Eragon Ancient Language

It looks like it's supposed to be related to Old Norse.

 

We don't really use the term "Old Germanic." The reconstructed hypothetical ancestor of all the Germanic languages is called Proto-Germanic. When some of the Germanic tribes migrated down from Scandinavia to the main part of Europe in the first millennium BCE, they went off in three directions and their languages gradually diverged. The language of the people who came down and headed east is called East Germanic; the various Gothic tribes were in that group, and their languages eventually died out, although a few monks managed to write them down so they're not completely lost. The language of the people who came down and went west is called West Germanic. Those are the people who made their mark on history, becoming the most well-known German tribes, such as the Allemani, the Franks, the Angles and the Saxons. English, German, Dutch, Frisian and Yiddish are West Germanic languages.

The people who stayed home in Scandinavia spoke North Germanic. Their language resisted divergence for many centuries, and even today Danes, Swedes and Norwegians can understand each other's languages with far less effort than, say, a Spaniard and an Italian. Icelandic is the most conservative of all the Scandinavian languages, and has changed very little from Old Norse, which was spoken and written well into the Common Era and for all practical purposes was the nearly unchanged original North Germanic language. It preserves phonetics, grammar and vocabulary that the other Germanic languages lost long ago. It has the TH sound that all Germanic languages except English lost nearly two thousand years ago, and it is relatively free of borrowings from Latin and French.

Old Norse gives us a better clue into the structure and vocabulary of Proto-Germanic than our reconstructed guesses at the original West Germanic language, which never had a chance to be written before it began diverging into English, Dutch, German and extinct Frankish.

So when we want to imagine what the language of the Germanic tribes was before their diaspora into sub-Scandinavian Europe, we naturally look at Old Norse. A writer who wants to evoke the sounds and spirit of the pre-Roman Teutonic tribesman will use Old Norse as a resource.

 

Judging from the words that have been inherited by all Indo-European languages, the original speakers of the ancestral Indo-European language started out somewhere in the vicinity of Anatolia (eastern Turkey), give or take a few hundred miles. The Eastern Branch migrated east and south, and were the ancestors of the Persian, Indic and Slavic peoples.

The Western Branch came north. It was always assumed that they sailed across the Bosporus into the Balkans, but new archeological evidence suggests that they came the long way around the Black Sea on foot and then headed west out of Siberia.

The Celts were the first Indo-European tribes to arrive in Europe, perhaps as long ago as 3000BCE. With the newer technologies they brought from the fringes of Mesopotamian civilization, such as iron metallurgy, they easily marginalized the older ethnic groups who were established there, to the extent that we have very little evidence of them except tantalizing bits like Stonehenge, and their only surviving descendants, the mysterious Basques.

The Celts had the continent to themselves for more than a thousand years and even populated the British Isles, when the Greek tribes showed up around 2000BCE. They repeated the process with even newer Mesopotamian technology such as writing, and began muscling the Celts out of their homeland.

Bear in mind that even though Mesopotamian civilization was a few thousand years old when the Indo-Europeans started migrating, they were a nomadic people on the Mesolithic-Neolithic cusp, or at least they regressed to that stage and made their journeys without wheels or draft animals. You lose a lot of your culture on a trip like that, if only because you can't carry much with you. So when the Greeks (and the Etruscans before them, a people about whom we know very little) built a civilization of their own based on ideas they borrowed from the Phoenicians and other seafaring people with whom they traded, they jumped through a Paradigm Shift and left the Celts in the dust.

It's not clear when the Roman tribes arrived or what route they took, and some anthropologists and linguists wonder if they weren't merely an especially precocious Celtic tribe. They took Greek civilization and fine-tuned it, and turned it into an empire, encroaching on the Celts all over Europe.

Meanwhile, sometime before 1000BCE, the Germanic tribes took the long, cold route toward Europe and established a homeland in Scandinavia. They must have passed through the lands of the Finnic tribes (the ancestors of the Finns, Estonians and Sami or "Lapps") along the way, since they've been in that region for possibly ten thousand years. But somehow both peoples survived the encounter. Then around 1000BCE they found their way to Jutland and began expanding into the main landmass of Europe from the north. As nomads, they eventually ran head-on into the Roman Empire, and the resulting clash was really bad news for the few Celtic tribes who were still hanging on in Iberia, Gallia (southern France) and Bohemia (the land of the Bohumil, a Celtic tribe).

The Celts were swept aside and survived as a distinct people only on the British Isles, as the Germanic tribes and the Roman legions divided Europe between them in the early years CE. When the Roman Empire declined and the Legionnaires abandoned Britannia, the Germanic Angles, Saxons and Jutes promptly sailed over and renamed it Angle Land, leaving the Celts, the former masters of all Europe, with only Ireland, Wales, Cornwall and a few islands, and eventually Scotland, which Irish adventurers seized from the pre-Indo-European Picts around 1300 years ago. ("Scoti" was actually the Roman name for the Irish people.)

It wasn't until about this time, the early years CE, that the Slavic tribes established a homeland in the Ukraine and then began pushing westward into eastern Europe. Another Indo-European tribe, the Albanians, established their country as well, although how they got there is a bit of a mystery, at least to me.

So except for the eternal Finns, the hardy Basques, and the Picts who were about to lose Scotland to the Celts, all of Europe was populated by Indo-Europeans about 2000 years ago. Then non-Indo-Europeans--various Mongol tribes--started muscling their way in, as the Roman Empire disintegrated and fragmented. The Huns and later the Magyars established an enduring beachhead in Hungary, or Magyarorszag as it's known within its borders. The Bulgars made a kingdom for themselves, but they abandoned their language and fraternized with their Slavic neighbors, so today most of us think they're just another Slavic nation. The Mongol Hordes themselves came pretty close to conquering Europe, abandoning their conquest at the gates of Vienna (and I'm not making this up) in order to go home to a royal funeral. Finally the Ottomans grabbed Greece and a big chunk of the Balkans and held onto it for centuries... as the Moors--a Semitic tribe--did to Iberia and some of the Mediterranean islands in an earlier era.

Speaking of Semites, the Jews never established a distinct nation in Europe but they've hung onto their cultural identity since Roman times and must be counted as one of the non-Indo-European tribes to successfully settle there.

So what are we left with in modern Europe as a result of all these Indo-European migrations? The Celts, the first Indo-Europeans to set foot on the continent, have been marginalized and in fact for a while were swallowed by the British Empire. The Greeks, who founded our civilization and once ruled from Egypt to Persia, still have Greece, and that's only because the Ottoman Empire collapsed. The Romans, who perfected Greek civilization and once controlled most of the continent... well Rome is not the center of the world like it once was, but a large and important chunk of our vocabulary is Latin, and several hundred million European people speak Romance languages. The mysterious Albanians still have Albania, although during the Ottoman occupation they adopted Islam, an artifact of Mideastern civilization. The Slavs have acquitted themselves well: the Russians had a mighty empire for several hundred years and then built a new one under communism, and most of eastern Europe is Slavic.

But the Germanic people went on to be world leaders. Germany itself was a center of power after the Enlightenment and flared briefly in the 20th century before burning out in shame. The Vikings are legendary while their Swedish descendants have become iconic pacifists who sell us Volvos to protect us from harm while driving. The Saxon kingdom of England ruled the waves and much of the land for hundreds of years. We Americans have taken the torch from them and are still English at heart despite our Melting-Pot gene pool--just try attacking England one more time and you'll be the target of American nukes. So American civilization, which is said to be dominating the world, is really English civilization, a legacy of the Germanic tribes who came down from Scandinavia and fought the Romans to a draw.