Proto Germanic - a creole language? (Philological Room) Language Learning Forum

Proto Germanic - a creole language?
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a3
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26 July 2012 at 7:57pm | IP Logged

From the wiki article:

Quote:

The Germanic substrate hypothesis is an attempt to explain the distinctive nature of the Germanic languages within the context of the Indo-European language family. It postulates that the elements of the common Germanic vocabulary and syntactical forms that do not seem to have an Indo-European origin show Proto-Germanic to be a creole language: a contact language synthesis between Indo-European speakers and a non-Indo-European substrate language.
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Grimm's law was a profound sound change that affected all of the stops inherited from Indo-European. The Germanic languages also share common innovations in grammar as well as in phonology, Half of the noun cases featured in what are commonly regarded as the more conservative languages such as Sanskrit, Lithuanian or Slavic languages are missing from Germanic. ....... The Germanic verb has also been extensively remodelled, showing fewer grammatical moods, and markedly fewer inflections for the passive voice.
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The Germanic substrate hypothesis attempts to explain these features as a result of creolization between an Indo-European and a non-Indo-European language. Writing an introductory article to the Germanic languages in The Major Languages of Western Europe, Germanicist John A. Hawkins sets forth the arguments for a Germanic substrate. Hawkins argues that the proto-Germans encountered a non-Indo-European speaking people and borrowed many features from their language. He hypothesizes that the first sound shift of Grimm's Law was the result of non-native speakers attempting to pronounce Indo-European sounds, and that they resorted to the closest sounds in their own language in their attempt to pronounce them.
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More recent treatments of Proto-Germanic tend to reject or simply omit discussion of the Germanic substrate hypothesis. Joseph B. Voyles's Early Germanic Grammar makes no mention of the hypothesis, nor do many recent publications on the Germanic language family.

Nonetheless, the hypothesis remains popular in some circles, such as the Leiden school of historical linguistics.

It's a highly controversial and probably wrong theory, however I'm fascinated by the way how ancient languages interact. The part about Grimm's law is especially interesting.
Do you think this theory is in any way plausible? What other interactions to such extent in ancient languages do you know of?
On the other hand, think of how many borrowings Uralic languages and Finnish in particular have from Germanic ones - these may actually be non IE, if the theory is correct.

Edited by a3 on 26 July 2012 at 8:00pm
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Hampie
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26 July 2012 at 9:26pm | IP Logged

It depends on weather the loans are common PIE words.
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palfrey
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Message 3 of 4

28 July 2012 at 4:25am | IP Logged

I'm getting sidetracked here, but: The wikipedia article claims that "the theory was first proposed by Sigmund Feist in 1932." But this idea sounds very similar to one mentioned by Edward Sapir in his 1921 book, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. In chapter 10, we find:

Quote:

The geographical position of the Germanic languages is such (7) as to make it highly probable that they represent but an outlying transfer of an Indo-European dialect (possibly a Celto-Italic prototype) to a Baltic people speaking a language or a group of languages that was alien to Indo-European. (8) Not only, then, is English not spoken by a unified race at present but its prototype, more likely than not, was originally a foreign language to the race with which English is more particularly associated.

The footnotes further elaborate:

Quote:

Note 7. By working back from such data as we possess we can make it probable that these languages were originally confined to a comparatively small area in northern Germany and Scandinavia. This area is clearly marginal to the total area of distribution of the Indo-European-speaking peoples. Their center of gravity, say 1000 B.C., seems to have lain in southern Russia.

Note 8. While this is only a theory, the technical evidence for it is stronger than one might suppose. There are a surprising number of common and characteristic Germanic words which cannot be connected with known Indo-European radical elements and which may well be survivals of the hypothetical pre-Germanic language; such are house, stone, sea, wife (German Haus, Stein, See, Weib).

Perhaps Feist was the first to work out the idea in some fullness. But it looks like others had thought of this hypothesis before him.

Of course, this is irrelevant to whether the idea is correct or not. But it seemed a bit surprising, as I thought that Sapir's short book was well-known to those English readers interested in general linguistics. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding what these two (Feist and Sapir) were saying - perhaps they are saying different things.

Edited by palfrey on 28 July 2012 at 4:30am
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Aquila123
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Message 4 of 4

02 November 2012 at 6:43pm | IP Logged

An explanation for the diversity of Germanic might be that Indo-european was a wide dialectal continuum, and not a well delimited language, and that Germanic originates from the outer parts of this continuum.

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