I'm not a subscriber so I'm not arguing it is or isn't worth paying for, but calling a site-wide subscription bad value based on the length of a single article is clearly missing the point, they're not expecting anyone to pay for a single article (even if you might think there ought to be a single article option).
I’m always fascinated by languages. As a native English speaker fluent in other languages but not any Germanic languages beyond basic vocabulary, this comment piqued my interest.
> I love Proto-Germanic
Is there something specific (aside from noticing these kinds of similarities in vocabulary) you love about proto-Germanic? Maybe its syntax, or grammar? Or sounds?
Mostly the similarities in vocabulary - it's exciting to be able to reconstruct what could may been spoken thousands of years ago by noticing the links between present-day languages! But I also like the case system, mostly because it feels like English has lost something of its poetic utility by dispensing with it. To expand on that, with cases, you can allude to the relationship between a thing and a situation without actually specifying what that relationship is, leaving something up to the reader's imagination.
What is that large, long-legged, ostrich-like bird in the painting? Was there a now-extinct bird like that in Anglo-Saxon England, or did people keep ostriches or emus or something like them?
I'd say a crane is a pretty good guess though, given it's a falconry picture; Wikipedia says
> The common crane (Grus grus) is generally believed to have been a breeding bird in Britain in the Middle Ages. English people prized cranes as the "noblest quarry" for a falconer, and gladly ate them. In December 1212 King John flew his gyrfalcons at cranes at Ashwell, in Cambridgeshire, and killed seven, and on another occasion in Lincolnshire in February 1213 he brought down nine.
I want to know what happened to the cranes - you'd think a few would escape and survive in the wild. Were they all hunted, or did the environment of Britain become somehow completely unsuitable for them between the middle ages and now? Relevant reading lists welcome :)
Historic crane populations crashed due to hunting and then loss of habitat as wetlands were drained and agriculture and housing expanded etc. Today you can find cranes in the wild in Norfolk, Suffolk and the Fens district which are all regions with sizeable wetland habitats due to active protection and reintroduction programs. There are small groups of other breeding pairs elsewhere in the UK as well. See following for a quick backgrounder:
The ostrich seems plausible to me. It is mentioned briefly twice in the Old Testament (Job 39:13 and Lamentations 4:3), and considering that publishing was almost exclusively done by the Church at this time, I presume that the illustrators would have been familiar with it. The Bible doesn't given any description however, so there must have been another source if it is indeed an ostrich.
I went down a related rabbit hole recently after realizing based on a passage in don quixote that all of the characters (and the reader!) were assumed to be familiar with the size and general appearance of an ostrich.
DQ was written in like 1600 but based on chivalric romances from 200-400 years earlier, where it turns out ostriches also come up from time to time, even in heraldry of some characters.
Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures including asia minor and northern africa where ostriches were present. And these seafaring cultural and trade spheres also extended into nothern europe and the british isles.
So ultimately I don't think they were going off the bible for it. It's no more unusual than someone from that area being aware of lions or crocodiles and their general appearance. It would probably be very unusual to have seen one, but they would appear in puppet shows and travelers tales for sure. Literate people may have seen them in manuscript illuminations as well.
> Basically what I came to is that southern europe of that time had a high degree of exchange with other mediterranean cultures
There were people in England in Anglo-Saxon times. who had been as far away as Alexandria, or Constantinople.
Icelandic sagas in the late 1000s, wrote about William the Conqueror in England, and noted that many of the surviving Anglo-Saxon nobles fled to Byzantium. So, even in Iceland they knew about Constantinople, and probably ostriches too, and that these were real things and places, which you might travel and see, even if they were basically at the other end of the known world. At the other end of the world, Byzantine records mention Anglo-Saxon warriors being recruited at that time.
The Bronze Age Collapse may have been precipitated in part by disruption to trade from North Europe and the British Isles to the Levant, Greece, and Egypt. They had the tin necessary to make bronze.
The Egyptians domesticated the ostrich and it has been familiar to Mediterranean civilization since. England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question. At that time at least, there were lions in London's zoos and gladiatorial games. I don't know of records to this effect, but there might even have been been ostriches - a favourite animal to import for the games elsewhere in the empire.
It's much less likely there were live ostriches in Anglo-Saxon times but the rich have always enjoyed mangeries and exotic animals. I wouldn't be surprised. And there would be traveller accounts and stories, increasingly mythical to be fair, as large population movements from places where people had actually seen them declined in the post-Roman era.
> England was part of the Roman world just a few hundred years before the period in question.
England was never part of the roman world. It was the collapse of the roman world that allowed the anglo-saxons to settle and create england. England was a post-roman world creation. Heck it was part of the destruction crew of the roman world.
It's not just US people who do this, it's many others in Europe and around the world. The common name of the UK in many languages is some variant of England, even to the point of what you'd learn in a geography class.
Also, people very commonly use the name of modern day countries to refer to their territory, such as "most of Germany was frozen over in the last Ice Age". I suspect this is what is happening here.
While I'm far from a professional, I'd rule out emu being known to Anglo-Saxons. As for ostrich, seems far more plausible of the two. Not that ostriches were indigenous to any part of Europe, but they were at least known to them through trade. Emu would just be far-fetched, I think.
Possibly peafowl? They were kept in medieval England. There is some bright decoration on the head. The head and legs are too long, but other things in the picture are not to scale either.
No. The prehistoric Indo-Europeans appear to have had no words for the ocean, or ships, or other such things. Or if they did have words for these things, their descendant cultures did not inherit them. This, and many other clues, suggest they originated on the central Eurasian plains. Don't need a word for ocean if you've never seen one.
The Germanic languages are a branch of Indo-European, and this offshoot shares common words for those sea-related things, and also words for many dozens of species of plants and animals (all the tree species, for example, native to the region.) These words have similar properties, and were almost certainly borrowed from an earlier, unrelated culture already living there.
The Basque today speak a language, that, before Roman times, seems to have been spoken all across Spain; it's probably the only remaining relic of what was once hundreds of distinct cultures that existed in Europe, in the neolithic era, before the Indo-Europeans.
> The Basque today speak a language, that, before Roman times, seems to have been spoken all across Spain; it's probably the only remaining relic of what was once hundreds of distinct cultures that existed in Europe, in the neolithic era, before the Indo-Europeans.
I don't think that a piece of land the size of the Iberic Penninsula could have spoken a single language in prehistory. Even in the modern day, in places that didn't have a concerted effort to impose a single language, we see a huge diversity. Dagestan for example has 14 different official languages, in a region with 3 million people, and an area almost half the size of Portugal.
Even in the Italian peninsula in the times of Caesar, there were at least 4 major languages spoken - Latin, Umbrian, Venetic, and Etruscan (which is not even indo-European).
The question makes not much sense because the concept of "original Europeans" oversimplifies the complex history of human migration and settlement across the continent.
Europe has been inhabited by various groups of people over hundreds of thousands of years, starting from early human ancestors like Homo erectus, followed by Neanderthals, and eventually Homo sapiens. The idea of a singular "original" group of Europeans doesn't align with our understanding of prehistoric migrations and the genetic mixing that occurred over time.
Modern populations, including Germans, are the result of these extensive, multi-directional movements and interactions, making any one group not "original" but rather a product of ongoing historical processes.
There are Germans, Slavs (although Slavs might be a Germanic subpeople?), Celts, the pre-Roman peoples in the Iberian Peninsula (they still exist in Spain IIRC), the Romans and the Greeks. Possibly the Finnish and the Hungarians as well? All are white of course. IIRC European has 50k years of breeding only with Europeans, separating them from the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, etc.).
> All are white of course. IIRC European has 50k years of breeding only with Europeans, separating them from the rest of the world (Africa, Asia, etc.).
Uhhh, no. Europe as we know it today is primarily a tripartite congregation of its first hunter-gatherers (such as Cheddar Man), Proto-Indo-European pastoralists from around the Caspian, and agriculturalists from Anatolia and the Levant, with further minor contributions from Central and North Asian peoples such as the Magyars, Huns, and the people who would give the Finnish the language they speak (Finnish not at all being an Indo-European language but an Uralic language, having a Siberian origin). Their varying combinations were only established within the last 4 - 8K years.
Slavs call Germanic people “njemac”. It means “mute” as in “people who can’t speak our language”. I’m sure they’re distantly related (Europeans, duh), but I don’t think there’s any direct cultural relation enough to call them “Germanic subpeople”.
The history of Europe is fascinating. I think there's not a single "country" today whose ethnicity was not almost entirely replaced with another in the last 10,000 years.
You're probably right, but looking at Germany and most of the region around it, it's clear that a lot of different "tribes" lived in overlapping areas before and after the Roman Empire, at different times... there were the Goths, Vandals, Gauls, Celtics, Suebis, Franks, Synthians, Vikings, "Greeks" (or Helenics), the Rus, Tatars, lots of Slavic tribes that seem to have arrived in Eastern Europe out of "nowhere"... if you include the Iberic Peninsula, Arab peoples dominated for several hundred years, then "disappeared" again in the 15-16th centuries.
Most of these completely disappeared (though they obviously left genetic material in the local populations, their culture/language was entirely replaced and mostly forgotten)!
Take the Vandals... they seem to have originated in Poland, migrated south pushed by the Mongol raids and later the Goths (themselves coming from Northern Germany or even Scandinavia), ended up in the Iberian Peninsula, then somehow moved even further to Northern Africa... They got their reputation which lives on today (in the word vandalism in case you didn't know) by sacking Rome when the Western Roman Empire had already lost most of its glory, coming from Northern Africa and a few Mediterranean islands, the most import of which was probably Sicily.
More recently, the Lithuanian people lost almost all of their territory when the Grand Duchy of Lithuania disappeared (it was subdued by the arch-rivals Russia, Sweden which at the time was nosing around in the area, occupying places like today's Estonia, and the Austrians)... Lithuania only became a country again, and a tiny one at that, after the USSR collapsed, something like 300 years later.
In the last couple of centuries the history is even more complex!! We don't notice in a lifetime but the map keeps changing and the previous century was no exception. Where are Yougoslavia and Checkoslovakia now? :D ... did you know that Kyiv changed countries dozens of times over its history? It was capital of the Rus, invaded by the Mongols, incorporated by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then Poland, the Russian Empire, then it really went crazy and switched back-forth between the earlier "rulers" and short-lived Ukrainian states multiple times (like 10 times, seriously), was captured by the German army not once, but twice (in WWI and WWII), before kind of stabilizing as part of the USSR, and then finally, a proper Ukrainian state.
I was in the area some time ago and it was mind blowing to learn all that.
Greeks would also be another example. The Hellenes have been in the general area with linguistic continuity since the Bronze age. Though their populations in Asia Minor were expelled in the early 20th century.
Possibly the Armenians are another example. And Georgians if you lump the Caucasus in with Europe. Albanians maybe also, as they are proposed by some to be descendants of the Illyrians.
Balts, Slavs, Germans, Celts, and maybe Italic speakers seem to have moved around a lot more.
Aren't most these European cultures all heavily descended (genetically and linguistically) from the Western Steppe hunter-gatherer horse tribes? Those guys got into Greece just like they got into the UK (probably sooner in Greece). The Minoans weren't though. Which is why you've got the wild Greek culture wars with Crete (Minoans and their Minotaur will eat your baby).
The English themselves are also still largely the same Celtic stock, the genetic impact of Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Norman colonialism have been minor, even though the cultural impact of these various rulers has been outsized.
