Language Contact and the Origins of the Germanic Languages: 13 (Routledge Studies in Linguistics)

Description

History, archaeology, and human evolutionary genetics provide us with an increasingly detailed view of the origins and development of the peoples that live in Northwestern Europe. This book aims to restore the key position of historical linguistics in this debate by treating the history of the Germanic languages as a history of its speakers. It focuses on the role that language contact has played in creating the Germanic languages, between the first millennium BC and the crucially important early medieval period. Chapters on the origins of English, German, Dutch, and the Germanic language family as a whole illustrate how the history of the sounds of these languages provide a key that unlocks the secret of their genesis: speakers of Latin, Celtic and Balto-Finnic switched to speaking Germanic and in the process introduced a 'foreign accent' that caught on and spread at the expense of types of Germanic that were not affected by foreign influence. The book is aimed at linguists, historians, archaeologists and anyone who is interested in what languages can tell us about the origins of their speakers. Cover Title Copyright Contents Preface I. Introduction 1. What This Book Is and Is Not About 2. Language Contact and Language Change 3. Language Contact in Deep Time 4. The Comparative Method II. The Rise of English 1. Languages Competing for Speakers: English as a Killer Language 2. The Anglo-Saxon Settlements 3. The Vanishing of the Celts as Seen by Linguists 4. The Reconstruction of British Celtic 5. The Linguistic Map of Pre-Anglo-Saxon England 6. Old English as Evidence for a Substratum in Old English 7. Tracking Down the Substratum Language under Old English 8. The Origin of Irish 9. The Celtic Influence on Old English 10. Synthesis III. The Origin of High German 1. Introduction 2. German and Dutch 3. The High German Consonant Shift 4. Making Sense of the HGCS 5. Sociolinguistics in the Rhineland, and Langobardian and Romance in Northern Italy 6. Explaining the HGCS in General 7. Germanic and Latin Up North IV. The Origins of Dutch 1. Non-Aspiration of p,t,k 2. i -Umlaut in Eastern and Western Dutch 3. Western Dutch 4. Coastal Dutch 5. Spontaneous Vowel Fronting 6. Coastal Dutch, Western Dutch, Central Dutch, and Eastern Dutch 7. Western Dutch as an Internally Motivated System 8. Western Dutch as the Product of Contact between Coastal Dutch and Eastern Dutch 9. Spoken Latin in the Low Countries 10. Northern Old French Vowel Systems 11. Spontaneous Fronting in Northern French and in Dutch 12. Romance Fronting and Germanic i -Umlaut 13. Language and History in the Low Countries 14. Towards Modern Dutch V. Beginnings 1. The Dawn of Germanic 2. Balto-Finnic 3. Convergence to What? 4. Saami and the Break-up of Germanic VI. Conclusions Notes Bibliography Index