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From Very Early Germanic and Before Towards the “Old” Stages of the Germanic Languages

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From Very Early Germanic and Before Towards the “Old” Stages of the Germanic Languages F. Plank, Early Germanic 1 FROM VERY EARLY GERMANIC AND BEFORE TOWARDS THE “OLD” STAGES OF THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES 160,000+ years of human population history summarised, up to ca. 10,000 Before Now: Journey of Mankind: The Peopling of the World http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/ The origin of Language and early languages – fascinating questions and challenges for geneticists, palaeontologists, archaeologists, physical and cultural anthropologists. Alas, this is not something historical linguists could do much/anything to shed light on. F. Plank, Early Germanic 2 No speech acts performed by early homines sapientes sapientes have come down to us to bear witness to their mental lexicons & grammars. From human fossils nothing can be inferred about the linguistic working of brains and little about the organs implicated in speech. Speech acts were given greater permanence through writing only much later: from around 3,200 BCE in Mesopotamia as well as in Egypt, from around 1,200 BCE in China, and from around 600 BCE in Mesoamerica. The technology for actually recording speech (and other) sounds was only invented in 1857. F. Plank, Early Germanic 3 What cannot be observed must be (rationally) hypothesised. The standard method in historical linguistics for rationally forming hypotheses about a past from which we have no direct evidence is the comparative method. Alas, the comparative method for the reconstruction of linguistic forms (lexical as well as grammatical) only reaches back some 8,000 years maximum, given the normal life expectancy and recognisability limits of forms and meanings. And it is questionable whether constructions can be rigorously reconstructed. The comparative method consists in observing systematic differences (not identities!) between languages and suggesting plausible stories to account for how such difference could develop from earlier sameness. For example, long parallel lists can be drawn up of English words with /t/ corresponding to German words with /ts/: E toll, ten, to, town, snout, cat, sit ... – G Zoll, zehn, zu, Zaun, Schnauze, Katze, sitzen ... The meanings are either the same or can be plausibly connected (e.g., a town is or used to be an enclosed, ‘fenced in’ place of habitation). A historical story that would make sense of correspondences which are so numerous that they can be considered systematic would be as follows. F. Plank, Early Germanic 4 Let’s assume that English and German derive from a single ancestral language, with these words (“cognates”) being part of the shared heritage, acquired again and again by new generations. But how have they come to sound systematically different? The continuation of the story is that speakers of German, once they had split off from speakers of English, would begin to pronounce /t/’s as [ts] (relevant features would be [continuant] or [strident]). Then, after a period of applying a pronouncing rule with the effect of affricating voiceless stops (also affecting /p/ and partly also /k/: pound/Pfund, apple/Apfel, rump/Rumpf, elk/Elch, sickle/Sichel ...), and not hearing anybody pronouncing such words with a stop any longer in their own speech community, they would eventually restructure these words in their mental lexicons so as to have basic affricates. The reverse story of historical de-affrication – with /ts/ [ts] in the common ancestral language and with the English changing the pronunciation to [t] and eventually the lexical representation to /t/ – would make less phonological sense. Later loan words, such as ton/Tonne, taboo/Tabu, state/Staat, chat/chatten etc. would therefore be spared affrication, and sound the same in the two borrowing languages, as such giving no evidence of direct historical relatedness. F. Plank, Early Germanic 5 No other method for throwing light on the distant linguistic past is considered sound by experts – notwithstanding the numerous efforts of amateurs (who may well be experts in their own fields, such as genetics, palaeontology, archaeology) to trace the history of lexicons and grammars back further through the mass comparison of words or other such dubious ventures. Mass comparatists hope that the more words they find with similar sound and similar meaning, the stronger will be their case for a historical relationship between the languages compared. However, words which sound similar and mean something similar now will in all probability have sounded differently and will have meant something different in the past of each of the languages concerned, and are therefore unreliable guides into those earlier times when the languages compared would conceivably have been close family members and possibly even one single language. F. Plank, Early Germanic 6 The Journey of Mankind shown above assumes monogenesis: all exemplars of homo sapiens sapiens ever can ultimately be traced back to the same mother. There is substantial genetic support for this theory. What is hotly debated is precisely how other species came into play: now extinct, there formerly were Neandertals, Denisovans and perhaps further humans, and they demonstrably mixed and intermarried with “us”. It is an open question whether they had Language, in the sense of a system for the expression of thought and feeling and for communication based on a mental lexicon & grammar. But what does that mean for Language and languages? Can all languages ever spoken also be traced back to a single language spoken in our common ancestral community some 150,000 years ago, “proto-Human”? Is English, for example, the way it is because it is historically descended from proto- Human, allowing for lexical and gramatical changes that over time have distinguished it, or its more immediate ancestors, from other languages? Possibly, but not necessarily. New languages have been devised even recently, with no model to follow, namely sign languages of village deaf communities, and oral languages may equally have been invented or reinvented more than once in the past. Therefore, genetic monogenesis of homo sapiens does not necessarily preclude linguistic polygenesis – even disregarding the possible contributions of Neandertals and Denisovans. F. Plank, Early Germanic 7 Where does deep time seriously begin for historical linguists? Perhaps here: The Nostratic or Eurasian super/macrofamily Comprising these families (all or some – you choose): Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, Kartvelian, perhaps also Afroasiatic, (Elamo-) Dravidian, Sumerian, Etruscan, Nivkh, Yukaghir, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut. Member languages of this supposed superfamily are (now) located in Europe, North/Northeast Asia, Arctic; the supposed Urheimat: The Fertile Crescent. When was the supposed proto-language spoken? Meso/Epipalaeolithic, end of last glacial period (20,000 – 9,500 BCE) Established (?) by which methods? Comparative method and/or mass comparison, fantasy. Here is how the supposed superfamily may have split up into (supposed) families: from A. Bomhard, Reconstructing Proto-Nostratic, 2008 F. Plank, Early Germanic 8 The Common Indo-European speech community: the Sredny Stog culture (±4500–3500 BCE) of nomadic Kurgan (burial mound) builders, fast travellers on horse-drawn chariots spreading in all directions in several waves of migrations/invasions [from Beekes, Comparative Indo-European linguistics, 1995] F. Plank, Early Germanic 9 Competing IE Urheimat theories; current favourites: 1. Pontic-Caspian Steppe/Kurgan theory: unity until 4th or 5th millennium BCE 2. Anatolian theory: wave(s) of advance of farming, since 7th millennium BCE or earlier [J. P. Mallory, In search of the Indo-Europeans, 1989, p144] plus Out-of-India theory; plus Paleolithic Continuity Paradigm: “Old Europeans” themselves as the Proto-Indo-Europeans, not later immigrants; plus Sprachbund theory (Trubetzkoy); plus ... F. Plank, Early Germanic 10 How did the Proto-Indo-Europeans speak? What was their (mental) lexicon and grammar like? This fable about a sheep and horses they would have told something like this, as August Schleicher saw it in 1868: [Das] schaf und [die] rosse [Ein] schaf, [auf] welchem wolle nicht war (ein geschorenes schaf) sah rosse, das [einen] schweren wagen fahrend, das [eine] große last, das [einen] menschen schnell tragend. [Das] schaf sprach [zu den] rossen: [Das] herz wird beengt [in] mir (es thut mir herzlich leid), sehend [den] menschen [die] rosse treibend. [Die] rosse sprachen: Höre schaf, [das] herz wird beengt [in den] gesehen-habenden (es thut uns herzlich leid, da wir wissen): [der] mensch, [der] herr macht [die] wolle [der schafe [zu einem] warmen kleide [für] sich und [den] schafen ist nicht wolle (die schafe aber haben keine wolle mehr, sie werden geschoren; es geht ihnen noch schlechter als den rossen). Dies gehört-habend bog (entwich) [das] schaf [auf das] feld (es machte sich aus dem staube) Avis akvāsas ka Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram ā bhugat. F. Plank, Early Germanic 11 This is of course hypothetical, a text fabricated on then current hypotheses about the reconstruction of forms and on assumptions about rules of syntactic construction. As reconstructions changed, so changed this story. Here are two recent versions, based on the reconstructions of Frederik Kortlandt (2007) and Craig Melchert (2009) (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable): ʕʷeuis ʔiḱ:ueskʷ:e ʕʷeuis i ʕueli nēʔst ʔeḱ:ums uēit:, t:o kʷ’rʕeum uoḱom uḱent:m, t:o mḱ’eʕm porom, t:o tḱmenm ʔoʔḱ:u prent:m. uēuk:t ʕʷeuis ʔiḱ:uos, ʕetḱo ʔme ḱ:ērt ʕnerm uit’ent:i ʔeḱ:ums ʕḱ’ent:m. ueuk:nt: ʔiḱ:ues, ḱ:luti ʕʷue, ʕetḱo nsme ḱ:ērt: uit’ent:i, ʕnēr p:ot:is ʕʷuiom ʕueli sue kʷermom uesti kʷ:rneut:i, ʕʷuēi kʷ:e ʕueli neʔsti. t:o ḱ:eḱ:luus ʕʷeuis pleʕnom pēuk’t. Hⁿówis (h⁾)ékŵ ōs-kʷe hⁿáwej josméj hⁿwlh̥ ⁾náhⁿ né h⁾ést, só h⁾ékwomŝ derkt.̂ só gʷrh̥ ₓúm wóĝhom wéĝhet; méĝhⁿm ̥ bhórom; só (dh)gĥémonm ̥ hⁿṓkû bhéret.
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