South Germanic

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Depending on the context, different terms can be assigned to the term Südgermanen .

Ethnologically

  • Occasionally the southern Germanic peoples are equated with the western Germanic peoples.
  • In the literature on the time of the Great Migration , this can mean a subdivision of the West Germanic tribes that settled near the Alpine Danube .

Linguistically

In German studies and historical linguistics, the term “South Germanic” is partly identical to the more common term “West Germanic” in linguistics. This refers to all Germanic idioms south of Denmark (see West Germanic languages ). According to other terminology, only those dialects are considered to be South Germanic, which then carried out the second sound shift from the 7th century, i.e. the language of the Rhine-Weser Germanic peoples (Istwäonen), to which the Franks and Chatti (Hesse) are counted, and the Elbe Germanic , to which the Sweben, the Alamanni, the Thuringians, the Lombards and the Bavarians belong. An almost synonymous term is therefore pre-old high German . The term West Germanic, on the other hand, includes the North Sea Germanic (= Saxons, Frisians and Anglo-Saxons) in addition to these South Germanic in the narrower sense .

In any case, the East Germans (Goths, Gepids, Rugians, Burgundians etc.) and the Scandinavian Germans ( North Germans ) are not counted among the South Germans or West Germans in the linguistic sense .

Mythological

  • Since the time of German mythology (after Jacob Grimm ), this can generally mean all Germanic non- North Germanic tribes, optionally with the East Germanic tribes (which are also represented in Grimm's German mythology ) or a purely German mythology (occasionally also "Teutonic mythology "Called) or the mythology of the German-speaking area.
  • A more recent expression in the field of Germanic mythology , which strives for an individuation process to Nordic / Eddic mythology and tries to use texts such as u. a. Tacitus ' Germania and, if necessary, reference to Indo-European mythology to create an autarkic Germanic mythology that excludes the typically exclusive Eddic elements. As a result, it can more closely resemble a Proto -European mythology and can thus in turn include the pre-Eddic Nordic mythology, taking into account that the Nordic mythology is not necessarily to be equated with the Eddic.
  • In general, there is a tendency in Germanic mythology to differentiate between Nordic / Eddic mythology, Anglo-Saxon mythology and South Germanic / continental Germanic mythology. The mythological views of the East Germans are mostly classified under the latter - because of the weak tradition .

See also

literature

Web links