The collateral branches under *North in table A seem seriously faulty anyway. According to this table, Norwegian and Icelandic appear to derive from Danish, and presumably a line descending from West (Old Norse) has been omitted. Without dates or any more precise explanation, the whole tree is, to put it mildly, misleading. Table B gives dates, of a sort, and has Icelandic and Norwegian jointly descending from Old Norse with Swedish and Danish, but is otherwise, in my view, just as wrong. It also suggests that Swedish and Danish have remained unchanged for the last 1000 years, which anyone who has wrestled with medieval Swedish would find hard to credit. Table C seems to indicate that English is a modern branch of an extinct language, which immediately separated from all other "Germanic" languages, although there is a 100% reliability of this specific branch. I must be very dense, since I have absolutely no idea of what is being conveyed by this statement. The relationships between these (and all other) languages has to be of an intricacy which these skeletal trees do not begin to address. A study of the "Germanic" languages might start with The Language of the Oldest Runic Inscriptions; A Linguistic and Historical-Philological Analysis, by È.A.Makaev, first published in 1965. This work was translated into English from the original Russian by John Meredig, and published in 1996 by Kungl. Vitterhets Historia och Antikvitets Akademiens Handlingar, Filologisk-filosofiska serien 21. A prefatory note remarks: "Language barriers among linguists are more durable than the Iron Curtain or the Berlin Wall (Anatoly Liberman, "Scandinavian phonology", Scandinavian Studies 66: 232-3 [1994])." I admit to not having yet mastered Makaev's intensely learned 123 pages, and maybe never will, but suspect that many works commenting on Germanic linguistics prior to 1996 can be relegated to the back shelf. I adhere to a belief that any practical mind with an interest in probing the sense of Anglo-Saxon texts will find that entry via Scandinavia will recover more meaning than lugging along the ball and chain of modern English. Converting words and phrases into modern Scandinavian cognates (in my case, Swedish) causes Anglo-Saxonist cruces to softly and suddenly vanish away. Try The Viking Legacy, by John Geipel, David & Charles 1971. Tree of Knowledge Geipel's book is accessible and enlightening, and I have more in common with its author than might be suspected. He employs Schütte's term "Gothonic" for the proto-Germanic tongue presumed to have arisen in the early Iron Age, and suggests, following Feist and certain other authorities, that it began as a kind of mongrel "pidgin-Celtic", a mélange of linguistic elements from east and west, perhaps resembling present-day Swahili in its genesis. (Pp. 8 & 16). anglo-saxon text manuscript |
