Talk:Germanic peoples

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Question[edit]

Why is it allowed to classify the Slavic language family as an ethnolinguistic group, but it is severely prohibited to classify the Germanic language family as such? 199.119.233.181 (talk) 12:46, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Because scholars don’t do so and if we did it would be WP:OR.—Ermenrich (talk) 13:25, 2 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We have many sources calling Germanic a ethnolinguistic group. I do support the creation of a Germanic (ethnolinguistic) page. Zyxrq (talk) 05:28, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Also wouldn’t it be more accurate to rename this page to Germanic tribes Zyxrq (talk) 05:29, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The word "tribe" is sometimes used for some classical peoples and not others in older publications, and this is partly due to traditions in Roman writing. There is however a deliberate move away from this type of terminology in academia, and there has been a lot of discussion on Wikipedia about being careful with this term. The term is not very accurate in most contexts because it can imply lots of different things "between the lines" such as a relatively low technology level or a relative lack of political sophistication. Modern historians (or many or most of them) believe that Tacitus and Caesar, who have an outsized influence on modern perspectives, deliberately wanted to exaggerate a wild and uncivilized image of what is now Germany for reasons to do with Roman politics in their times. Concerning the speakers of Germanic being a single ethnolinguistic group, you say we have sources. Which?--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 10:17, 16 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Question[edit]

What specific sources say that the Germanics stopped being a grouping of people that are categorized by being made up of generally Germanic speaking Ethnicities and Nations? Zyxrq (talk) 02:35, 25 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The question seems to be written in order to make a point "between the lines", but when read as a serious question it is difficult to understand. On the one hand, people who speak Germanic languages are categorized as people who speak Germanic languages, and so there is no "stopping" and no controversy because we are just talking about languages.
On the other hand, if we think separately about ethnicities, the wording is "begging the question". In other words, it demands that we make a certain assumption which would already be an answer to the question. Strictly speaking we do not know if there was ever any single Germanic-speaking "ethnicity". But even if we accept the simplified logic that any people sharing a single language must by definition be a single nation or ethnicity, which is questionable, then you still have to remember that Germanic is not a single language. So at best, we could only apply that logic to very early, prehistoric, phases of the language family when the peoples involved could still understand each other, and presumably lived in a single region. People certainly can't automatically be assumed to share a single ethnicity just because they speak related languages. Urdu and Spanish are related languages.
The other gorilla in the room here is that our modern concept of Germanic peoples is originally based upon classical authors like Caesar and Tacitus who used a more geographical conceptualization of what being Germanic meant. Much confusion is created by people writing as if the classical "Germani" were a single united people speaking a single language. There are many good reasons to say that they were not. The classical "Germani" and the Germanic-speaking peoples of the classical period are overlapping sets, but certainly not identical.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 09:02, 25 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for helping me understand. Zyxrq (talk) 20:11, 25 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Why it is not the same for Slavic languages and slavic peoples? Or Baltic peoples for instance. All the same arguments could be made, yet those are classified as ethno-linguistic groups 37.84.23.1 (talk) 09:35, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Those articles are now corrected. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 10:42, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@37.84.23.1 it could be that those other topics should also eventually be changed in Wikipedia, but on the other hand I see no particular reason why every group of languages will have the same type of connection to cultures and ethnicities. The Baltic speaking peoples might not have spoken one language recently but they do come from a specific identifiable region, and ethnicities or nationalities are often geographical in nature. So there might be some reason that scholars still treat them as sharing a common ethnic identity although I am not confident about this myself. In the case of Slavic peoples I suspect that things are fuzzier, but it could be that this identification is specifically a modern one with an ancient name, so to speak, as with the so-called Celtic peoples whose feeling of being connected is a modern phenomenon, and not reflective of any historically continuous connection between language and identity. Short version: every case is different.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 12:13, 7 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Germanic peoples also come from a specific identifiable region, just as Baltic peoples do. In fact, every ethnic group does have their "homeland" and it is strange to think otherwise, since it is basically how ethnicities and languages originated in the first place. 37.84.23.1 (talk) 13:48, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
This is WP:NOTAFORUM. Discussion here should be limited to improving the article, not discussing the competing definitions of ethnicity. Further forum-like posts will be removed.--Ermenrich (talk) 15:27, 8 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

once occupied?[edit]

I think this should be updated, its not like the germanic people no-longer live in england/netherlands/france/germany etc, so to refer to where we live in the past tense seems a bit strange 84.71.92.188 (talk) 21:03, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The past tense is correct. Presumably you are assuming that "Germanic-speaking peoples" are the same as the subject of this article, the "Germanic peoples" of the Roman era. While there is real debate about whether such an equation can or should be made in specific periods of history and in specific regions (read the article) there is no modern ethnicity uniting modern Jamaicans, Nigerians, Australians, Scots, Austrians etc. Unfortunately Wikipedia itself was once one of the internet sources which promoted such confusion, but the article is now more carefully written. Unless you are bringing new sources, please take your time to read the article. It is likely to contain answers to whatever doubts you have.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 21:27, 11 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
What Andrew Lancaster means here—in the event that it is not clear to you—is that scholars no longer make the conflation between the ancient Germanic peoples and the contemporary German-speaking world. These ancient peoples were not some monolithic assembly of ethnically related groups as promulgated by 19th and early 20th century racialists, who passed on specific idealized characteristics to modern Europeans. Just as Andrew makes plain, you'll want to carefully read the article in its entirety to understand why these once pseudo-scientific eugenicist ideas connecting the ancient past and modernity were specious in so many ways.--Obenritter (talk) 13:04, 12 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

"were a historical group"[edit]

as far as i can tell, germanic people definitely still exist all over western europe Alexander Shipfield (talk) 14:01, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Please see #once occupied? just above. Jähmefyysikko (talk) 14:32, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Bring sources. It is an old topic here. The feelings of anonymous people on the internet are not something we can use here. I also don't see people introducing themselves as "Germanic" in any country I've been to, so this is not just "common sense". If "Germanic people" just "Germanic speaking" then this is something covered by language articles. This article is about something else which does not correspond to any simple real thing anymore (if it ever did). If the way language is used changes enough then we will need to have multiple articles (and this has also been discussed).--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 22:04, 15 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Two pre-print articles to watch[edit]

Witnessing a huge amount of discussion about two pre-print articles from a plethora of scholars (including Guus Kroonen and Peter Heather) with the potential for big impact on this and related articles. They are as follows:

I'll be following. :bloodofox: (talk) 17:25, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting, we will have to see when they come out and how we should incorporate their conclusions into the article.--Ermenrich (talk) 18:14, 23 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The main new data in the first article is Danish, which is certainly a good thing. As is frequently true, the conclusions are not so simple and readers should be careful of the artificial cluster names. For example the name South Scandinavian might be seen as implying that the researchers discovered a strong genetic distinction between South Scandianvians and their neighbours in what is now Germany and Poland. Although they use selected data from other studies none of those include data from neighbouring areas to the south, so they can't really test the Jordanes-based "womb of nations" idea against its competitor, the Jastorf culture. Indeed, that culture is only mentioned in the abstract, despite the fact that the abstract implies that it will be a critical topic to be examined. The article will in any case add to ongoing discussion, along with many other such articles. At key moments Y DNA is used to justify decisions, which I think is methodologically questionable.
The second article is also interesting and also worth careful reading. It also discusses the Viking age. The wording concerning clusters is more careful in this article. See the following examples. --Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:51, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
  • Our modelling provides direct evidence of individuals with ancestry originating in northern Germany or Scandinavia appearing in these regions as early as the first century CE
  • We reveal evidence of expansion southwards and/or eastwards of likely Germanic speakers carrying Scandinavian-related ancestry in the first half of the first millennium CE. We note that ‘Scandinavian-related’ in this context relates to the ancient genomes available, and so it is entirely possible that these processes were driven e.g. from regions in northern-central Europe.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 11:51, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
The gap about the Jastorf culture in the paper by the Willerslev team is explained in the section "Expansions of Scandinavian ancestry during the Migration Period": The period between 2800 and 1575 BP is described in the archaeological and historical literature as the time of Germanic migrations moving south into continental Europe. The lack of samples from this period, especially from Germany, limits our ability to determine when these migrations may have occurred. Even before the emergence of archaeogenetics, cremation as the default burial practice has proven to be a source of frustration for physical anthropologists.
Maybe we can already try to draft a preliminary version for expanding this article by making use of the preprints in draft- or user-space, and incubate these changes until the papers have been published (and after cross-checking for potential changes made to the manuscripts in the meantime). –Austronesier (talk) 16:00, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
We currently have a very short section on genetics - I'd suggest leaving the caveat statement the same as they currently are, namely: The use of genetic studies to investigate the Germanic past is controversial, with scholars such as Guy Halsall suggesting it could represent a hearkening back to 19th-century ideas of race.[1] Sebastian Brather, Wilhelm Heizmann, and Steffen Patzold write that genetics studies are of great use for demographic history, but cannot give us any information about cultural history.[2]. I leave it to those wiser than I in archaeogenetics to drafts the rest.--Ermenrich (talk) 17:22, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ Halsall 2014, p. 518.
  2. ^ Brather, Heizmann & Patzold 2021, pp. 32–33.

Ermenrich (talk) 17:22, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier: I am personally not so sure yet what we could safely take out of these articles. The stronger conclusions are mostly unexciting, matching other articles (which is indeed where most of the data comes from). The more controversial implications are likely to be difficult to agree how to summarize. (One might even think the more controversial stuff is deliberating written in an obfuscating way.) So as a first step I agree with Ermenrich. But I would personally be open to proposals. I just did not yet see anything easy or practical yet.--Andrew Lancaster (talk) 17:36, 7 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Germanic_peoples&oldid=1218474038"