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Germanic
Hi. I promised not to overload the article talk page, so in case you are interested, I'll respond to your recent post here. Of course if you are not interested no worries. Feel free to delete or whatever. Also feel free to move this to my talk page if you'd prefer that. I can't predict whether we will come to new conclusions that will be relevant to the current re-structuring discussions, but I feel like getting our ideas clear is always a healthy thing to do and it can be positive in unexpected ways.
Andrew Lancaster was saying (my paraphrase) that Germanic peoples should only be regarded as real if they had been described by Roman authors, or as Germanic if classical authors had used that term for them.
Not quite. I do not define the language, and the "linguistic" definition is used. I also sometimes use it, depending on the audience. But it can cause confusion. So when writing carefully I would define my terms for my audience or readers, and I would tend to use terminology like "Germanic-speaking" because it hurts no-one to add words for clarity. This is not a question about reality. Just words?For me this is a key point of difference
. I was thinking the key point was that you believe that the linguistic definition should be considered dominant still, and therefore by implication the one we can assume all scholars mean, and which all readers will understand without problems? To be clear, I think there is no simple consensus on this among scholars.an unwarranted extension of Wikipedia's reliable sources policy back to the time of the Roman Empire
. I think that's a misunderstanding. My point about the qualitative difference between the historical and linguistic definitions (which can cause confusion) is that one openly claims to be based on the other. (Linguists took the term from History, not the other way around.) I have no problem with linguists claiming to know things about history, but this is not just a proposal, but a whole new definition of words, which has created confusion. We can not fix this confusion. But this is relevant to the question of how to explain things, because it makes it difficult to be "mathematical" and just say we have two independent words that happen to look the same.It amounts to rolling back everything scholars have learned since, and from my point of view it denies the existence of any group that (preserved) classical writings did not happen to mention.
I don't see how you can draw that conclusion. Probably you don't really mean what I think these words would normally mean. (Of course I admit there were people who existed who were not mentioned by classical writers.) But maybe it is an example of how this terminology confuses us. See below.There were many things beyond the ken of Roman and even Greek historians/ethnographers/generals. In particular, it obviously excludes the Scandinavians.
Yes, but I need to consider what you mean by this. If I say that I would prefer to use careful terminology such as "Germanic-speaking" instead of "Germanic" when we write about Goths or Vikings (on the basis that these words can be confusing) what am I denying according to you? Is it a denial about something real, or just about which words to use? For example, are you claiming that linguists have discovered that the Scandinavians called themselves Germani? (That would surprise me.) If not, then what is your disagreement with me?A further point related to this is the contrast he draws between language and ethnicity. Ethnicity is a whole scholarly kettle of fish, and rightly so.
So we agree on these things being different? By the way, do you think all people were in an ethnic group? And were they in only one? Some scholars actually criticize the idea that we have to have one simple model of shared identity, because in reality there were (and are) a lot of different ways these things can work. Put simply, some argue that people are part of whatever groupings, often many different and changing ones, that they and their associates think they are in, and academics can't really correct them, by definition. What do you think of such ideas?- (This is perhaps relevant to the question above of linguists saying they have discovered that Scandinavians were in an ethnic group that they probably did not know existed. Is that really possible? I am personally happier to use more vague terminology and just list the facts we can really say something about: Scandinavians were Germanic-speaking, at least once evidence starts to become available, and Tacitus saw them as culturally close to the Suebians. All those facts line up and just by stating them a normal person will get the picture without any added words about "ethnicity". The one thing we do NOT know is whether they saw themselves as sharing a specific shared identity with far away peoples on the mainland. Probably they did in earlier protolanguage times and soon after, but how long did this remain the case? We can only speculate about those details?)
Of course we should not equate speaking a Germanic language with being of "pure Germanic blood", at any period. The amalgamation of tribes, including in at least one case including a Celtic group, has been established as something that happened
. So you agree that tribes in the Roman era were not perfectly "biologically" isolated, but do I read between the lines that you are saying they were normally still relatively isolated (so to speak)? Are you saying that impurity was exceptional? I am confused if this is what you think, about why you would think it. What evidence would that be based on, and why is it relevant in this discussion?(and this is why I personally prefer to continue to use "tribes" for such political/military/cooperative groupings, to distinguish from the primarily ethnic meaning of "peoples", since "nations" has anachronistic implications, not the least of them being size).
Yes nation is a modern concept, quite different for example from Roman nationes. I don't have a strong position on "tribes" versus "peoples". To me it seems important to remember that both words have "common sense" meaning, so they are both unsuitable as "technical terminology" if our aim is to be as clear as possible. If our aim is to have a broad and flexible word though, I think "peoples" is the most neutral. Tribes is a word which English speakers naturally connect to specific preconceptions (primitive peoples). I know other editors feel more strongly about this. Anyway, I doubt I am getting all the points you are making here.But while Andrew Lancaster has averred that he is not seeking to deny the reality of peoples/tribes, by representing as problematic identification of groups as Germanic peoples on the basis of information other than statements by Classical writers, and equating such identification with a statement of ethnicity, he is in fact denying their generally accepted Germanic identity, as well as displacing the locus of disagreement among scholars (and is of course excuding the entire realm of medieval and later Germanic culture).
That's a bit difficult to parse, but perhaps it still means that we are not necessarily disagreeing on facts (including facts proposed by linguists), but rather on terminology.- I honestly feel that my difficulty with this sentence is a sort of proof that the terminology issues can be very confusing. For example: when I see the apparent insistence upon the words "Germanic identity", and your implied strong rejection of words like "Germanic speaking", then to me it looks like you are making a claim about facts that go beyond languages. But "identity" is something subjective, as discussed above, and so this would mean you are claiming that for example medieval people who spoke a Germanic language identified themselves as ethnically "Germanic". But taking this literally, can you really believe that? I think most medieval people had never heard the word Germanic and while they'd be used to understanding bits and pieces of other languages and noticing similarities, they would not have had a linguistic model in their minds about family trees of languages, and they most certainly would not have had ideas about being in the same group (let alone "ethnic group) as far away peoples. (FYI this was one of Goffart's arguments which has slowly been absorbed into mainstream thinking about Germanic peoples (such as the Vienna school).)
- BTW, talk of how people "identify" has become an everyday terminology now, influenced by a type of academic usage that you probably don't like. For example everyone now talks about "identifying as Asian", "identifying as gay", or similar. This wording is associated with people making a choice about who they are for themselves, which is of course totally opposed to the 19th century linguistic idea where academics believed they could literally know better what an ancient person "really" was, based on studying etymologies, and skull shapes, and the like. Most scholars don't accept that methodology anymore, and "normal people", influenced by newer ideas, are likely to be confused by this type of wording, and assume it refers to an "identification" people made for themselves (or were at least aware of). As writers trying to avoid confusion we have to keep the wide range of possible preconceptions connected to specific words in mind.
My apologies that this got so long! Your posts have been interesting and constructive so it seemed a good opportunity to test our ideas and whether we can explain them.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:49, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
- I'm flattered of course, but I limit my editing these days; I was disturbed to see you at Bloodofox's talk drawing several psychological conclusions about that editor and referring to an edit by Berig as trollish, neither of which impresses me as adhering to the standards of basic collegial civility required by a project like this, and was particularly alarmed since both editors have more obviously relevant credentials and expositional abilities than I do; and looking back at the talk page, I think I've explained my position quite clearly. But you do raise some new points/issues. So here's a rather scattershot response to what you wrote here.
- You make some comments about common usage and reader assumptions/understanding. In my view, it's always the case that an encyclopedic entry, perhaps particularly in Wikipedia, is going to sometimes be the first time some readers learn something that to many people may seem to be common knowledge. It's part of the mission to explain things. So for English-speakers, Germanic peoples or Germanic languages may be the first time they are made aware that "Germanic" is not the same thing as "German". Similarly (and IMO less likely) they may have prejudices about tribes. I've encountered college/university students unaware that the earth revolves around the sun and not vice versa; correcting ignorance and misunderstandings is embarrassing in the classroom, but here it's part of the basic encyclopedic mission. Not entirely unrelated, your background is no business of mine, but possibly your education separated Germanistik from Nordistik; some scholars in these fields are used to seeing them as part of a whole, some as distinct disciplines. I've also found that in the English-speaking world, I'm increasingly unusual in being able to manage Latin as well as Old Norse; in many if not most continental European countries, a high level of Latin is a pre-requisite for studying in any medieval field. We cannot assume English-speaking readers are even familiar with Tacitus as an author, while scholars of many backgrounds automatically place a high value on Classical writings.
- Of course I'm familiar with the concept of self-identification, and I think considerably more aware of intersectionality than the WMF :-) If you look again, I think you'll see that I am explicitly recognizing not only the possibility of combined tribes, but that we know of at least one. I am aware that problematizing the concept of "Germanic" is the basis of the scholarly approach you are expounding. I can't resist a cheap shot: the term "Vienna school" invites problematizing, Otto Höfler only died in 1987. The best answer is probably Bloodofox's: the field of Germanic studies exists, studying the complex of cultures that can be related through their having used Germanic languages or being relatable to peoples speaking Germanic languages (this is the challenge of using archaeological evidence in many places), and up through the folklore collecting of the 19th and early 20th centuries, "Germanic" is the WP:COMMONNAME. That the term "Germanic" derives from a term used by Roman writers is worth mentioning, but the peoples who happened to be around at that time and whether or not a writer mentioned them in a still surviving text is a small part of the story—origins, in and of themselves, are a small part of the story for me, I am not an Indo-European philologist :-) What I have said about the bias toward outsider reports in some of your arguments was, I think, quite clear and makes this a somewhat ironic point.
- "Medieval" covers a very long stretch of time, especially since in this context it must include what used to be called the Dark Ages, and in addition to changes, there was considerable variation between places. I would also argue that there were quite different ways of life even within societies; that's the problem IMO with the use of Viking to signify "any speaker of Old Norse until a bit after 1066". Berig, who I believe disagrees with me on "Viking", and I think I'm on the losing side on that matter, has also pointed on the talk page to the debates over cultural diffusion vs. migration/conquest. It is a complex picture even before accounting for the scholars who problematize it, but "Germanic peoples" is the overarching term we happen to use in English, and I'm personally quite interested in the threads of commonalty.
- That's probably too much, hopefully at least semi-clear, and I must now go write off-wiki :-) Yngvadottir ( talk) 09:13, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
- (talk page watcher) Note for any other talk page watchers: this relates to a discussion at Talk:Germanic peoples. (Just to save you looking for it at Germanic as I did out of curiosity.) PamD 22:57, 9 July 2021 (UTC)
I already wrote too much I suppose but looking over your comments and my explanation I suppose the one directions of continuing disagreement that remains possible or likely is concerning the area of proposals by linguists (I use the word roughly), about non-linguistic "facts" (and also for this word, I am using terms in a simple way). There have been accusations made on the article talk page that I must hate linguistics, but this is a parody. I think for example that Dennis Howard Green's distillation of some of the stronger attempts by language scholars to add to non-linguistic knowledge is extremely impressive and relevant to the article. It is written in a careful and critical way. However, we would be kidding ourselves if we would ignore the fact that the field he was distilling and filtering for English readers is a continuation of a very special sub-field that obsessed about everything Germanic, and which proposed all kinds of amazing conclusions about non-language facts (including of course racial facts), without scientific methodology, and that is heavily criticized now. There is a parallel and related debate in the archaeology of Germanic things. These debates did not end with WW2 of course, because it is not only about the racial conclusions, but also about other results of the non-sceptical methodology. This direction of controversy, which involves lots of specific debates about specific proposals, is less easy to resolve just by using careful language. I don't know if you are interested in methodological debates, but I am. To me this is an interesting area where a methodology has continued which is literally pre-modern. Proposals have been made, and if people liked the story, they went into the Reallexikon. This has slowed down, but only recently. Even in Germanic studies, for example in Germany, scholars are getting more conscious of the need for more methodological rigour in this area. In practice, this type of issue will relate to specific academic debates about specific "facts", and as WP editors we'll need to see what has been published in each case. But in short, yes, I tend to be more on the sceptical side. That should not be a big problem, although we have sometimes had people parodying each other, and the sources, too much. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:13, 10 July 2021 (UTC)
- @Yngvadottir: thanks for taking the time. I think possibly you overestimate how well I can understand what your argumentation would be in cases where it is not spelled out. What do you mean by "outsider reports"? I don't really get the joke you make about the Vienna school. Are you saying I overestimate how much they have moved on since Höfler? But they (e.g. Pohl) at least claim they have changed their position. Wouldn't they know? Anyway, we have to look at what they publish, right? Do you think we should not report what they say?
- Maybe I can just comment on one thing:
"That the term "Germanic" derives from a term used by Roman writers is worth mentioning, but the peoples who happened to be around at that time and whether or not a writer mentioned them in a still surviving text is a small part of the story—origins"...
I think that's missing a rather big part of the story. The disputed types of conclusions of the old school of thought you are defending are completely dependant upon information from those Roman writers such as Caesar, Tacitus and Jordanes. And yet they also "correct" them. They claimed to know who the Germani really were, and they were certainly talking about the exact some people who occur in those old books, and not e.g. the Jastorf culture, or proto-germanic speakers. - Language and archaeology could never have led Germanicists to those exact types of conclusions which are now seen as controversial (also within mainstream Germanic studies), let alone the name "Germanic". The controversial aspects of this school of thought are related to exactly this way in which it makes claims about Roman era peoples and events which go way beyond the linguistic evidence, and both relies upon, and disagrees with, the classical writers. And those old claims about Roman era people with known names are still a common source of disagreement on WP.
- The mainstream scholarly criticisms of recent decades are largely methodological, the way I read it. Or to put it another way, there was no methodology, the way that term is often used, in the sense that there has traditionally been no attempt to consider how many alternative explanations exist for any given piece of evidence. The conclusion was always treated as proven correct as long as someone found a way to claim that X, for example a tribal name or personal name, was Germanic. When I look at old and new publications about the Germanic concept I feel that even within Germanic studies there is an acceptance that this has been a problem. Do you see no such trend in publications specifically about the Germanic concept?-- Andrew Lancaster ( talk) 19:56, 11 July 2021 (UTC)
- I'm sorry you find me unclear. I know how frustrating that can be. I'll pass over your having apparently come to the conclusion that I write in defence of the bad old days, however those may be defined, and say again that a lot comes down to different assumptions and focusses. I am not very interested in methodological debates, both because they often hinge on differences in use of terminology and because they become rabbit holes and I'd rather spend my energies elsewhere. That may seem dismissive, but historical linguistics and some aspects of archaeology are the only parts of the field that I can think of right now where the scientific method is applicable; in most of the field, testing hypotheses in a scientific manner, let alone claiming proof, is impossible; furthermore, the assumption that the latest published treatment of a topic, or even the latest edition of a text, must be better is contrary to science as I understand it; and still furthermore, one of the things we learned from Nazi-era scholarship was the danger of undue reverence for a particular school of thought as against competing "schools", which can be reminiscent of the medieval citation of "authorities". Particularly in the modern climate of "publish or perish", competition between journals, and adopting a novel position being the key to jump-starting a career and to success in that career, academics in fields like Germanic studies have espoused all kinds of radical views, and all (or maybe almost all, I live in hope) have made at least one silly statement in print. We all have a duty to read critically, and of course the word "sceptical" can be applied to a whole range of things, from scepticism about a particular claim (such as the language family to which a name on a Rhineland votive tablet is assigned) to scepticism about a theory or application of such a theory (such as Dumézil's tripartite theory, the sequence of development proposed for bracteates or Scandinavian interlace ornament, or the relative dating of Norwegian place names) to scepticism about the existence of a Germanic cultural group.
- We differ on our weighting of the importance of Roman reports, and one of the reasons is that I don't give them automatic primacy because Roman culture was a culture of writing; another is that no Roman writer was an ethnographer in the modern sense, so their reports must be interrogated, to use a modern term; and a third is that since you raised the issues of self-description and self-identification, and since I had already pointed to the indefensibility of the equation of culture with ethnicity, it's a bit rich to insist that the descriptions that have survived from conquerors should be the final word. Yes, we do know more than the Romans did; and no, using that knowledge is not the same thing as accepting any pretty story.
- In any case, the field still has startling geographic splits, caused as much by ignorance and the impossibility of keeping up with all the publications as by adherence to different schools. Even in this internet age, anglophone scholars are often unaware of what's being published in Scandinavia, and I'm grateful to those countries and institutions that are making things available online so that those of us who do want to be aware can at least read publications no library can afford. (I am going to have to spend good money ordering one Scandinavian dissertation that I regard as wrongheaded, because even excerpts are no longer available online. I would much rather have given that money to a used book dealer for an out of print work of excellent older scholarship.) And that's if the anglophones can read the scholarship in question; I've noticed more scholars in the field able to read German, but facility in the modern Scandinavian languages is asking a lot except of modernists. So your mention of the Reallexikon in itself presupposes that that work plays a bigger role in reflecting scholarship than it actually does in many places. It's not only scepticism, it's differing backgrounds and priorities; I'll say again, the origins and very early periods of Germanic culture are not at the top of my personal interests, and I don't think that's the area most Germanicists are into; but I'd be hard put to determine whether I'm right, frankly. There's no central body or single conference structure where one could poll people.
- (No, of course those currently calling themselves the Vienna School and being referred to as such do not espouse the views of Otto Höfler. But I'm sure the change at that institution did not happen overnight, and that there was a certain amount of restatement of the same things in new jargon at first. And who knows what era's or in fact what subject's "Vienna School" a reader, or even a fellow editor, may have in mind? "Problematizing" things is a relatively modern buzzword; I took a cheap shot by applying just that disruptive technique to your terminology associating particular scholars, since I happen to know a bit about the history of the field. I'm all too aware that it's vital for scholars in many countries to vocally repudiate Nazism, while I have the privilege of having lived and worked in places where it suffices to not think like a Nazi, so I'll go a step further and add that that was why it was a cheap shot, precisely because I am fully aware that Goffart et al. are not Nazi thinkers, in addition to their scepticism about the term "Germanic" being opposed to the vast majority of what Höfler wrote.)
- And of course little of this has much of a bearing on Wikipedia, where our task is to write a resource for who knows who to look up who knows what, and click through to further information as they see fit :-) Yngvadottir ( talk) 03:48, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
Yngvadottir thanks. Very thoughtful, and it helps me as someone from outside these fields to continue to understand how they are working. Maybe these points are of interest:
- To be clear: of course I agree that following the old-style claims and methodology in Germanic studies does not make someone a Nazi. That was also true before WW2 of course. I don't think scholars criticize the old methodology just because of its association with Nazis. One of the debating strategies which I keep seeing on the internet including WP is that modern mainstream scholars are just being "politically correct" and over-compensating by proposing opposite things to whatever the Nazi era scholars believed. That is a misunderstanding, or perhaps sometimes a deliberate distortion, of what scholars write, and also a debating strategy that is borrowed from right-wing populism. (The Germanic peoples article has however constantly had a flow of editors who are clearly influenced by extremism in more ways than just borrowing some of the debating tactics.[1])
- Concerning methodology, I think the most important understanding of what a good modern methodology needs to be is systematically sceptical. A good example is any kind of blind-fold test. Despite how dogmatically that undergrad textbooks recite things about Popper and falsifiability and the like, real researchers and indeed philosophers, clearly can't agree on any single specific method. It is the need for being methodically sceptical of human judgement that they really agree on. Going back to Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the reason for following a method is that we should not trust human common sense, but rather assume that humans naturally get drawn towards certain kinds of explanations.
- I might not be a trained linguist but it is clear that many proposed "proofs" that single-syllable words or names are Germanic have been based purely on the possibility of finding similar-sounding syllables in a version of reconstructed Germanic. (And if the similarity is not a very good one, for example in the case of the Cimbri and Teutones, and their associated personal names, or the Germanic word involved seems to make no sense as an ethnic or personal name, for example in the case of Goths, all kinds of complex solutions are developed with the specific aim of achieving the pre-determined conclusion. In most fields today, scholars are trained to spot this kind of reasoning and weed it out. So as an outsider this approach is strikingly "pre-modern" to me. An obvious safety check such scholars need to perform, for example, is consideration of whether the proposed etymology can not be explained any other way. When this has happened, as happened in the case of say the Scirii, the traditional response has not been very objective IMHO.) It is also clear that whole sandcastles end up being built with such assumptions, and that these are still important. So the critics of this methodology do seem to have a point sometimes? And we can't really say these types of cases are not common? Anyway, this is just background thinking and not necessarily relevant to any specific Wikipedia edit. If no scholar publishes a criticism, as in the case of the Goths etymology, then we can't say anything. If scholars do criticize something and that criticism is well-known, as with the Scirii, then my position is that we should be careful not to selectively censor such information. I'd prefer to have too much on WP, rather than too little. (You seem to agree with me on that.)
- Concerning the Vienna school, my reason for mentioning them so often is much more to do with the practicalities of WP policy, and not my personal reading of the facts. The point is that this is a case where since about the 1980s numerous "big names" in the field of Germanic ethnicity debates, many of whom completely disagree with the Vienna school, ALL refer to exactly which positions they believe are the current frame of reference. There is a really strong consensus, for better or worse. By this I mean they name not only the Vienna school, but specific authors, and specific positions. The current leader of the Vienna pack is Walter Pohl, and the specific model they are talking about is the model of Ethnogenesis from Traditionskern-carrying mobile elites, which goes back to Wenskus and Wolfram. That this is at least one possible way that language and culture and the name of a people could "move" without massive migration is now very widely accepted. (There is much more that could be said about this.) So I agree with Ermenrich on this being reasonably clear and important in terms of how we can structure Germanic peoples in the long term. Older versions of both Germanic peoples, and Goths, have never contained proper discussions of this topic at all. OTOH, I do not mind if such discussions are moved to a spin-off article to some extent as long as this does not create a POVfork.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 08:39, 12 July 2021 (UTC)
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I will never forgive you for luring me into that den of vipers. EEng 17:18, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
- I see you fled to Gamergate. Yngvadottir ( talk) 20:36, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
- And I swear to God I don't do it on purpose. It's like some unseen hand guides me from flashpoint to flashpoint. EEng 23:59, 17 July 2021 (UTC)
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