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The Nordwestblock (English: "Northwest Block") is a hypothetical Northwestern European cultural region that several scholars propose as a prehistoric culture in the present-day Netherlands, Belgium, northern France, and northwest Germany in an area approximately bounded by the rivers Somme, Oise, Meuse, and Elbe, and possibly extending to the eastern part of what is now England, during the Bronze and Iron Ages from the 3rd to 1st millennia BCE up to the onset of historical sources in the 1st century BCE. The theory was first proposed by two authors working independently, Hans Kuhn,〔Hans Kuhn, Rolf Hachmann and Georg Kossack, ''Völker zwischen Germanen und Kelten.'' ''Schriftquellen, Bodenfunde und Namengute zur Geschichte des nördlichen Westdeutschlands um Christi Geburt'', Neumünster, Karl Wachholz, 1962. (German)〕 and Maurits Gysseling, who was partly influenced by Belgian archeologist Siegfried De Laet. Gysseling's proposal included research indicating that another language may have existed somewhere in between Germanic and Celtic in the ''Belgian'' (sic) region.〔J.B. Berns (2004) ''Gysseling, M.'' Biography. (Dutch)()''〕 The term itself ''Nordwestblock'' was coined by Hans Kuhn,〔Rolf Hachmann, Georg Kossack and Hans Kuhn. ''Völker zwischen Germanen und Kelten'', 1986, p. 183-212〕 who considered the inhabitants of this area neither Germanic nor Celtic, thus attributing to the people a distinct ethnicity or culture. According to Kuhn and his followers, the region was Germanised from the beginning of the Common Era, at the latest. == Language hypotheses == Concerning the language spoken by the Iron Age Nordwestblock population, Kuhn speculated on linguistic affinity to the Venetic language, other hypotheses connect the Northwestblock with the Raetic ("Tyrsenian") or generic Centum Indo-European (Illyrian, "Old European"). Gysseling suspected an intermediate Belgian language between Germanic and Celtic, that might have been affiliated to Italic. According to Luc van Durme, a Belgian linguist, toponymic evidence to a former Celtic presence in the Low Countries is near to utterly absent.〔Oude taaltoestanden in en om de Nederlanden. Een reconstructie met de inzichten van M. Gysseling als leidraad. In: Handelingen van de Koninklijke commissie voor Toponymie en Dialectologie. LXXV/2003〕 Kuhn noted that since Proto-Indo-European (PIE) /b/ was very rare, and since this PIE /b/, via Grimm's law, is the main source of regularly inherited /p/'s in words in Germanic languages (except after fricatives, e.g. *sp-), the many words with /p/'s which do occur must have some other language as source. Similarly, in Celtic, PIE /p/ disappeared and in regularly inherited words only reappeared in p-Celtic languages as a result of the rule that PIE '' *kʷ'' became proto-Celtic *''p''. All this taken together means that any word starting with a /p/ in a Germanic language which is not evidently borrowed from either Latin or a p-Celtic language must be a loan from another language, and these words Kuhn ascribes to the Nordwestblock language. Linguist Peter Schrijver speculates on the reminiscent lexical and typological features of the region, from an unknown substrate whose linguistic influences may have influenced the historical development of the (Romance and Germanic) languages of the region. He assumes the pre-existence of pre-Indo-European languages linked to the archeological Linear Pottery culture and to a family of languages featuring complex verbs, of which the Northwest Caucasian languages might have been the sole survivors. Although assumed to have left traces within all other Indo-European languages as well, its influence would have been especially strong on Celtic languages originating north of the Alps and on the region including Belgium and the Rhineland.〔Peter Schrijver. ''Keltisch en de buren: 9000 jaar taalcontact'', University of Utrecht, March 2007.()〕 It is uncertain when Germanic began to gain a foothold in the area. The Nordwestblock region north of the Rhine is traditionally conceived as belonging to the realms of the Northern Bronze Age, with the Harpstedt Iron Age generally assumed to represent the Germanic precedents west of the Jastorf culture.〔J.P. Mallory, ''In Search of the Indo-Europeans'', p. 87〕 The general development converged with the emergence of Germanic within other previously Northern Bronze Age regions to the east, maybe also involving a certain degree of Germanic cultural diffusion. The local continuity of the Dutch areas was not substantially affected by pre-Roman or Celtic immigration.〔''Op zoek naar de Kelten, Nieuwe archeologische ontdekkingen tussen Noordzee en Rijn''. Leo Verhart, 2007. ISBN 90-5345-303-2〕 From about the 1st century CE, this region saw the development of the "Weser-Rhine" group of West Germanic dialects which gave rise to Old Frankish from the 4th century. The issue still remains unresolved and so far no conclusive evidence has been forwarded to support any alternative. Mallory considers the issue a salutary reminder that some anonymous linguistic groups that do not fully obey the current classification may have survived to the dawn of historical records. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Nordwestblock」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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