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Northwest Germanic is a proposed grouping of the Germanic dialects. The Germanic languages are a group of related languages that constitute a branch of the Indo-European (IE Language family. It does not challenge the late 19th-century tri-partite division of the Germanic dialects into North Germanic, West Germanic and East Germanic, but proposes additionally that North and West Germanic remained as a subgroup after the southward migration of the East Germanic tribes, only splitting into North and West Germanic later. The North Germanic languages or Scandinavian languages make up one of the three branches of the Germanic languages, a sub-family of the Indo-European languages The West Germanic languages constitute the largest of the three traditional branches of the Germanic family of Languages and include languages such as English The Germanic tribes referred to as East Germanic constitute a wave of Migrants who may have moved from Scandinavia into the area between the Oder Whether this subgroup constituted a unified proto-language, or simply represents a group of dialects that remained in contact and close geographical proximity, is a matter of debate. A proto-language is a Language which was the common ancestor of related languages that form a Language family. The date by which such a grouping must have dissolved - in that innovations ceased to be shared - is also contentious, though it seems unlikely to have persisted after 500 AD, by which time the Anglo-Saxons had migrated to England and the Elbe Germanic tribes had settled in Southern Germany. For their language see Anglo-Saxon language. Anglo-Saxon is the term usually used to describe the invading Tribes in the south The Irminones, also referred to as Herminones or Hermiones, were a group of early Germanic tribes settling in the Elbe watershed and by the

This grouping was proposed by Hugo Kuhn as an alternative to the older view of a Gotho-Nordic versus West Germanic division. Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. This older view is represented by mid 20th-century proposals to assume the existence by 250 BC of five general groups to be distinguishable: North Germanic in Southern Scandinavia excluding Jutland; North Sea Germanic along the middle Rhine and Jutland; Rhine-Weser Germanic; Elbe Germanic; and East Germanic[1]. Ingvaeonic, also known as North Sea Germanic, is a postulated grouping of the West Germanic languages that would fork into Old Frisian, Old English The Northwest Germanic theory challenges these proposals, since it is strongly tied to runic inscriptions dated from AD 200 onwards.

The evidence for Northwest Germanic is constituted by a range of common linguistic innovations in phonology, morphology, word formation and lexis in North and West Germanic, though in fact there is considerable debate about which innovations are significant. Phonology ( Greek φωνή (phōnē voice sound + λόγος (lógos word speech subject of discussion is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning Morphology is the field of Linguistics that studies the internal structure of words In Linguistics, word formation is the creation of a new Word. An additional problem is that Gothic, which provides almost the sole evidence of the East Germanic dialects, is attested much earlier than the other Germanic languages, with the exception of a few runic inscriptions. Gothic is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths. Epigraphy (ἐπιγραφολογία from Greek ἐπιγραφή — "inscription" is the study of inscriptions or epigraphs engraved This means that direct comparisons between Gothic and the other Germanic languages are not necessarily good evidence for subgroupings, since the distance in time must also be taken into account.

Among the common innovations cited as evidence for Northwest Germanic are:

Postulated common innovations in North Germanic and Gothic, which therefore challenge the Northwest Germanic hypothesis, include:

However, as long as Northwest Germanic is not regarded as a distinct proto-language, it is possible to harmonize these two hypotheses. Holtzmann's Law is a Proto-Germanic Sound law originally noticed by Adolf Holtzmann in 1838. An early close relationship between Nordic and Gothic dialects does not exclude a later similar relationship between remaining North and West Germanic groups, once the Gothic migration had started in the 2nd or 3rd century.

There are also common innovations in Old High German and Gothic, which would appear to challenge both the Northwest Germanic and the Gotho-Nordic groupings. However, these are taken to be the result of the known cultural contacts across the Alps in the 5th and 6th centuries, reflected in the Christian loanwords from Gothic into Old High German. A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, a monotheistic Religion centered on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth A loanword (or loan word) is a word directly taken into one Language from another with little or no translation

Sources

References

  1. ^ Britannica 15th edition 22:642

See also

South Germanic is a term used for a number of proposed groupings of the Germanic tribes or dialects.
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