Old Germanic Languages
OLD GERMANIC LANGUAGES HERBERT PENZL 1. EARLY GERMANIC 1.1 General Among Old Germanic languages we include: Gothic (§2), Old North Germanic ('Proto-Norse', §3) before its split into the Old Norse (ON) dialects, the 'West Ger- manic' languages such as Old English (OE, §4), Old Frisian (OFris., §5), Old Saxon (OS) and Old Low Franconian (OLF, §6), Old High German (OHG, §7). Compre- hensive research reports on Germanic languages without specific regional and time restrictions have appeared by Carl Karstien ("Altgermanische Dialekte"), Victor Michels ("Deutsch"), and Wilhelm Horn ("Englische Sprachwissenschaft") in Stand und Aufgaben (1924); in Götze et al. (1934); and in Streitberg et al. (1936). Many studies concern not only these individual attested languages but rather features shared by all or by some of them which we can thus attribute to an earlier reconstructed stage. Some early onomastic data, some Runic inscriptions cannot be easily assigned to any particular major Germanic dialect. In this first subchapter (§1) I shall deal with all these publications and those that involve reconstructed stages of, or within, Germanic. The character and status of reconstructed forms and sounds were infrequently an issue, rarely the whole concept of a reconstructed ancestral language like 'Proto- Germanic' ('Primitive Germanic', Urgermanisch), 'Common Germanic' (Gemein- germanisch) but frequently the assumption and grouping of specific intermediate proto- languages. Some scholars, however, like Pisani (1955), also van Coetsem (1969), avoided altogether references to 'Proto-Germanic'; other scholars, like Sparnaay (1961), criticized the concept of a monolithic proto-language without dialects. Maurer (1943) successfully attacked 'West Germanic' as an areal and tribal entity, within an analysis of the grouping and development of the Germanic languages but largely on the basis of Germanic tribal history and archeology; cf.
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