Germanic lineage arrived from the east?

[Jaska]

“In Denmark and Sweden we show strong genetic evidence suggesting that observed archaeological and linguistic changes are linked to the migration of Iron Age Danes. Based on the genetic heterogeneity of the migrating population and the inability to identify a suitable source population, it appears that between 1500 and 1200 BP was likely the outcome of an amalgamation among several migrating and local groups, comparable to the formation processes among Germanic groups on the continent. In contrast, in Norway, the adoption of Old Norse and similar social changes as seen in South Scandinavia occurred with limited genetic impact from Southern Scandinavian and must have been more cultural in nature. With the exception of a single early Viking sample, the majority of Viking Age Norwegians appear either to carry local ancestry, or to reflect back migrations from Celtic regions of Britain and Ireland. Of note, the border between the East and West Norse languages closely corresponds closely to that of the Southern Scandinavians and Western Scandinavians clusters during the Viking Period (Figure 6).” (Page 37)

Wouldn't that also need to be the case in the east if this is a South Scandinavian-driven cultural/linguistic expansion? I.e in Eastern/Northern Sweden, where it doesn't seem this South Scandinavian ancestry was very widespread until much later than the actual cultural shift. I see they make no equivalence between this expansion and any genetic source population, but they also clearly state that it's centered in the south and linked to "the migration of Iron Age Danes".

In the Norwegian coast, Scandinavian language spread early on: before 500 CE (evidenced by Saami placenames borrowed from already Proto-Scandinavian stage). However, in Sweden the northward expansion did not yet occur in that time frame. Northernmost coastal Sweden was Swedecized only during the 13th century. Even Old West Finnish spread there centuries before Swedish.

[Orentil]

Then, what about the migration from Germany to Southern Scandinavia ca. 400 CE?

1. At the time of this migration from Germany to the north (ca. 400 CE), several Germanic branches were already clearly distinguishable from each other; Gothic was even written already during the 4th century CE. Therefore, if there was a language replacement Proto-Scandinavian --> Continental West Germanic, there should not exist any extant Scandinavian languages but northern dialects of Continental West Germanic in Scandinavia. And that is not the case in this reality.

2. Moreover, we know from the Runic inscriptions since ca. 100 CE that there was a gradual change from Northwest Germanic to Proto-Scandinavian to Transitional Scandinavian to Old Scandinavian. There are no signs of replacing the Scandinavian lineage with the Continental West Germanic lineage.

To conclude: undeniable linguistic evidence shows that no language replacement occurred in Southern Scandinavia following the migration from Germany ca. 400 CE.
(See also the end of my previous message concerning migrations and linguistic expansions.)

Hhm, that‘s not what the paper is saying, therefore it would be interesting to get your detailed comments  on their statements

What the paper says to you? It certainly does not say that the Scandinavian language lineage derives from these later immigrants from Germany, as you can see. 

"Linguistically, this period is one of central importance to Northern Europe. Runic inscriptions from across Scandinavia testify to a North Germanic language that remained relatively similar to Proto-Germanic during 2000 - 1500 BP. However, during the Migration period (1575 - 1200 BP) the language underwent far-reaching changes resulting in the formation of Old Norse. The glottogenesis of Old Norse thus coincides with a period of social and demographic instability. Following this transition, the originally common Germanic script known as the Elder Futhark was likewise fundamentally remodelled, giving rise to the Younger Futhark that was tailored specifically to Old Norse, and was taken into use all across Scandinavia."

They write what fully agrees with what I wrote:
1. This period is linguistically important.
2. North Germanic = Scandinavian lineage remained archaic 2000-1500 BP.
3. After that began transitional Scandinavian changes, leading to Old Scandinavian stage.
4. Linguistic change coincides with demographic instability. (It is well known that often languages in intense contacts change faster, while isolated languages change slower = remain more archaic.)
5. Futhark alphabet changed, too, to better suit for writing the language (which had developed several different kinds of vowel umlauts, for example).

They do not say that new language arrived from Germany, or even that any linguistic influence came from there (like loanwords). They imply that the migration from Germany led to a "demographic instability", but even without that, intense contacts with the newcomers alone would be enough to cause rapid changes in the local language.

Naudigastir quoted exactly the part I meant, therefore my question is answered.

[Orentil]

Figure 4

How about this Orentil?

Angles already figured out that my parents were "pure Danish IA" (according to a qadm).

This is confirmed by the paper.

A BB related Eastern North Sea-cluster- see the paper- in (Northern) Netherlands was overlaid by an incoming influx from Danish IA.

Somehow this reminds me of this from archeologist Johan Nicolay (2007), the Danish realm in late Roman and early migration times:



What do you think?

The map of Nicolay with it‘s 4 power centers is indeed a good match with the CNE region in Denmark and Skane. But for this discussion we might better move to an archaeological thread ;-)

[Quint]

What we can establish is that the Scandinavian Bronze Age Culture, beginning ca. 1500 BCE, is already related to the Germanic lineage.

Based on what linguistic evidence? That seems like wishful thinking especially given the close ties between the Nordic Bronze Age and Mycenaean Greece, Sintashta, Unetice...

If this were true, there would be Pre-Germanic loanwords all over Europe, not just in the Northeast.

[Uintah106]

' Linguistically, the Late Bronze Age is the period
during which Palaeo-Germanic donated vocabulary to Finno-Saamic in the east and adopted
vocabulary from Celtic in the south, suggesting that it was spoken widely among East
Scandinavians distributed between Sweden and Denmark, and possibly also in the Nordic
Bronze Age communities in Finland and Estonia '    This is an interesting observation. Kind of turns some peoples assertions on their head.

[alanarchae]

I haven’t thought this through in detail in terms of the ancient DNA but I have always thought that the Nordic Bronze Age would create a window of opportunity for lineages (perhaps peripheral up to then) anywhere on the Baltic coasts who had superior maritime navigation skills. It’s possible that superior maritime skills in the Baltic zone were actually possessed by up-to-then relatively marginal lineages who still had a a major fishing aspect to their economy. A group like that could have been formerly marginal and prestige would in prior times have lain with those with strong agriculture and less reliance on things like fishing which may have seemed backwards to thoseon the best farmland. Then suddenly a lot of power came from trade which requires maritine skills that farming based groups may have only had a rudimentary ability in. I wonder if this is the key to the rise of the eastern Scandinavianrom) component and its spread?

That said, I don’t totally buy into a simple model of Germanic spreading from the east. Germanic to me had always looked like a language born out of multiple inputs linking it both to the east and the west. Germanic has a load of shared isoglosses with (not the same as the later borrowings from) Celtic. Few of those are also shared by Italic. My feeling now is that the eastern component ln Germanic came with this eastern genetic input AFTER a period when western and southern influences had been stronger

[Jaska]

What we can establish is that the Scandinavian Bronze Age Culture, beginning ca. 1500 BCE, is already related to the Germanic lineage.

Based on what linguistic evidence? That seems like wishful thinking especially given the close ties between the Nordic Bronze Age and Mycenaean Greece, Sintashta, Unetice...

If this were true, there would be Pre-Germanic loanwords all over Europe, not just in the Northeast.

Linguistic evidence has been presented earlier in this thread, but I repeat:

1. No conclusive linguistic evidence exists concerning the earliest Pre-Proto-Germanic stages: different studies put Germanic closest (taxonomically or contactwise) to different IE branches: Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic, Albanian, Tocharian…

2. Contacts with Celtic occur only ca. 1200 BCE in Southern Scandinavia, according to John Koch.

3. Contacts with West Uralic are more difficult to date precisely. Paleo-Germanic loanwords in Finnic and Saami could be just slightly earlier than Late Proto-Germanic, but they could also be clearly earlier (fork ca. 1000–500 BCE). The proposed older Pre-Proto-Germanic loanwords in West Uralic are still rather uncertain, as competing explanations have been proposed at least for some of such loanwords.

Scandinavian Bronze Age Culture began shortly before these contacts established between Germanic and both Celtic (in the west) and Finnic and Saami (in the east). This culture also spread quickly to the southwestern coast of Finland. These contacts would be very difficult to explain from some other place than from this cultural sphere - can you propose a better place?

What exactly would be wishful thinking here and why? The Unetice Culture is generally considered as one root for the Scandinavian Bronze Age Culture. But what connections you claim there are with Sintashta and Mycenae? 

By Pre-Germanic, do you mean Pre-Proto-Germanic or totally different language preceding Germanic? It would be good if you could explain what you mean by this and why do you think that there should be such loanwords all over Europe.

[Anglesqueville]

^^ The influences of Mycenaean culture on the NBA (Kivik!) and more generally the contacts between the NBA and Mediterranean cultures have been the subject of many studies. Kristiansen has written extensively on this. But none of this involves lexical impulses (except perhaps for Vennemann). As for Sintashta, it is difficult to see how this culture could have had the slightest contact with the NBA. Kristiansen notes certain cultural analogies (which extend into the India of the Rig Veda), all explicable by the Indo-European heritage. As for Unetice, what other than a sort of super bronze trading hub? Anyway, when the NBA starts (say around -1600) Unetice has already collapsed.

[Quint]

What we can establish is that the Scandinavian Bronze Age Culture, beginning ca. 1500 BCE, is already related to the Germanic lineage.

Based on what linguistic evidence? That seems like wishful thinking especially given the close ties between the Nordic Bronze Age and Mycenaean Greece, Sintashta, Unetice...

If this were true, there would be Pre-Germanic loanwords all over Europe, not just in the Northeast.

Linguistic evidence has been presented earlier in this thread, but I repeat:

1. No conclusive linguistic evidence exists concerning the earliest Pre-Proto-Germanic stages: different studies put Germanic closest (taxonomically or contactwise) to different IE branches: Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic, Albanian, Tocharian…

2. Contacts with Celtic occur only ca. 1200 BCE in Southern Scandinavia, according to John Koch.

3. Contacts with West Uralic are more difficult to date precisely. Paleo-Germanic loanwords in Finnic and Saami could be just slightly earlier than Late Proto-Germanic, but they could also be clearly earlier (fork ca. 1000–500 BCE). The proposed older Pre-Proto-Germanic loanwords in West Uralic are still rather uncertain, as competing explanations have been proposed at least for some of such loanwords.

Scandinavian Bronze Age Culture began shortly before these contacts established between Germanic and both Celtic (in the west) and Finnic and Saami (in the east). This culture also spread quickly to the southwestern coast of Finland. These contacts would be very difficult to explain from some other place than from this cultural sphere - can you propose a better place?

What exactly would be wishful thinking here and why? The Unetice Culture is generally considered as one root for the Scandinavian Bronze Age Culture. But what connections you claim there are with Sintashta and Mycenae? 

By Pre-Germanic, do you mean Pre-Proto-Germanic or totally different language preceding Germanic? It would be good if you could explain what you mean by this and why do you think that there should be such loanwords all over Europe.

Pre-Germanic in the sense of the various stages preceding Proto-Germanic which haven't gone through all the sound changes defining Germanic and which also were in contact with Western Uralic languages.

I read you in a way as if you're suggesting that the NBA was linguistically on the Germanic lineage from the start.

That would not exactly be what the authors of the new paper seem to imply here:

“Linguistically, the Late Bronze Age is the period during which Palaeo-Germanic donated vocabulary to Finno-Saamic in the east and adopted vocabulary from Celtic in the south, suggesting that it was spoken widely among East Scandinavians distributed between Sweden and Denmark, and possibly also in the Nordic Bronze Age communities in Finland and Estonia.” (Page 34) 

They suggest that Germanic languages only arrived during the Late Bronze Age with the newly detected East Scandinavian cluster.

[Jaska]

Quint:

Pre-Germanic in the sense of the various stages preceding Proto-Germanic which haven't gone through all the sound changes defining Germanic and which also were in contact with Western Uralic languages.

OK, thanks.
In either way, Pre-Proto-Germanic came from the south or from the east, so I do not understand why you would require such loanwords all over Europe in only one of the options.

Quint:

I read you in a way as if you're suggesting that the NBA was linguistically on the Germanic lineage from the start. That would not exactly be what the authors of the new paper seem to imply here:
“Linguistically, the Late Bronze Age is the period during which Palaeo-Germanic donated vocabulary to Finno-Saamic in the east and adopted vocabulary from Celtic in the south, suggesting that it was spoken widely among East Scandinavians distributed between Sweden and Denmark, and possibly also in the Nordic Bronze Age communities in Finland and Estonia.” (Page 34)
They suggest that Germanic languages only arrived during the Late Bronze Age with the newly detected East Scandinavian cluster.

Actually, they do not: here they only write that around 1000 BCE (their beginning of Late Bronze Age) Paleo-Germanic was ALREADY “spoken widely” by people sharing traces of this East Scandinavian IBD cluster. They do not exclude the earlier presence of Germanic language lineage there, nor do they claim that it only spread during the Late Bronze Age. This becomes obvious when we look at the whole picture. The total chronology can be described like this:

1. In the late 3rd millennium: the arrival of Baltic Hunter-Gatherer ancestry in Southern Sweden, and following that, the formation of the East Scandinavian IBD cluster. Germanic language lineage might have arrived from the east or from the south, or it was already there since the CWC; in any case, it was already there (at least in Southwestern Sweden) during the early 2nd millennium BCE.

2. Towards 1600 BCE: admixture of the East and West Scandinavian IBD clusters in Southern Norway. Beginning of the Scandinavian Bronze Culture. Pre-Proto-Germanic was already spoken here among the “EScan cluster people”, irrespective of where it arrived from and whether it had arrived only recently or a long time ago.

3. Towards 1400 BCE: admixture of the East and South Scandinavian IBD clusters in Denmark. Population in Denmark either adopted the Germanic language only now, or they had adopted it already earlier. Spread of Scandinavian Bronze Culture in Southwestern Finland and Coastal Estonia.

4. Around 1000 BCE: Proto-Celtic influence in Peninsular Southern Scandinavia and Celtic loanwords into Paleo-Germanic. In Southwestern Finland and Estonia: Paleo-Germanic loanwords were borrowed into Early Proto-Saami and Early Proto-Finnic, just recently arrived in the respective regions.

5. Around 600 BCE: sound changes leading to Proto-Germanic. Still a persistent genetic border between Southern and Eastern Scandinavians (although the former was admixed with the latter).

6. Around 1 CE: West Germanic people spread from Southern Jutland (South Scandinavian cluster) and East Germanic (> Gothic) people spread from Sweden (East Scandinavian cluster). North Germanic (Scandinavian) remains in Northern Jutland and/or Southwestern Sweden?

7. Around 400 CE: people from Germany move to Denmark, virtually replacing the earlier population in the Danish islands. However, no new language replaces Proto-Scandinavian (see my earlier messages).

[alanarchae]

I don’t really go for the single origin idea of Germanic. It looks a complex fusion of multiple inputs. The reason it is so imo is that the nordic bronze age ‘captured! a whole bunch of different roots - beaker, single grave, battle axe, comb pot, ex TRB, Baltic elements etc. Now the ancient DNA further demonstrated the blending of multiple groups with multiple roots. And being in a large maritime network would have promoted further blending and linguistic convergence. It was an extremely long lived network too. personally i’m dubious that the eastern impulse should be viewed as the root of the Germanics linguistically. I think they more likely brought a substantial element to the mixture. And I think there would have been a strong impulse to keep a common emote dialect throughout the nordic brinze area anyway regardless of what subgroup.

[Anglesqueville]

^^ The great Germanist Winfred P. Lehmann was of exactly the opposite opinion:

In view of the absence of common innovations shared among other dialects, such as the augment, I assume that Germanic broke off independently — early — from Proto-Indo-European. Its archaic structure has been pointed out variously, as for instance in my article on the conservatism of Germanic phonology (Lehmann, 1953) and subsequent publications. (...)
It may be concluded, then, that the Germanic group of speakers developed somewhat independently of the other Indo-European dialect groups.

( https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/books/pgmc/index )

[Jaska]

I don’t really go for the single origin idea of Germanic. It looks a complex fusion of multiple inputs. The reason it is so imo is that the nordic bronze age ‘captured! a whole bunch of different roots - beaker, single grave, battle axe, comb pot, ex TRB, Baltic elements etc. Now the ancient DNA further demonstrated the blending of multiple groups with multiple roots. And being in a large maritime network would have promoted further blending and linguistic convergence. It was an extremely long lived network too.  personally i’m dubious that the eastern impulse should be viewed as the root of the Germanics linguistically. I think they more likely brought a substantial element to the mixture. And I think there would have been a strong impulse to keep a common emote dialect throughout the nordic brinze area anyway regardless of what subgroup.

Well, cultures and populations always get admixed and therefore have several roots. Language still always has one root (except the rare true mixed languages). There may be of course contacts between languages, and features borrowed from one language to another, but these can never change the taxonomic status of a language. Germanic is a language lineage of its own, one primary branch of the Indo-European language family, and it arrived in Scandinavia from somewhere. Contacts with other languages can help us to find out its expansion route.

[alanarchae]

I don’t really go for the single origin idea of Germanic. It looks a complex fusion of multiple inputs. The reason it is so imo is that the nordic bronze age ‘captured! a whole bunch of different roots - beaker, single grave, battle axe, comb pot, ex TRB, Baltic elements etc. Now the ancient DNA further demonstrated the blending of multiple groups with multiple roots. And being in a large maritime network would have promoted further blending and linguistic convergence. It was an extremely long lived network too.  personally i’m dubious that the eastern impulse should be viewed as the root of the Germanics linguistically. I think they more likely brought a substantial element to the mixture. And I think there would have been a strong impulse to keep a common emote dialect throughout the nordic brinze area anyway regardless of what subgroup.

Well, cultures and populations always get admixed and therefore have several roots. Language still always has one root (except the rare true mixed languages). There may be of course contacts between languages, and features borrowed from one language to another, but these can never change the taxonomic status of a language. Germanic is a language lineage of its own, one primary branch of the Indo-European language family, and it arrived in Scandinavia from somewhere. Contacts with other languages can help us to find out its expansion route.

I agree it has a basic root. Often placed as the or one of the earliest post-Tocharian branches. Almost certainly rooted in CW variants that settled initially somewhere between Denmark and the east Baltic. However, I suspect that what existed in say 2800-1600BC might have been a bunch of similar but drifted dialects that might have formed from the early PIE-Germanic branching point.So once you start to see admixing in the genetics you might also have seen admixing of a number of related dialects all of which were ultimately rooted in the same branching off point from PIE. The dialects may have been subject to both drift and differing substrate effects. Once they were intermixing and involved in the Nordic Brinze Age network it could have been quite complex imo.

[Jaska]

Alanarchae:

I agree it has a basic root. Often placed as the or one of the earliest post-Tocharian branches. Almost certainly rooted in CW variants that settled initially somewhere between Denmark and the east Baltic. However, I suspect that what existed in say 2800-1600BC might have been a bunch of similar but drifted dialects that might have formed from the early PIE-Germanic branching point.So once you start to see admixing in the genetics you might also have seen admixing of a number of related dialects all of which were ultimately rooted in the same branching off point from PIE. The dialects may have been subject to both drift and differing substrate effects. Once they were intermixing and involved in the Nordic Brinze Age network it could have been quite complex imo.

I am not sure are we talking about the same thing here...
As I explained, languages or dialects do not admix like ancestries or cultures do. When speakers of other dialects arrive, usually one dialect prevails and other speakers, or at least their children, adopt that one. Of course some contact-induced features can spread, but that does not change the dialects or their status or development history. Historical phonology can tell us the development of different languages and dialects, and all Indo-European branches are clearly different from each other. 

"Drift" is therefore essential part in linguistic diversification, and it occurs always after a while, when speech communities get separated. Substrate, superstrate or adstrate influence can also occur, but they cannot level down the "drift" development of a language. Shared features and differentiating features of language co-exist together but independently from each other.