Since we quoted from the Geschichte der Deutschen Sprache in the previous post, it seems fair to also quote from another linguistic source and, since we quoted from a 19th century source, let us also quote from another 19th century source. The book in question is Robert Gordon Latham’s “The English Language”. Latham had many talents but his foremost appears to be in ethnology. Here is Latham regarding the Slavic displacement of the original Germanic population. (Latham generously gives this displacement 500 years from the time of Tacitus to the 6th century but these days, the displacement is posited to have occurred only in the 6th-7th centuries):
“Lastly, Saxon as in England, the oldest geographical terms are Keltic; some of the original names of the rivers and mountains remanining unchanged. The converse is the case in Transabingian Germany. The older the name the more surely it is Slavonic.”
“So much for the extent of the assumed displacement. It must have been the greatest and the most absolute of any recorded in history.”
“It must also have taken place with unparalleled rapidity. By supposing that the assumed changes set in immediately after the time of Tacitus, and that as soon as that writer had recorded the fact that Poland, Bohemia, and Courland were parts of Germania, the transformation of these previously Teutonic areas into Slavonic ones, began, we have a condition as favorable for a great amount of changes as can fairly be demanded. Still it may be improved. The last traces of the older population may be supposed to have died out only just before the time when the different areas became known as exclusively Slavonic; an assumption which allows the advocate of the German theory to stay that, had our information been a little earlier, we should have found what we want in the way of vestiges, fragments, and effects of the antecedent non-Slavonic aborigines. Be it so. Still the time is short. Bohemia appears as an exclusively Slavonic country as early as A.D. 625. Is the difference between these areas and the time of Tacitus sufficient?”
“Undoubtedly a great deal in the way of migration and displacement may be done in five hundred years, and still more in seven hundred; yet it may be safely said that, under no circumstances whatever, within the historical period, has any known migration equalled the rapidity and magnitude of the one assumed, and that under no circumstances has the obliteration of all signs of an earlier population been so complete.”
“How could the displacement inferred from this utter obliteration have taken place? Was it by a process of ejection, so that the presumed immigrant Slavonians conquered and expelled the original Goths. The chances of war, when we get to the historical period, run the other way; and the first fact which we know concerning those selfsame Slavonians who are supposed to have dispossessed the Germans in the third and fourth centuries, is that, in the ninth, the Germans dispossessed them.”
“If this view will not suffice, let us try another. Let us ask if it may not be the case, that, when those Germans, who are admitted to have left their country in great numbers, migrated southwards, they left vast gaps in the population of their original areas, which the Slavonians from behind filled up, even by the force of pressure; since geography abhors a vaccuum as much as nature is said to do.”
“I will not say that this view is wholly unsupported by induction. Something of the kind may be found amongst the Indians of North America, where a hunting-ground abandoned by one tribe is appropriated by another. The magnitude, however, of such vacuities is trifling compared with the one in question.”
“History only tells us of German armies having advanced southwards. The conversion of these armies into national migrations is gratuitous.”
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