Why did English survive?

[Queequeg]

Hey Squeelus, how much Punic do you know?

Uh, none?  But it seems impossible that the Phonecians would leave such a massive influence on the language of some extraordinarily poor lowland inhabitants of the marshes and swamps of Jutland and southern Sweden and Norway while leaving out a much larger, measurable influence on the far wealthier Celtic lands.  The fact that the Germanic languages have a weird nautical words is, pretty obviously, a result of the fact that they didn't have much measurable contact with the more advanced Mediterranean civilizations, meaning that the first Proto-Germans to sail the North Sea and the Baltic used their own terms, which today have plausible Indo-European etymologies.  The weirdness of some of the early Germanic shifts (say p-f, as in father) is probably due to a combination of early separation, relative isolation, and possibly some kind of non or early Indo-European substratum.  I think it's a lot more likely that if there WAS some kind of substratum, it was an Old European language, either Indo-European or not. 

[Queequeg]

All the Indo-European languages have some pretty early borrowings from the Semitic group, and I guess it's actually possible that somehow some of the sounds changed in Proto-Germanic before the settlement in Scandinavia and far northern Germany, but that seems pretty unlikely. I like McWhorter, but he uses a lot of really flimsy evidence.  The Germans had a god named Baldr to the Levantine Baal plus some kind of honorific, but IDK how the fuck Baal ends up in Denmark without a similar cult among the Celts.

[Queequeg]

DAMN IT PEOPLE SHARE MY INTEREST IN BRONZE AND COPPER AGE EUROPE!

[Ed Anger]

*takes a drink*

[garbon]

DAMN IT PEOPLE SHARE MY INTEREST IN BRONZE AND COPPER AGE EUROPE!

No thanks.

[PDH]

*takes a drink*

Should I add it to the list?

[katmai]

DAMN IT PEOPLE SHARE MY INTEREST IN BRONZE AND COPPER AGE EUROPE!

No thanks.

+1

[Ed Anger]

*takes a drink*

Should I add it to the list?

Spellus being a spaz? Yep. Take a drink.

[PDH]

done

[alfred russel]

DAMN IT PEOPLE SHARE MY INTEREST IN BRONZE AND COPPER AGE EUROPE!

It is kind of hard when the history is derived from picking through placename and descendant language analysis to get clues regarding extinct languages, and from that some ideas about what was going on. You really have to be something of a specialist.

But, I did post a question / comment, that you didn't reply to (though after the bronze age). 

[Ed Anger]

If anyone wants to talk about Spartan latrine procedures, I'm game.

[Queequeg]

What dates are you using for Gothic rule? 400 years seems too long...

But my extremely amateur opinion was that the language of the visigoths in spain was something like the romans in the eastern part of the empire...The educated visigoths spoke latin to begin with, the gothic language never supplanted latin for daily use, and even the ruling class transitioned to latin/romance languages relatively quickly.

I think there's a real argument that Spanish (Castilian) is at least as, probably more, of a hodgepodge than English.  There's substantial Basque influence in phonology and vocabulary, and the extent of Gothic influence on grammar is actually really surprising.  As I said, the patronymic (Sancho-->Sanchez, son of Sancho, like -ovich in Russian) is of Gothic origin.  Spanish shares with English the -ing ending taken from Gothic.  Taking complex grammar from a language is generally an indication of intense contact.  It's probably secondary to Celto-Iberian and Arabic, and Basque, but it's there.  There was probably a core warrior class of Goths that kept the Spaniards in line, and they kept Gothic around for a while, and eventually adopted a bastardized Romance that kept some of the war and political terms.  Fascinatingly, there was an area of Alan in Spain, but any influence it might have had was obliterated by the Moors. 

[Queequeg]

A few reasons why Gothic might have survived in some form in Spain for an extended period of time;
1) Arianism-they were outside Rome's authority for a substantial period of time.  The tension between Germanic Arians and the Romance-speaking Catholic population would have been conductive to this kind of linguistic divide
2) The Goths went all-in on moving out of Central Europe.  The traditional area of Gothic settlement-the Ukraine, Poland, Romania-were all almost totally depopulated in the wake of the Huns, making way for my beloved Slavs.   This was probably enough of an exodus to form an effective ethnic nucleus in certain regions in settlement prior to the catastrophe of the Arab invasion.
3) "Goth" was probably always a pretty loose term, almost more of a profession.  Romance-speakers would learn some basic Gothic for talking to the king or moving in warbands.  Like "war" being Norman in origin, but originally shares the same Germanic etymology as "worse". 

[Queequeg]

Holy Shit.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alano


Awesome.  It's a Caucasian Shepherd.  I've seen breeds like this on the streets in eastern Turkey. 

[celedhring]

A few reasons why Gothic might have survived in some form in Spain for an extended period of time;
1) Arianism-they were outside Rome's authority for a substantial period of time.  The tension between Germanic Arians and the Romance-speaking Catholic population would have been conductive to this kind of linguistic divide
2) The Goths went all-in on moving out of Central Europe.  The traditional area of Gothic settlement-the Ukraine, Poland, Romania-were all almost totally depopulated in the wake of the Huns, making way for my beloved Slavs.   This was probably enough of an exodus to form an effective ethnic nucleus in certain regions in settlement prior to the catastrophe of the Arab invasion.
3) "Goth" was probably always a pretty loose term, almost more of a profession.  Romance-speakers would learn some basic Gothic for talking to the king or moving in warbands.  Like "war" being Norman in origin, but originally shares the same Germanic etymology as "worse".

Quite a bit of the German influence in Spanish is explained through the Frankish presence in the north-east in the Hispanic Marche. Catalan is way more germanized than Spanish, and a lot of the words present in Spanish can be traced back to Catalan/Occitan and French, entering Spanish centuries after the Goth domination.

As I was told in school, direct goth influence is quite small since goths were almost fully romanized when they occupied the peninsula, and mixed with the local populace, which explains why names (and surnames in particular) were their single biggest contribution.You have to take into account that surnames were far more ductile at the time, and it was easy for the locals to take upon the conventions of the ruling elite.