Is there any linguistic evidence to prove Goths came from Scandinavia?

Cyrus

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Gothic is actually the oldest Germanic language, in the ancient times Goths lived in the southeast of Europe, it is usually believed that they migrated from Scandinavia but I can't find any linguistic evidence for this migration, all evidences actually show that they migrated to Scandinavia, for example we see numerous Latin and Greek words in Scandinavian languages, such as dragon, wine, ship, pipe, ...
 
What kind of evidence would you expect to find if Gothic were from Scandinavia?
 
In fact the news of the Scandinavian origin of the Goths is deduced from the writings of Jordanes, but the written testimonies of the Gothic language have matured on the continent, in central-eastern Europe, in particular since the writing of the Bible by Wulfila in the full IV century.

To my knowledge, the few elements that can put eastern Germanic into strict contact with the languages of Scandinavia are hypothesized by Holtzmann's law and through some similarities with the ancient Gutnish which was the spoken language on the island of Gotland.


The issue has also been studied more recently by Elias Wessén and Dietrich Hoffmann.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holtzmann's_law

https://www.academia.edu/1670089/Old_Gutnish_Historical_Phonology_and_the_Old_Norse_Context
 
Gothic is actually the oldest Germanic language, in the ancient times Goths lived in the southeast of Europe, it is usually believed that they migrated from Scandinavia but I can't find any linguistic evidence for this migration, all evidences actually show that they migrated to Scandinavia, for example we see numerous Latin and Greek words in Scandinavian languages, such as dragon, wine, ship, pipe, ...

Gothic is not the oldest Germanic language. It's the oldest fully attested Germanic language for very obvious reasons, i.e. it was spoken near to literate societies and was under very strong Roman and Hellenic influence from a very early age. Gothic was already specifically Eastern Germanic, and not generically Germanic, let alone Proto-Germanic, so when it's first attested Proto-Germanic had already split into at least 3 different branches of Germanic dialects/languages since at least a few centuries earlier.

However, the earliest attestation of an undisputed Germanic language can be found as early as the 2nd century A.D and is identified as a very early form of Proto-Norse that is still reasonably close to Proto-Germanic. That proves that Germanic languages were already spoken in Scandinavia even before Gothic appears in the written historical record. Besides, the fact that Finnish, Estonian and Saami have a numrous adstrate of Proto-Germanic or even presumably Pre-Proto-Germanic loanwords, having borrowed forms of the Germanic words before they changed significantly in the latter branches like East Germanic, also indicates that Proto-Germanic and probably its earlier linguistic stages was spoken nearby the Finnic and Saami tribes, which were probably natives to Northeastern Europe, not to Southeastern Europe or elsewhere further south.

Goths do not represent the earliest linguistic or sociocultural stage of Proto-Germanic peoples at all. Genetically, as the latest studies have demonstrated, they also seem to have been pretty mixed with lots of Northern European, Eastern European and even Southeastern European elements, so they look more like a population formed out of a relatively recent ethnogenesis, not a relic of older times.

A major factor to confirm that Goths came from Scandinavia, apart from the relatively contemporary documents that claim just that, is that, well, the Goths appeared in Southeast Europe and dispersed from there to many parts of the Roman Empire in the 4th to 6th centuries. They were not mentioned in the Roman and Hellenic sources in the Balkans well before that, and they seem to have been a "novel population" settling in the region in the Late Antiquity. So it clearly makes more sense that they came from outside of the Roman Empire into it, not the other way around.

Also, Goths did not live in Southeast Europe. They migrated during historic times to it, and there are lots of documented evidences of that migration. Goths had originally lived in the lands roughly from Poland to Western Ukraine/Moldova, therefore in North-Northeastern Europe. They were decisively pushed away by the Hunnic invasions and possibly even earlier by other movements of people.

Wine is a Latin borrowing present in all branches of Germanic languages (not just East Germanic), so it might've come from anywhere between Gallia and Britain, in Northern Europe, and the Western Balkans, but Latin was hardly spoken by a sizeable part of the population east of Carpathians.

Dragon does not count as a general Early Germanic loanword from Greek. It's held to be a much later borrowing from Greek and only appears in Middle English (medieval era), for instance. Germanic peoples in Northern Europe were not isolated from the Mediterranean world, by the way. There are lots of archaeological evidences of widespread trade and cultural contact between them since the early Roman Era or even earlier. As with dragon, a large part of the Latin and Greek loanwords in Scandinavian languages seem to date from the Middle Ages as they had even closer contacts with the Mediterranean cultures, but it started even earlier, because Scandinavians and other North Europeans were profoundly influenced by the Roman Empire even before their Migration Period.

Why do you say ship is a Latin or Greek borrowing? It's also present in all Germanic languages and can be reasonably linked to the PIE root *skey-, -skeyb, so I see no reason to believe it should be a Southeast European borrowing.
 
I would say Gothic is the 'oldest' Germanic language in the same way that the Anatolian languages are the oldest IE languages. Perhaps Basal Germanic would be more accurate (excluding the Negau inscription).
 
Ancient DNA from Goths and other Eastern Germans shows R1b-U106 and I1.
 
What kind of evidence would you expect to find if Gothic were from Scandinavia?

For example mention some words from other languages in the north of Europe in Gothic, like from Finno-Ugric or Balto-Slavic, ...
 
Gothic is not the oldest Germanic language. It's the oldest fully attested Germanic language for very obvious reasons, i.e. it was spoken near to literate societies and was under very strong Roman and Hellenic influence from a very early age. Gothic was already specifically Eastern Germanic, and not generically Germanic, let alone Proto-Germanic, so when it's first attested Proto-Germanic had already split into at least 3 different branches of Germanic dialects/languages since at least a few centuries earlier.
However, the earliest attestation of an undisputed Germanic language can be found as early as the 2nd century A.D and is identified as a very early form of Proto-Norse that is still reasonably close to Proto-Germanic. That proves that Germanic languages were already spoken in Scandinavia even before Gothic appears in the written historical record. Besides, the fact that Finnish, Estonian and Saami have a numrous adstrate of Proto-Germanic or even presumably Pre-Proto-Germanic loanwords, having borrowed forms of the Germanic words before they changed significantly in the latter branches like East Germanic, also indicates that Proto-Germanic and probably its earlier linguistic stages was spoken nearby the Finnic and Saami tribes, which were probably natives to Northeastern Europe, not to Southeastern Europe or elsewhere further south.
Goths do not represent the earliest linguistic or sociocultural stage of Proto-Germanic peoples at all. Genetically, as the latest studies have demonstrated, they also seem to have been pretty mixed with lots of Northern European, Eastern European and even Southeastern European elements, so they look more like a population formed out of a relatively recent ethnogenesis, not a relic of older times.
A major factor to confirm that Goths came from Scandinavia, apart from the relatively contemporary documents that claim just that, is that, well, the Goths appeared in Southeast Europe and dispersed from there to many parts of the Roman Empire in the 4th to 6th centuries. They were not mentioned in the Roman and Hellenic sources in the Balkans well before that, and they seem to have been a "novel population" settling in the region in the Late Antiquity. So it clearly makes more sense that they came from outside of the Roman Empire into it, not the other way around.
Also, Goths did not live in Southeast Europe. They migrated during historic times to it, and there are lots of documented evidences of that migration. Goths had originally lived in the lands roughly from Poland to Western Ukraine/Moldova, therefore in North-Northeastern Europe. They were decisively pushed away by the Hunnic invasions and possibly even earlier by other movements of people.
Wine is a Latin borrowing present in all branches of Germanic languages (not just East Germanic), so it might've come from anywhere between Gallia and Britain, in Northern Europe, and the Western Balkans, but Latin was hardly spoken by a sizeable part of the population east of Carpathians.
Dragon does not count as a general Early Germanic loanword from Greek. It's held to be a much later borrowing from Greek and only appears in Middle English (medieval era), for instance. Germanic peoples in Northern Europe were not isolated from the Mediterranean world, by the way. There are lots of archaeological evidences of widespread trade and cultural contact between them since the early Roman Era or even earlier. As with dragon, a large part of the Latin and Greek loanwords in Scandinavian languages seem to date from the Middle Ages as they had even closer contacts with the Mediterranean cultures, but it started even earlier, because Scandinavians and other North Europeans were profoundly influenced by the Roman Empire even before their Migration Period.
Why do you say ship is a Latin or Greek borrowing? It's also present in all Germanic languages and can be reasonably linked to the PIE root *skey-, -skeyb, so I see no reason to believe it should be a Southeast European borrowing.
In another thread you also tried to prove that some Germanic words which are believed to be loanwords from ancient languages have actually Germanic origin, the fact is that those who believe that in the ancient times Germanic people lived in Scandinavia prefer to believe that the ancient Greek word for ship (skaphos) is the source of the proto-Germanic word, not vice versa.
Proto-Germanic is really one of the most influential languages in the west Asia, for example *burg "tower, fortress, pyramid" which can be found in almost all ancient languages in this region from Homeric Greek to Hurro-Urartian, Semitic and Iranian languages has certainly Germanic origin.
 
In fact the news of the Scandinavian origin of the Goths is deduced from the writings of Jordanes, but the written testimonies of the Gothic language have matured on the continent, in central-eastern Europe, in particular since the writing of the Bible by Wulfila in the full IV century.

To my knowledge, the few elements that can put eastern Germanic into strict contact with the languages of Scandinavia are hypothesized by Holtzmann's law and through some similarities with the ancient Gutnish which was the spoken language on the island of Gotland.


The issue has also been studied more recently by Elias Wessén and Dietrich Hoffmann.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holtzmann's_law

https://www.academia.edu/1670089/Old_Gutnish_Historical_Phonology_and_the_Old_Norse_Context

Jordanes never talks about Scandinavia but he says Goths came from Scandza which was the name of different ancient lands in the Mediterranean region in the ancient Greek sources, like this one: Ancient Scandia in Kythira island - Greeka.com, hundreds years before him, Pliny talks about Scandinavia and Jordanes certainly knew the difference between Scandinavia and Scandza, the more important point is that Jordanes, who was himself a Goth, says that Goths migrated to Getae thousands years ago, not a few centuries before him, he also believed that the ancient land of Getae named after Goths, in fact he just uses the name of Getae for Goths.
If we consider Goths and the Getae, who lived in the southeast of Europe from at least 700 BC, as the same people then the Gothic migration from Scandinavia will be meaningless, Jacob Grimm, the discoverer of Grimm's law (the First Germanic Sound Shift), says that "If only six or eight of my interpretations be correct, and the remainder more or less probable, there needs no further proof that ancient Getae were a Germanic people."
 
Jordanes never talks about Scandinavia but he says Goths came from Scandza which was the name of different ancient lands in the Mediterranean region in the ancient Greek sources, like this one: Ancient Scandia in Kythira island - Greeka.com, hundreds years before him, Pliny talks about Scandinavia and Jordanes certainly knew the difference between Scandinavia and Scandza, the more important point is that Jordanes, who was himself a Goth, says that Goths migrated to Getae thousands years ago, not a few centuries before him, he also believed that the ancient land of Getae named after Goths, in fact he just uses the name of Getae for Goths.
If we consider Goths and the Getae, who lived in the southeast of Europe from at least 700 BC, as the same people then the Gothic migration from Scandinavia will be meaningless, Jacob Grimm, the discoverer of Grimm's law (the First Germanic Sound Shift), says that "If only six or eight of my interpretations be correct, and the remainder more or less probable, there needs no further proof that ancient Getae were a Germanic people."

Cyrus,


it's true that Jordanes doesn't employ the precise term of Scandinavia and that the same Scandia term may have greek roots. But when he speaks of Scandza / Scanzia, borrowing some topos and informations from the ancient geographers, he speaks of a territory absolutely located in the extreme north of Europe. If then the ancients considered it an island and not a peninsula it matters little. It is located in the "boreal" (northern) ocean, in front of the Vistula river. There is no possibility of misunderstanding. Read this passage from Getica, III, 16:

"Ad Scandziae insulae situm, quod superius reliquimus, redeamus. De hac etenim in secundo sui operis libro Claudius Ptolomeus, orbis terrae discriptor egregius, meminit dicens: est in Oceani arctoi salo posita insula magna, nomine Scandza, in modum folii cetri, lateribus pandis, per longum ducta concludens se. De qua et Pomponius Mela in maris sinu Codano positam refert, cuius ripas influit Oceanus. 17 Haec a fronte posita est Vistulae fluminis, qui Sarmaticis montibus ortus in conspectu Scandzae septentrionali Oceano trisulcus inlabitur, Germaniam Scythiamque disterminans."


On the use of the Getae term it's necessary to be very careful in the interpretation. Jordanes exploits the memories of the Goth settlement in the Balkan-Danubian area (probably he himself was a native of those parts), but above all the assonances of names and paretimologies to identify his Goths with the Balkanic Geats of antiquity, who lived in that area. It's an operation that served to ennoble the Goths in a more erudite form and to bring them back to more famous groups in the orbit of the "Scythian" peoples or to their neighbors, considered so indomitable, bellicose and "barbaric" with respect to the Greek-Roman world, but with a considerable cultural and religious level.


Check out this recent study, in pages 48 and following
https://books.google.it/books?id=KHHsCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA49&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false
 
Gothic is actually the oldest Germanic language, in the ancient times Goths lived in the southeast of Europe, it is usually believed that they migrated from Scandinavia but I can't find any linguistic evidence for this migration, all evidences actually show that they migrated to Scandinavia, for example we see numerous Latin and Greek words in Scandinavian languages, such as dragon, wine, ship, pipe, ...

question of reasoning
- are you sure 'ship' (**skip) is not a PIE cognate and not a loan? -
- the other words have been loaned too by a lot of other languages, without any migration from S-E Europe; words can travel without too much people sometimes... Scandinavians loan new words from elsewhere, and that doesn't change the origin of the bulk of their languages.
 
Sorry, I reacted too quickly, Ygorcs had made a far more detailed and accurate answer before me.
Getae languages for what is known to date appear rather close to other languages of East Balkans (and even to Illyrian) and very far to what can have given birth to Germanic, IMO.
 
Cyrus,


it's true that Jordanes doesn't employ the precise term of Scandinavia and that the same Scandia term may have greek roots. But when he speaks of Scandza / Scanzia, borrowing some topos and informations from the ancient geographers, he speaks of a territory absolutely located in the extreme north of Europe. If then the ancients considered it an island and not a peninsula it matters little. It is located in the "boreal" (northern) ocean, in front of the Vistula river. There is no possibility of misunderstanding. Read this passage from Getica, III, 16:

"Ad Scandziae insulae situm, quod superius reliquimus, redeamus. De hac etenim in secundo sui operis libro Claudius Ptolomeus, orbis terrae discriptor egregius, meminit dicens: est in Oceani arctoi salo posita insula magna, nomine Scandza, in modum folii cetri, lateribus pandis, per longum ducta concludens se. De qua et Pomponius Mela in maris sinu Codano positam refert, cuius ripas influit Oceanus. 17 Haec a fronte posita est Vistulae fluminis, qui Sarmaticis montibus ortus in conspectu Scandzae septentrionali Oceano trisulcus inlabitur, Germaniam Scythiamque disterminans."


On the use of the Getae term it's necessary to be very careful in the interpretation. Jordanes exploits the memories of the Goth settlement in the Balkan-Danubian area (probably he himself was a native of those parts), but above all the assonances of names and paretimologies to identify his Goths with the Balkanic Geats of antiquity, who lived in that area. It's an operation that served to ennoble the Goths in a more erudite form and to bring them back to more famous groups in the orbit of the "Scythian" peoples or to their neighbors, considered so indomitable, bellicose and "barbaric" with respect to the Greek-Roman world, but with a considerable cultural and religious level.


Check out this recent study, in pages 48 and following
https://books.google.it/books?id=KHHsCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA49&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

Jordanes is either right or wrong, if he is right the we should also believe that Goths migrated from Scandinavia in the 3rd or 2nd Millennium BC and they were the same as ancient Getae.

It is certainly possible that Jordanes thought that ancient Scandza was somewhere in the Germania because at that time Germania was considered as the original land of Germanic culture, some people also thought that Turkey was the original of Turkic culture! As in the ancient times Turkey didn't exist in Anatolia, Germania didn't exist in the north of Europe before 500 BC too, Herodotus talks about Germania but as a land in the east, not in the north.
 
Sorry, I reacted too quickly, Ygorcs had made a far more detailed and accurate answer before me.
Getae languages for what is known to date appear rather close to other languages of East Balkans (and even to Illyrian) and very far to what can have given birth to Germanic, IMO.

Gothic was just one of Germanic languages, Germanic is a direct descendant of proto-Indo-European language which dates back to at least 6th millennium BC, there were some other Germanic tribes in Getae too, one of the most famous ones was Bastarnae that we read about them from about 200 BC (600 years before Gothic conquest of Roman Dacia), they defeated Romans in the famous Battle of Histria (62–61 BC) and ancient historians such as Strabo, Pliny and Tacitus, considered them as one the strongest Germanic tribes.

Getae got its name from ancient Gutians but some different Thracian, Illyrian, Iranian and Germanic tribes lived in this land.
 
MOESAN said:
question of reasoning
- are you sure 'ship' (**skip) is not a PIE cognate and not a loan? -
- the other words have been loaned too by a lot of other languages, without any migration from S-E Europe; words can travel without too much people sometimes... Scandinavians loan new words from elsewhere, and that doesn't change the origin of the bulk of their languages.


What do you mean by "a lot of other languages"? Romans never conquered Scandinavia and other major Germanic lands, why there should be many Latin words in Germanic languages? For example why proto-Germanic agent suffix -ārijaz has been borrowed from Latin -ārius? Germania was in the north and Persia was in the east of Roman empire, why we don't see almost any Latin word in Persian?
 
Jordanes is either right or wrong, if he is right the we should also believe that Goths migrated from Scandinavia in the 3rd or 2nd Millennium BC and they were the same as ancient Getae.

It is certainly possible that Jordanes thought that ancient Scandza was somewhere in the Germania because at that time Germania was considered as the original land of Germanic culture, some people also thought that Turkey was the original of Turkic culture! As in the ancient times Turkey didn't exist in Anatolia, Germania didn't exist in the north of Europe before 500 BC too, Herodotus talks about Germania but as a land in the east, not in the north.

Cyrus,


I have some difficulty in following the reasoning.
At what chronological height Jordanes placed the migration of the Goths to the continent will we never know. He would have to ask himself if he was still alive.


Let's go back to the starting question: do you ask if there is any linguistic evidence that testifies incontrovertibly to the origin of the Goths from Scandinavia, right?

No, strictly speaking, no: we have no "smoking gun" that can be taken as a sure and objective proof of all this. We have only a few indirect indications that could make a Scandinavian origin or a closeness to the Scandinavian context plausible: some phonetic phenomena common to eastern Germanic and Norse / Northern Germanic, and the lexicon of some Scandinavian dialects, now extinct.


Jordanes information remains, so to speak, isolated, and you are right when you say that he himself passes on somewhat confused historical-geographical notions, being an epitomator working on lost previous works by non-Goth authors (including Cassiodorus), who drew on their turn to other traditions and with other purposes.
It would however remain to understand why he feels compelled to report this topos of Scandinavian origin in his writing. The same thing would have happened later in the Lombard context with the anonymous Origo Gentis Langobardorum and with Paolus Diaconus with his Historia Langobardorum (which perhaps in their turn took on a Jordanes model?). Although the news may not be true or not entirely trustworthy, it's clear that it was important for them to pass on this memory, but before abandoning what is now only a hypothesis - despite the fact that today's leading scholars of the Goth may think otherwise, like Wolfram and Pohl- something else is needed that defeats it openly: lack of evidence is not evidence of absence. Just as we admit that Scandinavia may have been reached by continental Indo-European groups two millennia or so BC. it doesn't even seem so out of the ordinary that around the beginning of our era there was a partial counter-migration towards the continent.


We need to agree on what we want to save from what Jordanes wrote. If we do not want to give credit to literary testimony, we must make do with what else is available, based only on material elements and archaeological evidence that makes us suppose that the first possible Goths are formed on the continent, with a first Germanic / Baltic nucleus, within the cultures of Oksywie and Wielbark, in Pomerania (however not far from Scandinavia) and from there they radiated southeast into the continent, ascending the Vistula. It is in the steppes of central and eastern Europe, north of the Black Sea, and partly in the eastern Balkans that the Goths are so called that they will flow back into Iberia and Italy, with the cultures of Černjachov and Sîntana de Mureș. That is to say when the Goths assimilate sarmatic, protoslavic and eastern Balkan elements including, in all probability, ancient Dacian and Thracian substrates. Notwithstanding the fact that the Goths = Geats equation has always seemed to me an operation of historical erudition advocated by elites, rulers and writers (not therefore a collective phenomenon present in the common imaginary), if I were to hypothesize when the Goths began to imagine themselves as Geats, I would pause more than anything else on this phase of the late antique, not before.


After which I absolutely agree that Germanic, ethnic and / or linguistic elements were present and infiltrated in Central Europe even before the Goths, according to trajectories that are not yet well clarified. The first attestation of Germanic language (or better of a Germanic name) is that one in the Etruscan alphabet, affixed around the II sec. a.C. on the helmet of Negau, an older artifact dating back to around the fifth century. BC, found in present-day Slovenia.

https://balkancelts.wordpress.com/tag/negau-helmets/
 
Gothic was just one of Germanic languages, Germanic is a direct descendant of proto-Indo-European language which dates back to at least 6th millennium BC, there were some other Germanic tribes in Getae too, one of the most famous ones was Bastarnae that we read about them from about 200 BC (600 years before Gothic conquest of Roman Dacia), they defeated Romans in the famous Battle of Histria (62–61 BC) and ancient historians such as Strabo, Pliny and Tacitus, considered them as one the strongest Germanic tribes.

Getae got its name from ancient Gutians but some different Thracian, Illyrian, Iranian and Germanic tribes lived in this land.

You're opening doors already open: you can say: Germanic, Celtic, Italic, Lusitanian, Ligurian, Illyrian, Greek, Iranian, Slavic a.s.o. are brother languages! Sure Germanic is a part of IE languages and found its oldest sources in PIE. But too, Germanic is a late evolution, with specific mutations. We are maybe shouting in the wind? And it seems these last evolutions which made it "germanic" occurred in Northern Europe, not elsewhere. And the male haplo's we find as dominant among them are Y-R1b-U106 and Y-I1 (I think R1a was acquired on the margins), and their lands of demographic expansion are in North too. And even if we take as basis Germanic is a far cognate of Daecian or Gaetian or whatever else, it remains these Balkans languages have an evolution very far from the Germanic one. Concerning Bastarnae, their ethnic and linguistic affiliations seems very dubious, for now.
 
If anyone's interested, this is a very good paper about the Germanic ethnogenesis with an eastern focus:

https://www.academia.edu/37471966/I..._in_southern_and_central_Poland_300_BC_10_AD_

4-6f0d4689ae.jpg


The (likely) Gothic split can be seen in the gradual colonization of the Polish plain.
 
What do you mean by "a lot of other languages"? Romans never conquered Scandinavia and other major Germanic lands, why there should be many Latin words in Germanic languages? For example why proto-Germanic agent suffix -ārijaz has been borrowed from Latin -ārius? Germania was in the north and Persia was in the east of Roman empire, why we don't see almost any Latin word in Persian?

Well, I think you're forgetting that the Roman Empire was the main source of civilized stuff and knowledge to the Germanic tribes in Antiquity, and it was tremendously influential, and during the Roman Empire a very large number of Germanic tribesmen served the Roman Empire as mercenaries and even came to live within its borders. Many Germanic tribes became officially foederati of the Romans. And in fact Roman did conquer lands that were either Germanic or directly neighboring Germanic peoples in present-day Germany and Belgium. There were very close relationships between Germans and Romans, they don't need to have been directly conquered by them for that, particularly when Romans projected a very powerful culture and brought lots of sociocultural and economic novelties to the Germanic tribes almost all on their own (except for some contact with Hellenic people), whereas people in West Asia, in Persia for instance, had been living amidst diverse civilized ways of life for millennia.

Also, it seems to me you need to decide what you really think. If Germanic was a West Asian language spoken somewhere in Iran or Iraq, then it couldn't have been that influenced by Latin, because Latin was never spoken by large masses of people nor managed to become a lingua franca in the East Mediterranean region, actually in any land to the west of Epirus and south of Moesia, where Greek and further east Aramaic and Persian still reigned uncontested. No wonder the Latin influence on Persian is minimal: Latin was never a major native language in West Asia and never managed to become a true lingua franca of trade, civilization and high culture, the Romans themselves learned Greek and soon started to speak Greek natively (Eastern Roman Empire).

On the other hand, the Germanic tribes' location in North-Central Europe (their origin in Scandinavia doesn't preclude the fact that when we're talking of early Germanic peoples, and not its earliest PGM roots, they already occupied parts of Germany, Netherlands, Poland) makes perfect sense considering the heavy Latin influence, because Latin was indeed the main language of civilization and political power and the lingua franca of Europe in the lands neighboring those territories (Gallia, Britannia, Noricum, Pannonia, Moesia Superior). They were in direct contact with lands where Latin had indeed become a major native language or at least an important lingua franca. Even much earlier, Proto-Italic and Proto-Celtic being probably Central European languages, Pre-Proto-Germanic would've been in much closer contact with the ancestral forms of Latin if it were an originally North-Central European language (nobody is certain whether PGM was first spoken north or south of the North Sea coast in Scandianvia) than in the Iranian Plateau or Mesopotamia.

One thing is certain:Uralic languages of Northeastern Europe are full of PGM and even arguably pre-PGM loanwords, indicating that that language was spoken in their vicinity since very early on if it had come from elsewhere. That becomes even more likely when you add to that the overwhelming genetic evidences (an increasing number of ancient DNA records) pointing to a high degreee of continuity between ancient and modern populations in core Germanic-speaking, territories with an almost completely "Central+North European" background (mainly CWC + Bell Beaker + occasionally some additional Euro HG i.e. WHG and EHG), and virtually nonexistant signs of West Asian input typical ofall the ancient DNA records recovered from the areas between the Levant and Central Asia, and the Iranian Plateau in particular, all of which had a very high pre-steppe ancestry that is not found in Germanic-speaking North Europe (Iranian_Chalcolithic + extra Levant_Neo and Anatolian_Neo input due to ongoing admixture that homogeneized the Near East gradually after the Neolithic). That would make PGM a language that was brought to Northern Europe by a supposedly very influential and more civilized people, but strangely with minimal genetic impact.
 
Getae got its name from ancient Gutians but some different Thracian, Illyrian, Iranian and Germanic tribes lived in this land.

That's an extremely speculative statement based on mere sound similarity, and you'd know that fully well if you were not very obviously personally invested in rejecting any evidence contradicting your hypothesis and instead accepting anything whatsoever that fits the conclusion you want to be true (Germanic being West Asian and, by sheer "coincidence" with your being Iranian, closely related to Iran and Iranians). I have met this kind of behavior before in this forum, and it's just intriguing that, surprisingly, all these people have hypothesis that invariably link some ancient people/civilization/culture to their own modern ethnicity or country.
 

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