Quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Whew, back again.
Yeah Finnish and Magyar(Hungarian) are both in the Finno-Urgic(sp??) group, both originating in central Asia when the Finns had a huge territory they inhabited. Wolgir, do you know what group Lapps belong to? Or whatever happened to the Getes of southern Sweden?
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Yorick, I simply have to say you keep impressing me with your knowledge but also your eagerness to learn (whereas most people who know as much as you do would rest on their laurels, arrogantly assuming they know enough, you keep asking intelligent questions). Honestly not trying to lick your bootheels, just a heartfelt compliment. Wolfgir you also impress me in this respect!
The most common belief w.r.t. the origin of Germanic languages holds that they all originated from one single root language, Indo-European. However, this IE is more of a useful reconstruction based on the earliest available languages such as Vedic Sanskrit than anything else, since we never actually found texts written *in* IndoEuropean. All germanic languages branched off from this Indo European language around the same time, which is why they all belong to the same root. There are also languages that are not Germanic (because they did not branch off), but which *do* stem from IE, such as Sanskrit, Latin, Greek etc. This branching off, occurring about 4000 BC was induced by a particular shift chance called Grimm's Law (yes, the same Grimm as the fairytales

) This shift is the reason why we have pairs like brother-frater (IE bhrater), daughter-thygater (IE dhugheter), father-pater (IE pater), kin-genus (IE genos).
Grimm's Law can be schematised like this:
voiced fricatives --> voiced plosives
voiced plosives --> voiceless plosives
voiceless plosives --> voiceless fricatives
OK then, the Germanic Branch continued to split itself into West, East and North germanic. West Germanic developed into two strands: Anglofrisian, branching again in English (from Old>Middle>Modern) and Frisian; and German.
German split into Low and High German, from the High version, Yiddish and modern German developed, from the Low branch came, amongst others, Dutch, Flemish and Afrikaans. The second big branch, North Germanic, first split into two: West and East. From West (Old Norse) came then Icelandic, Faeroese and Norwegian, from East came Danish and Swedish. (Which is we the swedish and the norwegians keep insulting each other

). Lastly, the East Germanic strand is now extinct, since the only known language that sprouted from it is Gothic, which nobody speaks anymore

(though my dad can still say the Lord's Prayer in gothic

)
OK guys, now I'm going to apologise for this very long and tedious lecture, which is not even of interest to most of you

SORRY!!!!! ~bigbigpuppycutiedoggyeyes~
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Melusine, Archbabe of the OHF and the LH
Your voice is ambrosia