What language did the Germans speak?

The classical world classified space more than peoples. If you lived north of the Pontic Sea, you were a “Scythian”. If you lived beyond the Sind, along the Sindhi river: “Indian”. “Ethiopians” lived south of Egypt. Nobody knew a Slav from an Ossete, a Hindi from a Burushaski, a Nubian from a Somali. Nobody much cared. So when Julius Caesar or Tacitus is talking about “Germans”, they just mean someone on the wrong side of Gaul.

The third part of Gaul – the Belgium – Gaius Julius Caesar noted as part Gallic, part Germanic. Which I fully believe; I’ve long suspected even the Yorkshire was Frisian throughout the Roman age. Julius hired some transRhenian German mercs in his struggles against the Gauls proper. Germans, whatever that meant, were considered friendly enough that his adopted son and heir Augustus sent over three more legions. Er. Anyway Julius didn’t bother fine-tuning the names much.

I’m considering all this when I see the trailer for “Barbarians”, about the Varusschlacht. So, at any rate, modern Deutsches term it. I was discussing all this with my German-speaking mother and she wondered how come the Germans put That Statue in the wrong place. That got me thinking about Wiker and Hahn (although I’m too Catholic to have mentioned it), and the late-mediaeval rediscovery of Tacitus especially across the Alps and Rhine.

Modern “Germans” do own a folk memory… of Late Antiquity. They remember Etzel, widely accepted these days as Attila. They remember the Fimbulwinter a century after him. But they don’t remember Arminius. Tacitus had to teach them. In Latin.

The “Germannic” languages denote the languages recorded there in Late Antiquity. Franks and Goths spoke related languages. So, it seems, did the Sueves by then. Before all that there was (Runic) literacy in old Norse around the Dane Mark. Arminius wasn’t in any of those tribes; he was in the Cherusci, far up the Weser, east of the Rhine. What did they speak?

Words like “Teuton” don’t help; Teutatis was a god of the Gauls too, you’ll remember from Asterix. The Volcae were probably Celts, certainly foreign to our [neo]Germans.

Wikipedia has a map of “the Germanic tribes”. The map is from Penguin Atlas of World History… 1988. I take it the Penguin was looking at Jastorf. Jastorf got to the green bits, including Germania Superior province, by Year One AD. But … 1988.

I think the background to the revolt was, exactly, the tug-of-war across the Weser. The Rhine was becoming Romance. The Elbe still oriented north, to what we'd recognise as German. Whatever was in between had to decide between them.

Count me as a skeptic that in AD 1988 the archaeologists could declare Jastorf in the upper Rhine as of AD 9. For all we know the Cherusci spoke Gaulish. I much doubt that Netflix Germany knows any better. The Swiss certainly spoke Gaulish and, in fact, their metal bands are now reconstructing that as a common language.