Module B. The Rhenish Fan. (A Fan on the Rhine? A Soccer Aficionado, Perhaps?)
Bear with me now for a few moments for a kind of far-fetched appearing module. Most people are surprised to learn that the Rhine played an important role in the development of the languages we speak today, including English, German, and Dutch, the languages of our host countries on this voyage. But there is much more: A study of the history of these languages complements our study of the history of the tribes we have just examined, for it allows us to go back to the stone age, to the neolithic, even before the dawn of history, before any written records exist at all, and discover important information about the ancestors of these Celts, these Germanic peoples, and even the Romans and the Greeks, not to mention the Persians, the Slavs and many others. The story of these, our most ancient ancestors, takes us back at least to about 4,000 BCE, in the late neolithic, and possibly even, according to some scholars, to the early or middle neolithic (7,500 to 4,500 BCE).
Considering that the early dynastic period in Egypt is dated from about 3,400 BCE, and that Abraham must have lived about 2,000 BCE, this is an impressively ancient story! Because it is prehistory, there are no written records about these ancestors, and yet there is, in fact, a record, a record in the history of our languages, recorded in the story of linguistic change.
This, then, is the story of the Indo-Europeans, named for how their descendants – at least the speakers of their language – presumably came to settle the entire known world from far western Europe (Greenland, Iceland, and Ireland) all the way east to India.
These Indo-Europeans were the ancestors of later speakers of languages from the following language families (in alphabetical order): Albanian; Armenian; Baltic (Latvian, Lithuanian); Celtic (Gaelic: Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Brittonic: Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Manx); Germanic (English, German, Saxon, Frisian, Luxembourgish, Dutch, Afrikaans, Scots – a form of English –, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish); Greek; Hittite; Indic (Sanskrit, Hindustani, Hindi-Urdu, Bengali , Punjabi Marathi, Gujarati, Bhojpuri, Oriya, Sindhi, Sinhala, Nepali, Assamese...over 50 in all); Iranian (Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, Balochi, Dari...86 in all); Italic (Latin, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, Galician, French, Romanian, Occitan); Slavic (Belarusian, Russian, Ukrainian, Rusyn, Czech, Slovak, Lechitic, Polish, Silesian, Pomeranian, Kashubian, Sorbian – spoken in parts of Germany – Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian); and Tocharian, all language families profoundly related to each other.
As we have seen, the Celts were the first Indo-European group to drift to the west. The Germanic branch of the family wandered into Western Europe later than the Celtic branch. (The Slavs followed, but others like the Greeks and Iranians, of course, went south or even east, like the Indic peoples.)
When the Germanic people encountered their Celtic cousins, as we have seen, they gradually pushed them back into fringe corners of Europe such as the Highlands of Scotland, across the sea to Ireland, and to the Isle of Man, or to the remote coasts of Wales and Cornwall. Under pressure, some of the Celts migrated south from England back across the channel into France, as we have also seen, where the province of Brittany was named for them (and where a Celtic dialect – Breton – is still spoken by only a few people, and is thus considered a severely endangered language).
Where the Celts had been living, before their rude Germanic cousins pushed them on, in Germany, France, and Austria, we find Celtic place names. A few of them we have already reviewed, but some other Celtic place names specifically along the Rhine which we will encounter include: Bonn, from Celtic *bona ‘base, foundation’ (Welsh bôn ‘base, bottom, stump); Boppard, from Gaulish Boudobriga, ‘hill of victory’, containing the elements *boudo- ‘victory’ (Welsh budd ‘gain, benefit) + *briga, ‘hill’. Also: Mainz, from Celtic *mogunt-, ‘mighty, great, powerful’, used as a divine name (see Mogons); Remagen,(famous for its WWII bridge) from Celtic *magos ‘field, plain’. *magos is also the source of the (second part of the name) Worms; and the second part of Nijmegen, with the Celtic prefix *nowijo- ‘new’ (Welsh newydd) at the beginning, meaning “new field.”
We also encounter many Celtic burial sites. The day I was writing this paragraph, headlines in France proclaimed: “Archaeologists uncover royal Celtic burial site in small French town.”
These Celtic burial sites often involved placing large stones or cromlechs upright (from Welsh crom, feminine form of crym “bent, curved” and llech “slab, flagstone”) a term used to describe prehistoric megalithic structures. Most date from about 4,000 BCE or earlier. The Germans later called these mysterious structures “Giants’ Graves” (Hünengräber). See:
http://www.carls-sims-3-guide.com/screenshots/worldadventures/celticburialmound.jpg
http://www.eatourspecialist.com/wp-content/gallery/celtic-galicia-albarino-wine-tour/S1350022.jpg
https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/81/a1/20/81a120f8c8dace04671b99ba14ee5f46.jpg
http://www.unc.edu/celtic/topics/burial/crypt.gif
http://www.mauiceltic.com/img/CelticVillageHalleinChariotBurial.jpg
Both the Celts and then the Germanic tribes encountered indigenous peoples in Europe, of course. Presumably they killed some, pushed some away, and intermarried with others. What we do know of these peoples comes, again, mostly from linguistics. The Basques, in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, appear to be the sole isolated remnant of these pre-Indo-European indigenous people in Western Europe. Their “language isolate” is unique, though scholars have tried hard to find connections between it and other non-Indo-European languages such as Hungarian and Georgian. (A friend of mine who was married to a Basque, contends that the Basques have unique physical features as well and claims to have made a study of this among her husband’s family and among Basque sheep herders in Utah and Idaho.)
Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of both English and German (and Dutch and...), developed from Indo-European, and here’s where the Rhine comes in: A second major development in Germanic linguistics that ultimately differentiated German from other Germanic dialects like English and Dutch (and Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, Frisian, and Flemish...) begins in the high Alps of Switzerland and moves northward on and along the Rhine, right where we’re traveling.
In an area from Speyer to Düsseldorf we can trace the development of this so-called High German sound shift kilometer by kilometer, village by village, as we glide along the Rhine, past the Rhenish Fan, so called because it looks on a map like a fan made up of bundled lines called isoglosses or heteroglosses, the geographic boundaries of certain linguistic features that distinguish English from German, for example. We’ll get to that later. But first, Indo-European!
(Don’t worry, I’ll try to make this as simple as possible, so let’s dive right in):
In the language we call *Proto-Indo-European (*PIE) – we write it with that *asterisk to show that we have no actual documents written in it, and that it has been reconstructed from studying its linguistic offspring – we know there were consonants such as p, t, k, for example. Over time, when one particular group of the Indo-Europeans – the Proto-Germanic peoples – moved westward away from their homeland somewhere north of the Black Sea, and their language began to change, some of these consonants underwent a regular shift. For some unknown reason, the sounds became more aspirated, that is, more air sound is audible when they are spoken. We can say that stops turned into fricatives.
It’s as if these consonants were involved in an odd game of musical chairs. They got up, moved sideways, the music stopped, and then they sat down in different chairs. This was the beginning of the differentiation between the Germanic languages and all the others. (The other IE languages changed in other ways, but only Germanic shifted its consonants.)
Here are some examples of the Germanic Sound Shift:
p>f : (The unvoiced bilabial stop p- shifted to the bilabial fricative f-.) Thus, for example, the word for cattle in all the other Indo-European languages (and therefore probably in the original *PIE) is like the Latin pecu, in that it starts with a p. It’s the root of words for money, wealth, etc. like pecuniary. But in shifted Germanic this word now started with f-, as in English fee, or German Vieh (pronounced fee just like the English word but still retaining the original meaning cattle), the pre-modern way of measuring wealth. The English meaning has changed slightly, but a fee still involves money.
t>þ: (the symbol þ is called thorn; it stands for a th- sound). This shift can be illustrated by the word for the number three. In IE languages the words for three start with t- like the Latin tres (triangle, triad...). In Germanic the t- shifts to thorn (þ) as in the English word three. (I’ll use Latin examples for Indo-European sounds as much as possible because they are more familiar to us English speakers. And I’ll use English examples for Germanic, where possible.)
k>h: (This h was an aspirated sound like the Greek χ – chi – or German ach.) An IE example is the Latin cornu (the c has a k sound) as in the word cornucopia, horn of plenty. The Germanic counterpart is the English horn, (originally pronounced as though you were clearing your throat: ccchhhorn). Another interesting example is the Greek word kánnabis which shifts in Germanic to hemp. This also helps us date the Germanic sound shift, because the Greeks borrowed the word and the product from a non-Indo-European language area in about the fifth century BCE and then the word shifted as it was borrowed into Germanic, which was obviously still shifting or had not yet begun to shift (certainly it had not yet ceased to shift).
Now (I hope you are still following me!) when you think about it, the “chairs” formerly occupied by p,t,k had become empty, but when the “music stopped” so to speak, three other consonants “sat down” in their places, namely those formerly known as b,d,g. Here are some examples:
b>p: My Indo-European example is once again from Latin: lûbricâre “to make slippery, lubricate.” The Germanic example is once again from English: (s)lip, slippery. (Adding the s- is just a slight complication.)
d>t: Indo-European (Latin): decem (ten, i.e. decimal, decimate...) > Germanic (English) ten.
g>k: Indo-European (Latin): genu > Germanic (English knee, i.e. genuflect, “to bend the knee”...)
This Germanic Sound Shift was first described in 1818 by a Danish philologist (philologist = “lover of words”) named Rasmus Rask. Four years later the German scholar Jacob Grimm (also the collector, along with his brother Wilhelm, of the famous Fairy Tales) formulated the most definitive statement about this phenomenon, coining the term “sound shift” (Lautverschiebung) to describe it. Subsequently it has become known as Grimm’s Law. This made Jacob Grimm the world’s first scientific linguist.
Parenthetically, I want to briefly describe one more significant change that differentiated Germanic from Indo-European, namely that the word stress or accent moved from one of the final syllables, where they still mostly reside in Latin and Greek, for example – just think of that Greek word philologist, for example, with its accent on the next-to-the-next-to-last – the antepenultimate – syllable – to the first syllable, the root syllable, in the word. This was a very important change in the Germanic language family.
Because the accent shifted to the root syllable in Germanic, eventually the final syllables in longer words weakened (the later vowels first changed to “uh” for example) and then dropped away, taking some of their grammatical information with them, leaving short words often requiring the use of articles and prepositions for the grammatical context. Example: Whereas Latin says virorum, to achieve the same meaning English has to say of the men, still three syllables, but now in three separate short root words instead of one longer word with two suffixes and a penultimate accent (on the next-to-last syllable).
This change of stress accent also resulted in an important Germanic poetic feature called alliteration, where the first consonant in a given word rhymes with others nearby: “in a somer seson whan soft was the sonne” (Piers Plowman, ~1370-90). The first Old High German epic poem, the Lay of Hildebrand, is alliterative (~800). Notice the repetitions of g in the first line, t in the second, h in the third, s in the fourth, g in the fifth, and h in the sixth:
Ik gihorta ðat seggen
ðat sih urhettun ænon muotin
Hiltibrant enti Haðubrant untar heriun tuem
sunufatarungo iro saro rihtun
garutun se iro guðhamun gurtun sih iro suert ana
helidos ubar hringa do sie to dero hiltiu ritun
I heard tell
That warriors met in single combat
Hildebrand and Hadubrand between two armies
son and father prepared their armor
made ready their battle garments girded on their swords
the warriors, over their ring mail when they rode to battle.
Initial word stress in Germanic also led to a large number of alliterative “noun doublets” such as: black and blue, hearth and home, bag and baggage, or in German: Wind und Wetter, Nacht und Nebel, Haus und Hof, Kind und Kegel. Alliteration can occur in other languages, of course, but it developed into such a dominant feature under these special Germanic conditions where the stress rests on the root syllable of relatively short words. (ps. I’m reminded by this of the love for alliteration of Elder Neal A. Maxwell of the Twelve. Good thing he spoke English!)
Before getting back to some more consonant shifting and to the Rhine, as promised, I want to describe the Indo-Europeans just a bit more: Even something as general as Wikipedia can tell us some of their traits, mostly reconstructed from clues found in their language and from some found in archaeology:
We learn that the Indo-Europeans engaged in stock breeding and animal husbandry, including domesticated cattle, horses, and dogs. They had agriculture and cereal cultivation, including technology commonly ascribed to late-Neolithic farming communities, like the plow. They had a climate with winter snow (since they lived north of the Black Sea they had a word for snow), words for transportation by or across water, they had the solid wheel used for wagons, but not yet chariots with spoked wheels as the Celts and many others did later on.)
They worshiped a sky god named (in *PIE): *dyeus phater (literally “sky father”). Compare that with the ancient Greek term Zeus (pater) or – say Zeus (pater) fast – with Latin Jupiter. They had a tradition of oral heroic poetry or song lyrics that used stock phrases such as imperishable fame and wine-dark sea. They lived west of a line, east of which the beech tree does not grow, because they have a word for beech tree.
They had a patrilineal kinship-system based on relationships between men. They had domesticated horses – *e?wos (compare Latin equus). The cow (*gwous) played a central role in religion and mythology as well as in daily life. As we have seen, a man’s wealth would have been measured by the number of his animals (small livestock), *pe?us (cf. Latin pecunia, English fee, German Vieh).
They practiced a polytheistic religion centered on sacrificial rites, probably administered by a priestly caste. Important leaders would have been buried with their belongings in kurgans (a type of burial mound or barrow, heaped over a burial chamber, often of wood) and possibly also with members of their households or wives (suttee). (Some tilted up big stones, as we have seen.)
Many Indo-European societies know a threefold division of priests, a warrior class, and a class of peasants or husbandmen. If there were a separate class of warriors, it probably consisted of single young men. They would have followed a separate warrior code unacceptable in the society outside their peer-group.
Traces of initiation rites in several Indo-European societies suggest that this group identified itself with wolves or dogs. Some, called Berserkers (or berserks) were warriors primarily reported in the Old Norse literature to have fought in a nearly uncontrollable, trance-like fury, a characteristic which later gave rise to the English word berserk. Most historians believe that berserkers worked themselves into a rage before battle, while the idea that they consumed drugged foods has also been suggested.
Interestingly, our concept of werewolf, the man-wolf (Latin vir “man”+ wolf; Greek lúkos “wolf” and ánthropos “human”) can be traced back to Proto-Indo-European mythology, where lycanthropy may have been an aspect of the initiation of the warrior class, as depicted on this Greek vase of ca. 460 BCE:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Lekythos_Dolon_Louvre_CA1802.jpg
As for technology, reconstructed *PIE words indicate a culture of the late Neolithic bordering on the early Bronze Age, with tools and weapons very likely composed of “natural bronze” (i.e., made from copper ore naturally rich in silicon or arsenic). Silver and gold were known, but not silver smelting (as *PIE has no word for lead, a by-product of silver smelting), thus suggesting that silver was imported. Sheep were kept for wool, and textiles were woven.
While we’re on the subject, this might be a good spot to interject that the word Rhine itself is an old Indo-European root, ultimately from Gaulish renos, literally “that which flows,” from a *PIE root *reie- “to move, flow, run”. Compare the Sanskrit rinati “causes to flow,” ritih “stream, course;” Latin rivus “stream;” Old Church Slavonic reka “river;” Middle Irish rian “river, way;” Gothic rinnan “run, flow,” rinno “brook;” Middle Low German ride “brook;” Old English riþ “stream;” Old English rinnan, Old Norse rinna “to run,” Dutch ril “running stream”. The spelling with -h- (cf. Latin Rhenus ; French Rhin, German Rhein) is from the influence of the Greek form of the name, Rhenos. The Rhine is no ordinary river, then, it is THE ancient European running stream par excellence. (Though other major European rivers have similarly ancient roots.)
I find it satisfying and even thrilling to begin to understand in this way how intimately things – and peoples – can be shown to be connected, but I still have one thing to say about sound shifts, as promised, directly involving the Rhine.
This is the so-called second sound shift, also known as the High German sound shift, which differentiated German from the rest of its Germanic cousins like English and Dutch. I find the second sound shift to be a very odd thing indeed, because it appears, for whatever reason, that something much like the first sound shift repeated itself more than a thousand years later, this time beginning around 500 CE in the high Alps, (hence the term High German) in Switzerland, gradually moving down the Rhine toward the lowlands (hence the term Low German). (I admit that its travel from Switzerland down the Rhine was what gave me the odd idea of including this module in the first place.)
Like the first sound shift, this later one causes consonants to become more aspirated, spoken with a stronger and more audible puff of air. (It would be nice to think that the hardy Swiss, puffing and panting as they climbed their mountains, just naturally hyper-aspirated their consonants. It’s a way of helping us remember the aspiration aspect, but probably did not come about like that.)
Some of the shifted characteristics stayed in the Alps, others moved along the Rhine to the north, stopping along the way, scattering along the river at the Rhenish Fan. (Only one, the “thorn shift” goes all the way north into Scandinavia, but thorn does not shift into England, as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes had gone over to that island long before it occurred. That’s why English still has so many words with th’s in them, which German speakers find almost impossible to pronounce because they have nothing like it.)
Here’s a brief summary of what happened in the second, or High German sound shift:
High in the Alps, in “Upper German” our old friends p,t,k (formerly b,d,g in *PIE) begin to shift again, this time to pf,ts,kh respectively. Again, there’s more air sound used to form them. We’ll use English examples for Germanic and High German examples for shifted consonants. Perhaps more than one example of each will be useful (there is no shortage of them):
p>pf:
English: > German:
pipe > Pfeife (smoking pipe)
pound > Pfund
path > Pfad
pile > Pfeil (arrow) Pfeiler (column rammed into earth)
pan > Pfanne
plum > Pflaume
play > pflegen (take care of children and others)
apple > Apfel
penny > Pfennig
cup > Kopf (head: cup shaped)
(Pardon a slight complication: under certain circumstances, at the end of words or when the consonant is doubled, for example, then p>f):
pepper > Pfeffer
sleep > schlafen
ship > Schiff
t>tz (spelled z):
town > Zaun (fence, that which surrounds and defines a town)
team > Zaum (bit from a horse’s bridle)
tick > Zecke
tin > Zinn
tinder > Zunder
twilight > Zwielicht (two kinds of light at once)
toy > Zeug (as in Spielzeug, play toy)
tide > Zeit (time, as in eventide) Gezeiten (the tides), newspapers: Die Zeit of Hamburg, the Times of London.
toll > Zoll
tongue > Zunge
(Slight complication: at the end of words, t>s):
eat > essen
that > das
out > aus
k>kh:
corn > Khorn (limited to upper German in Switzerland. This shift didn’t go any further down the Rhine so I won’t belabor it, but you can hear it in Switzerland).
Thorn (þ) shifts to d and goes all the way down the Rhine to Holland and then on to Scandinavia, but not to England, as I’ve said. Here are some examples:
þ>d:
English: > German:
bathe > baden
thank > danken
thing > Ding
earth > Erde
north > nord
thumb > Daumen
loathe > leiden (here the meaning has switched 180̊)
A few more shifts, with your indulgence. Germanic d shifts to High German t:
d>t
door > Tür
good > gut
day > Tag (notice y also shifts to g: yard>Garten)
God > Gott
k>ch (pronounced either at the back of the throat or at the top of the arched tongue like the beginning of the English words huge human):
make > machen
break > brechen
ik (Dutch) > ich (I)
f,v>b
wife > Weib
give > geben
Well, that’s roughly that. I don’t want you to get sick of this. But I promised the Rhenish Fan, so here goes (finally!)
As we sail along we first encounter the Speyer line, where the shift p>pf stops moving. North of that you still hear Appel instead of Apfel, etc.
Next comes the line near Sankt Goar, where t>s shift stops. South of there you hear das, north of there you hear dat, like English that.
At Bad Hönningen auf stops and ob, something resembling English up, is heard.
At the state border between Nordrhein-Westfalen and Rheinland Pfalz you hear the shifted Dorf for the last time. North of that it’s Dorp (village: compare English Thorpe).
At Benrath we hear machen to the south and maken to the north ( English: make). At Uerdingen the sound changes from ich to ik (I). Anything north of this line is Dutch.
These Rhenish Fan isogloss lines run east, clear across Germany. The most clearly defined is the Benrath line, or the machen/maken line, which runs just south of Berlin all the way to the Polish border near Frankfurt an der Oder.
When one travels in Germany, one really does hear these different dialects spoken, differing from village to village, though the official language is High German. Especially along the sea coast in places like Hamburg one hears a great deal of Plattdeutsch, Low German, with words like Water, Door, and ik instead of Wasser, Tür, and ich.
If you listen carefully in Holland, sometimes you can understand simple conversations because the consonants are just like those in English. That’s also true in Scandinavia.
Well, thanks for your patience with this linguistics lesson! Hope it wasn’t boring. Here are a couple of maps of the Rhenish Fan and the Benrath Line:
http://www.maxen.de/maxenLingual/maxenLingual.gif
http://o.quizlet.com/7t58UOuHAGPn6Gy29dw0mA_m.png
