4. Historical Sources of Germanic Tribes and Dialects

The earliest evidences about Germanic tribes, places of their settlement and their contacts with other ancient peoples are mostly provided by historiographers who were not Germanic by their origin.

The first mentioning of the Germanic tribes was done in IVth century by Pitheas, who came across Gothic tribes during his voyage to the Baltic coast.

Other historians who mentioned provided the information about Germanic tribes in their works include the following ones:

1) Plutarch, who mentioned Teutones as one of the peoples who endangered the safety of the Roman Empire.

2) J. Ceasar who described the military attacks of Germanic tribes on the Roman Empire in his “Ceasar’s Commentaries on Gaelic Wars”

3) Strabo, who devoted the 7^th book of his “Strabo’s Geographica” to Germania

4) Pliny the Elder, whose book “Historia Naturalis” contains the concise classification of Germanic tribes

5) C. Tacitus who gave a profound description of Germanic tribes, their way of life of his time in his “Germania”

6) Gregory of Tours who described the history of Franks of the VIth century in “Historia Francorum”

7) Casseodorus wrote the history of Goths.

The information provided in these sources mainly concerns the description of the way of life of Germans and attempts of classifying Germanic tribes into groups.

Thus, C. Tacitus described Germans as strong, brave warriors – blue-eyed, red-haired, heavily-built, who lead their lives either in wars or in idelness, leaving the managements of the household to women, the old men and the weakest members of the family.

Among the most clear and concise classifications there is the one elaborated by Pliny the Elder, who devided Germani tribes into 6 groups:

1. the Vandals (Vindili) who inhabited the easterns part of Germanic territory and spoke the dialects which gave rise to East Germanic languages;

2. the Ingaevones who inhabited the north-western part of Germanic territory, the shores of the North Sea (English is the descendant of the dialects originally belonging to these tribes);

3. the Istaevones who inhabited the western part of Germanic territory (Dutch originated from Istaevonic dialects);

4. the Hermiones who inhabited the southern part of Germanic territory (German comes from this group of dialects);

5. the Helleviones who inhabited Scandinavia (the dialects are the predecessors of North Germanic languages);

6. the Peucini and Bastarnae who lived close to Dacians and whose affiliation to Germanic tribes is doubted by some scholars.

3. Geographical distribution. Dialect geography

The geographical distribution of languages and dialects is studied be such branch of linguistics as geolinguistics which task is to mark transitional areas on linguistic maps and to group languages in terms of their contacts.

Geolinguistics operates the term isogloss. Isoglosses are lines on a map which separate regions according to linguistic differences in languages or dialects.

There are four main kinds of isoglosses:

1) isolex – lines separating regions according to the differences of lexical items;

2) isomorph – lines separating regions according to the differences of morphological features;

3) isophone – lines separating regions according to the differences of phonological features;

4) isoseme – lines separating regions according to the differences of semantic features.

It is absolutely impossible to draw precise lines on linguistic maps and define exact boundaries of such dialectal regions having differences in in semantic, lexical, morphological and phonological features, so, in linguistic maps the isoglosses are criss-crossed. The boundaries are obscure and the territories where the areas merge are called transition areas.

As for Germanic languages….

Geographical distribution of the Germanic group of languages among other groups of the Indo-European family tree shows their nearest neighbours - Celtic in the West, Italic in the South, Slavic in the East, and Baltic in the north-east.

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