Only Torsten has that courage.
>A Hebrew letter composed in Saloniki perhaps in the year 1000
>speaks of a monolingual Slavic-speaking Jew from the East
>Slavic lands.11
You see? Wexler quotes a source saying some Jews in the
Slavic area were "monolingual Slavic-speakers". Is there
any source attesting in Poland rests of German(ic)
populations in the same period?
>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.
By Ashkenazic Jews he means German Jews (Jews immigrating
from Germany), while, in this context, keeping mum on the
numerous East-European Jews, the genuine Ashkenazim of Khazar
extraction.
>It is unlikely that many Jewish communities in the Ukrainian
>lands could have survived the destruction of the Tatar
>invasions in the 13th century;
Why unlikely? Even Tatars became Jews; some of them. QIrIm-
tatardzha is virtually the same dialect as that one spoken
by the Caraites and by those Tatars who were colonized in
Poland and Lithuania.
>The linguistic evidence gathered here
> (...)
>In other words, Jews were present in Eastern Europe before the
>German Ostsiedlung started.
Of course. The presence of *west-European* Jews (from
the Frankish Empire, from Italy, from Spain, as well
as from the Byzantine Empire). But these authors (with
the relevant exceptions) are very cautious towards the
really Ashkenazic group, that in the 10th century still
had a rest of a state, a former Eurasian superpower,
Khazaria.
And the topic is - whenever talking of the Yiddish
language - how *this* group managed to switch from
Old Turkish to Yiddish German, and where this happened,
in which period of time.
>Wexler assumes they would have
>spoken Slavic, but he has presents no evidence that they
>couldn't have spoken Early Yiddish.
Of course he couldn't: at that time it was impossible
for Yiddish to have been "born". It had to "wait" until
the deutsche Sprache itself, at home, in Germany, first
arrived at the appropriate stage of transformation.
And, although German Jews were not as numerous as those
semi-anonymous in the East (Ukraine etc.), they were in
real command of real German dialects, no doubt about
that. And the main theory is based on them; this is why
in the mainstream perception Ashkenazic Jew has the
meaning German Jew; this theory saying that in a period
betw. the 13th-16th century these Jews were in a
migration (due to pogroms, during the Crusades, and
the great epidemies), to Bohemia, then to Poland etc.,
where their population got bigger, millions. The other
theory says the East-European Jews were initially
another linguistic group sharing the same faith, and
that this group switched the language under the influence
of groups/masses of colonists/immigrants from the
West (Jewish + Christian Germans). But all this happened
towards the middle of the 1st millennium.
>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?
You didn't understand, because some aspects of the
discussion seem difficult to you, although you are
aware of myriads of details. You do not understand
that all dialects that developed into the so-called
German language were 1,000-1,500 years earlier than
MHG as different as is is your Danish compared with
Oberdeutsch: you say (I assume) hviid, and der Ober-
deutsche say [vais] or [voas]. The entire hv- cluster
ist futsch. Das sind sprachhistorische Merkmale. If
they don't mean anything to you, well then any theory
is true. :)
>When did I say something idiotic like that?
Re-read your own posts.
>Oh yes, he does. He is full of doubt, unlike you.
You don't understant a iota of what Wexler says,
and what he doesn't say and why he doesn't.
(And I dare say the Jewish world is a terra
incognita to you, too.)
>Like the Bastarnians in Przeworsk.
It is here the place/moment where/when your judgment
runs astray, and you can't understand that: your
Bastarnae might have been everything you say. Perhaps.
But at the time when the Jiddische Sproch evolved,
there were no Bastarnae whatsoever in the Jewish
world. They merely were, perhaps (we don't know
exactly), a part of the ancestors of a part of
the German population. That's all. Everything
else is bunkum, malarkey, until you find evidence.
The "Yiddishization" of a certain European Jewry
has various other explanations that more or less
fit, since there are lots of evidences (and whole
lotta traces in the very language).
> Thank you for the RD article.
You're welcome.
>Would you like to switch the subject to something you feel
>more comfortable with? We can do that.
This is the last time I give you a reply, so don't worry.
> No, you asked me to explain my proposal which takes place in Ariovistus' time.
No. You can't concentrate on the content of my posts.
I asked explanations on those Basturds who stayed
"back home". For those who moved to Germany, I have
whole lotta explanations, written in German, or
taugh in German by university professors whose
Vorlesungen I can attend, getting out of the bed
and going a few hundred of yards and enter the
appropriate premises. Note that I don't make any
Fisimatenten concerning the history of your language
and Denmark, but you teach me about my own ancestors,
who might have really lived in Przeworsk. :-)
>Yada-yada-yada.
Depperter Depp.
>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?
Don't ask me, ask the community here. They'll tell you.
>Yes, that is the standard theory.
How the heck can it be standard theory (you repeat it
for the n-th time), when you state above it's "science
of your imagination"? Merkst Du was?
>Yes I did because I've written appr. 15% of the postings myself.
I wrote "direct link". Where the is the direct link
between Bastarnian and Yiddish? Nowhere. On top of
that nobody knows how Bastarnian was, in order to
infer conclusions that Bastarnian was sort of an
ancestor of Althochdeutsch (Althochdeutsch was
really a German spoken around the Alps in the
Alemanian-Suebian and Bavarian region and has a
continuum up to nowaday's German in the same
region).
So you wrote whole lotta posts, but nothing about
what you've been requested to write.
>In what German dialect does 'Geschlecht' mean "Adelsgeschlecht"?
It depends on the context. Geschlecht means "gen(u)s",
"clan", "tribe". The first meaning that crosses your
mind is "sex", because you learnt *modern* German
and because the primordial meaning vanishes: lineages,
genealogies in connection with *civil rights* in the
society don't play a role any longer.
But if your knowledge of German is at an advance level,
you should be able in a quarter of a second to grasp
everything in the appropriate context in order to
be sure: is it "lineage" or is it "sex"?
>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.
Perhaps in Denmark you aren't aware of the extent
of the German cultural impact in the early medieval
periods, and especially after the important waves of
migrants from Germany and Netherlands esp. starting
in the 12th-13th centuries. And the tremendous importance
of the German inheritance law: only one brother could
inherit the farm, all the others either accepted being
his underlings or had to go away. Germany always
had big diasporas (at least every seventh American
has German extraction). City culture in medieval East
Europe was the work of Germans and Italians. Kings
and dukes there encouraged waves of such immigrants
from the West.
>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 see! :-) If you're fond of protochronisms,
why aren't you attracted by the idea of Sarmatian
ancestry of the Slavic upper crust (an idea that
was or has been popular in Poland, Russia, Ukraine,
Croatia). Sarmatians were proud and efficient
warriors, who brought to the Roman empires various
techniques and military customs, unlike "your"
Bastarnae, a quite anonymous, temporary collection
of backward hinterwäldlerische Germanic rubes.
>to the consternation of the Germans
Yea sure. Most Germans give a darn. Most of them
don't even know that there is a tiny Dansk minority
in Schleswig, and it has an ethnic political party.
To most Germans all Northerners "an der Waterkant"
are "Fischköppe". :^) And to the "Fischköppe" all
Southerners are "Seppel".
>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,
But Willy von Hohenzollern had Suebian-Alemanian ancestry,
that is, he was a genuine... Bastarnian. So, pay heed! :)
>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.
Then be placated by the idea that earlier, when
they had been "Indo-Europeans", they had lived
in Tartaria, around the "Khazar Sea", around the
Aral and in Kurdistan.
George