Elbe Germanic, also called Irminonic or Erminonic,
is a proposed subgrouping of West Germanic languages introduced by the German linguist Friedrich Maurer (1898–1984) in his book,
Nordgermanen und Alemanen, to describe the West Germanic dialects ancestral to Lombardic,
Alemannic German, Bavarian and Thuringian. During
late antiquity and the
Middle Ages, its supposed descendants had a profound influence on the neighboring West Central German dialects and, later, in the form of
Standard German, on the
German language as a whole.
Nomenclature
The term
Irminonic is derived from the
Irminones, a culturo-linguistic grouping of Germanic tribes that was mentioned by
Tacitus in his
Germania.
Pliny the Elder further specified its meaning by claiming that the Irminones lived "in the interior", meaning not close to the
Rhine or
North Sea.
[ Plin. Nat. 4.28] Maurer used Pliny to refer to the dialects spoken by the
Suevi,
Bavarii,
Alemanni and
Lombards around the
Hercynian Forest and the Northeastern German plain.
[
]
Theory
Maurer asserted that the cladistic tree model, which was used ubiquitously in linguistics in the 19th and the early 20th centuries, was too inaccurate to describe the relation between the modern Germanic languages, especially those belonging to its Western branch. Rather than depicting Old English, Old Dutch, Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old High German to have simply 'branched off' a single common 'Proto-West Germanic', which many previous linguists equated to "Old German / Urdeutsch", he assumed that there had been much more distance between certain dialectal groupings and proto-languages.
See also
-
North Sea Germanic
-
Weser–Rhine Germanic
General references
-
Grimm, Jacob (1835). Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology); From English released version Grimm's Teutonic Mythology (1888); Available online by Northvegr © 2004–2007: Chapter 15, page 2 -; 3 . File retrieved 11-18-2015.
-
