On the periodisation of early North Germanic (AAM/Post-Print) (original) (raw)

The Diachrony of Definiteness in North Germanic

2021

Tables and Figures Tables 1 An overview of NPs in North Germanic 5 2 Icelandic case inflection in bare nouns and definite nouns 6 3 Faroese case inflection in bare nouns and definite nouns 6 4 Stages and contexts in the grammaticalization of the definite article (after Skrzypek 2012:49) 30 5 The definite article paradigms in Fering (Ebert 1971b:159) 32 6 The suggested global cycle of definite articles (Carlier and Simonenko 2016:10) 37 7 Stages and contexts in the grammaticalization of the indefinite article (after Skrzypek 2012:53) 42 8 The inflectional paradigm of (h)inn 46 9 Definite nouns in

From "Palaeo-Scandinavian" to "Transitional Scandinavian" and "Old Norse"

Terminological confusion abounds concerning the classification of ancient North Germanic languages, both vis-à-vis chronology and dialect diversification. Qualifiers such as "Proto-/Primitive", "Ancient", "Common" and "Old", as well as "East/West" are combined with the labels "Scandinavian", "Norse" and "Nordic" in ways that can be ambivalent, misleading, or even contradictory. Most inadequately, there is no agreement on how to refer to forms reconstructible for the era of colouring umlaut CE 475-ca 650 and vowel quantity reduction CE 475-ca 900, forms which must have differed significantly both from those of the preceding period and from those attested in the late medieval dialects which followed. Weighing up the merits and drawbacks of different labels used so far, a terminology is proposed that could resolve ambiguity and facilitate a scholarly discussion on umlaut and syncope, and on the dialect diversification of North Germanic:

Isolated Lexical Items in North Germanic : The Pre-Indo-European Scandinavian Lexicon

Lexicon. -The Germanic Lexicon contains numerous words of unknown or obscure origins which, in all likelihood, seem to reflect the impact of a pre-Indo-European substratum. This paper aims at analyzing the specific case of North Germanic from this perspective, on the basis of a list of probable pre-IE Danish words (most of them common to all the North Germanic languages). Moreover, it exposes some theoretical rules in order to detect substratal words, and criticizes some commonly admitted principles of etymologization in historical linguistics.

CELTO-GERMANIC Later Prehistory and Post-Proto-Indo-European vocabulary in the North and West

Celto-Germanic: Later Prehistory and Post-Proto-Indo-European vocabulary in the North and West, 2020

Synopsis This book is a study of the inherited vocabulary shared uniquely by Celtic, Germanic, and the other Indo-European languages of North and West Europe. The focus is on contact and common developments in the prehistoric period. Words showing the earmarks of loanwords datable to Roman times or the Middle Ages are excluded. Most of the remaining collection predates Grimm’s Law. This and further linguistic criteria are consistent with contexts before ~500 BC. The evidence and analysis here lead to the following explanatory hypothesis. Metal-poor Scandinavia’s sustained demand for resources led to a prolonged symbiosis with the Atlantic façade and Central Europe during the Bronze Age. Complementary advantages of the Pre-Germanic North included Baltic amber and societies favourably situated and organized to build seagoing vessels and recruit crews for long-distance maritime expeditions. An integral dimension of this long-term network was intense contact between the Indo-European dialects that became Celtic and those that became Germanic. The Celto-Germanic vocabulary—like the motifs shared by Iberian stelae and Scandinavian rock art—illuminates this interaction, opening a window onto the European Bronze Age. Much of the word stock can be analyzed as shared across still mutually intelligible dialects rather than borrowed between separate languages. In this respect, what is revealed resembles more the last gasp of Proto-Indo-European than a forerunner of the Celtic–Germanic confrontations of the post-Roman Migration Period and Viking Age. This 2020 edition puts into the public domain some first fruits of a cross-disciplinary research project that will continue until 2023. https://www.wales.ac.uk/Resources/Documents/Centre/2020/Celto-Germanic2020.pdf

Filologia Germanica - Germanic Philology 9 (2017)

Scientific Committee: Letizia Vezzosi - Coordinator; Rolf H. Bremmer Jr; Concetta Giliberto; Patrizia Lendinara; Martti Mäkinen. Editorial Board: Patrizia Lendinara - Editor-in-chief; Verio Santoro; Marina Buzzoni; Letizia Vezzosi., 2017

Le lingue del Mare del Nord - The North Sea Languages

Introduction: New perspectives on diachronic syntax in North Germanic

Nordic Journal of Linguistics

This special issue of Nordic Journal of Linguistics is dedicated to diachronic generative syntax in the North Germanic languages. With the introduction of generative grammar in the late 1950s the historical perspective became less prominent within linguistics. Instead, contemporary language, normally represented by the researcher’s own intuitions, became the unmarked empirical basis within the generative field, although there were some early pioneering studies in generative historical syntax (e.g. Traugott 1972). It was not until the introduction of the Principles and Parameters theory in the 1990s that diachronic syntax emerged as an important domain of inquiry for generative linguists. Since then, the study of syntactic change has added a temporal dimension to the overall enterprise to better understand the nature of variation in human language.

Wayne Harbert, ,The Germanic Languages (2007) C.U.P.,Cambridge

2009

A major, well-documented branch of Indo-European, the Germanic languages have spurned a number of comparative surveys over the years, beginning with Grimm's pioneering Deutsche Grammatik (where deutsch signifies Germanisch), through the works of Rosen, Hutterer, Nielsen, Robinson etc. But whereas these books are set in the philological tradition and tend to focus on the early periods, a new line of work is now emerging whose outlook is more synchronic and theory-informed. König and van der Auwera's edited volume The Germanic Languages (1994) has been the pioneer of this trend so far, with separate chapters dedicated to single-language surveys in partly historical, partly genetic order, and a uniform basic structure imposed on the individual chapters so as to ensure comparability (cf. Leuschner, 2004 for discussion). Starting from the same synchronic orientation, the methodology adopted by Wayne Harbert is very different: the basic structure of his book is provided, not by self-contained descriptions of entire linguistic systems, but by the fundamental domains of morphosyntactic organisation (viz. the noun phrase, the verb phrase and the clause), which are then compared systematically across the Germanic languages. A notable consequence of this approach is that all languages in question are treated ''on a par'' from a synchronic point of view (p. 3), regardless of space and time, with interesting and unusual juxtapositions as a result. The individual Germanic languages are thus made to appear as ''different variants on a common theme'' (p. 3), a perspective which is still quite unusual in the literature on Germanic. Although Harbert's chapters on the NP and the VP each start with historical preludes of their own (cf. below), most historical information is concentrated in the Introduction (pp. 1-20), which discusses divergences and convergences within the Germanic family (including brief discussions of SAE and typological classification) and also presents brief surveys of four genetic groupings: East Germanic, West Germanic, North Sea Coast Germanic, and North Germanic. Even in these sections, the focus is firmly on language-internal matters, with only an absolute minimum of external information given per language or group. Next come two relatively short chapters on the lexicon (pp. 21-40) and the sound systems (pp. 41-88) of Germanic. The remainder of the book then consists of extensive chapters on the nominal system (pp. 89-269), the verbal system (pp. 270-368) and the clausal syntax of Germanic (pp. 369-481), followed immediately by the references (pp. 482-504) and a subject index (pp. 505-510). The absence of a Conclusion may come as a disappointment to some readers, and although Harbert does not explicitly comment on it, it may be due in part to the encyclopedic nature of the book (cf. below). Surprisingly, Harbert seems to downplay this part of his achievement when he distances himself implicitly from the ''encyclopedic approach'' of earlier surveys (p. 1). While his book may not be an encyclopedia of Germanic languages, it is in effect an encyclopedia of Germanic language structures, and its very success at this task deserves being acknowledged. What, then, are the main strengths of Harbert's approach? One is the flexibility brought by the morphosyntactic focus, which allows for anything from a simple comparative enumeration of structures to in-depth, problem-oriented discussion whenever the author deems this desirable. Another strength is the impressive coverage of languages within the family. Not surprisingly, Harbert's book is almost identical on this point to König/van der Auwera's (1994), with the sole exception of the Germanic-lexified Creoles, which (naturally, given their non-Germanic structure) are not discussed by Harbert at all. The secondary sources on which his book is almost entirely based vary hugely in terms of breadth and depth per language, and obviously it would have been neither possible nor desirable to feature every language at each point in the book (one reason being that the Germanic languages ''are much more alike than they are www.elsevier.com/locate/lingua

Revising the History of Germanic Languages: The Concept of <i>Germance</i&gt

International Journal of Language and Linguistics, 2021

This paper puts forward a new division of the history of Germanic languages, taking into account the existence of three different historical periods (prehistoric, proto-historic, and literary) in the development from Common Germanic or Proto-Germanic to modern Germanic languages, analogously to the development of Romance or Romanic languages from Vulgar Latin (also called Proto-Romanic or Proto-Romance), in which three stages can be retraced: Vulgar Latin (prehistoric), Romance (proto-historic) and literary (historical). So far, only two stages have been considered in the linguistic history of Germanic languages, namely, the Common Germanic (not documented) and the literary Germanic languages (documented since the Middle Ages). Nevertheless, the history of both families of languages is similar in most aspects, so that the three aforementioned periods can be clearly recognized in both: a period of considerable linguistic unity, although poorly or not at all documented; a period of dissolution of this unity and fragmentation into several dialects not mutually intercomprehensible; and a period of full and intense literary production and official recognition of some of these dialects, now raised to the condition of culture languages. Due to this new historiographical division, the denomination Germance is proposed for the second of the three evolutionary stages of Germanic.