Saskia Pronk-Tiethoff has recently published her study on “The Germanic Loanwords in Proto-Slavic”. Despite some quibbling we have had with her concepts of a Proto-Slavic homeland, her book is very interesting and recommended to anyone interested in the topic. One of the curious aspects of her work is what emerges once you tabulate some of the results as regards one categorization of each word. Namely, assuming that Pronk-Tiethoff is correct that a particular word is in fact a borrowing from some Germanic language into Slavic, Pronk-Tiethoff’s work includes a designation of the source of such word. In general, the designation is either a West-Germanic (WG) or Gothic (East Germanic or GO) or unknown Germanic (UG).
“Welcome to Europe Slavs! – here is what we call a radish”
We have no view on whether a particular word is a borrowing or whether it is correctly classified as either WG or GO or UG. (e.g., she assumes that no borrowings exist from or into Proto-Germanic because no contacts existed between Slavs and Germanics until after the break up of the Proto-Germanic community – for present purposes we are willing to along with that assumption). What we would like to highlight is what emerges. We have followed her designations tallying the words as above plus two additional categories of “probable WG” and “probable GO”. Where Pronk-Tiethoff vacillates we’ve made the call that seems to have been closest to her heart. We did not include words that she considers as of uncertain origin (ones that “cannot be regarded as certain Germanic loanwords in Proto-Slavic).
Here is what we get:
- Uncertain Germanic (UG) – 19
- West Germanic (WG) – 21
- probable WG – 12
- East Germanic/Gothic (GO) – 13
- probable GO – 5
This (to us) seems strange. If Gothic was really the first Germanic language that the Slavs came into contact with and, as Golab asserts, if the Slavs lived under Gothic domination or at least in contact with the Goths for about 600 years then one would have thought that the vast majority of the borrowings would be from GO not WG.
But maybe this reflects the fact that Slavs (after the freed themselves of Goths) lived a much longer time alongside of WG speakers?
- Except that, remember, we are talking about borrowings into Proto-Slavic, i.e., before the breakup of the Slavic linguistic community which would have been, at the latest, about 600 or so.
But maybe these WG words represent concepts that did not exist during the Gothic-Slavic cohabitation?
- Except that it is difficult to claim that the types of WG words as are found in Slavic languages are the kind of words that naturally must have been borrowed after Slavs settled in their destination countries (e.g., redka – radish (originally from Latin into Germanic) or pila – saw). One can see how words representing concepts obviously unknown to pre-medieval societies could not have come from Gothic but radishes?
Finally, were we to ask mainstream historians how Gothic words ended up in Proto-Slavic the answer they would produce is (given their assumptions) perfectly logical – all Slavs are posited by them to have been dominated by the Goths up to 400s-600s. The much more difficult question is how words that are WG borrowings spread from WG dominated areas into all of Slavdom and done so sufficiently early to have made their way into Proto-Slavic (pre-600s). No one amongst mainstream historians claims that all Slavs ever lived next to WG tribes. So what’s the answer?
And then there is the question whether there is any variation among Slavic languages today between the West and East Germanic groups (note all those words are posited to have been present in Proto-Slavic but they are not all attested in all Slavic languages).
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