Weser–Rhine Germanic

The English term "Weser-Rhine" is used as an equivalent to the German term which was introduced into linguistics by Maurer, or , which is influenced by the term now more commonly used by more German archaeologists. "Rhine-Weser" is also sometimes used in English. Maurer's term was influenced by the archaeological findings of Raphael von Uslar in 1938, although in the field of archaeology itself Gerhard Mildenburger had already introduced the term to refer to what Uslar himself had originally simply called the inland part of the "West Germanic area in the narrower sense". This regionalisation is still commonly used in archaeology, where it is considered convenient, although the idea that it represents a clearly defined cultural area is no longer widely accepted. The maps of Uslar visualized the area being roughly between the Rhine and Weser rivers in what is now Western Germany, stretching north the upper Ems and south to the Main. The term "Istvaeonic language" (German , or ) was part of a tripartite distinction given in Roman sources, which had already being used in linguistics before Maurer. The Istvaeones (or Istaevones) were a group of Germanic peoples mentioned by two Roman authors in the first century AD. Pliny the Elder ( 23-79 AD) described them in his Natural History as one of five major groupings of Germanic peoples, who lived near the Rhine, and were distinct from the Ingvaeones on the North Sea coast, and the Herminones who lived further inland from the Ingvaeones and Istvaeones. (The other two groups, the Vandili and Peucini, lived east of the Elbe river.) Tacitus ( 56-120 AD) in his Germania added that these three western groups claimed, on the authority of ancient songs (), to descend from three sons of a common ancestor named Mannus, who was in turn the son of a god. == Theory ==

Maurer proposed Weser-Rhine Germanic as part of a three-way division of the languages traditionally recognized West Germanic. According to Maurer, West Germanic did not exist as a subgroup within the Germanic languages: rather West Germanic consists of three distinct dialect groups, with Weser-Rhine Germanic coexisting with North Sea Germanic and Elbe Germanic. According to Maurer, Weser-Rhine Germanic was ancestral to a proposed early Frankish language, and related dialects in Hesse, thus giving rise to the Franconian dialects, including modern Dutch, as well as the Central German dialects. He thus proposed that Central and the Upper German dialects only secondarily became united into a single High German language via the High German consonant shift. This language family effectively joined into the greater West Germanic language continuum, from which the consonant shifts spread. It was proposed that this unification of the languages was encouraged by the political unification of these areas achieved by the Merovingian dynasty. While some linguists discuss Weser-Rhine Germanic as a subgrouping within the West Germanic languages, linguists do not generally support Maurer's theory. Current scholarship is less inclined to propose distinct proto-languages to explain the lack of unity in West Germanic, instead relying on the notion of a dialect continuum. There is no linguistic evidence that separates supposed Weser-Rhine Germanic languages from supposed Elbe Germanic languages. Furthermore, cultural and archaeological groupings do not necessarily correspond to linguistic divisions, and Maruer's theory requires common West Germanic linguistic innovations to be later developments that spread to all West Germanic languages. Moreover, the large tribal divisions that Maurer assumes for his theory, such as the Franks, Alemanni, etc. do not seem to predate the Migration Period. ==Maurer's methodology==

Maurer asserted that the cladistic tree model, ubiquitously used in 19th and early 20th century linguistics, 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 as having simply 'branched off' from a single common 'Proto-West Germanic', he proposed that there had been much more distance between the languages and the dialects of the Germanic regions. Maurer's approach of drawing linguistic conclusions from non-linguistic evidence was influenced by Gustav Kossinna. He proposed that the Germanic dialects which eventually entered the Rhine-Weser region became a distinct group of dialects spoken by the Franks and Chatti around the northwestern banks of the Rhine, who were presumed to be descendants of the earlier Istvaeones. == References ==