Nordwestblock

The term Northwest Block groups are combined, the BC were established in the last few centuries in the northwest of Central Europe and to have spoken neither Celtic nor Germanic, but a different Indo-European forms of this idiom. One calls the Northwest block so as the " peoples between Germans and Celts ".

The northwest block hypothesis

The hypothesis of the existence of the north-western block was partly established by the linguist Hans Kuhn for the first time in 1959 because of its analysis of place names and personal names and other linguistic clues and expanded in the following years.

The southern border of the Celtic -speaking world, according to Kuhn ranges of the Somme on the Oise to the Main. This would be seen for example in the dissemination of Celtic place-names ending in " - dun " (Latin: " dunums ", eg Noviodunum ) or " briga " that do not occur north of that line. In the north and north-east the territory of the North West block extends right to the lower Weser, Aller and the resin and to Thuringia and Hesse. To the north and east of it sat germanischsprachige peoples.

Characterizes the northwest block is by one occurrence of the following symptoms, however, are not spread evenly over the entire space:

Hans Kuhn gave evidence before that the space of the Northwest block was north along the North Sea coast and to the south by Thuringia and Hesse comprises of walks germanischsprachiger groups. So Caesar knows the river Scheldt already under his Germanic name " Scaldis ", indicating that around the middle of the 1st century BC is here to anticipate a germanischsprachigen population.

The core area of the Northwest block was Germanized according to Kuhn only for Christ's birth. Go to Northwestern block therefore included the chatting and Cherusker, which are supposed to have so originally not been for the Germans. In terms of the tribal name of the Cherusker Kuhn pointed out that the suffix sk was not Germanic, or as such unusual. He does present a composite, which is to bind to Indo-European linguistic heritage of the North West Block. The Germanization by a Germanic upper class, which also includes the Cherusker Arminius to have belonged, has been promoted in the opinion of Hans Kuhn through the defensive struggle against the Romans.

In contrast to the Germans, the Northwest Block tribes were down to earth and it should stay up all migrations over.

Formerly saw some historians and linguists, the Northwest block as Illyrians. Hans Kuhn held in 1962 for the most likely assumption that the North West Block used the Venetian language or related to her language.

Criticism

The hypothesis Hans Kuhn welcomed the agreement, but also to violent rejection, which his critics accuse Kuhn volatile and inaccurate work.

Wolfgang Meid considers the presence of an originally non- Celtic and non- Germanic, but spoke related population in the northwestern Central Europe for granted, but has doubts on the question of the spatial extent of this linguistic substrate and on the issue of subsequent Germanization.

Critics such as the Onomastiker Jürgen Udolph see in the arguments put forward as the main argument waters names ending in- apa - merely a derivative of IE * ap-/ab- in the wake of the Germanic sound shift and calculate " the area of the alleged Northwest block with his alleged expansion in the southwestern Lower Saxony, Westphalia, the southern Netherlands and northern Belgium to the Germanic core areas. "