Deeply Ancient Germanic

junk Piotr writes:

My second favourite theory is that Germanic is a sole survivor of a whole nother subfamily of IE which once occupied a large part of northern Europe and whose speakers perhaps arrived there via the east Baltic area, Finland and southern Scandinavia, rather than from the south or southeast.

I've had similar (speculative) thoughts. People tend to think of Scandinavia as a frozen wasteland, but in fact it's not; the winters are less severe than Russia's. In Norway, you also have stupendous fishery resources (Atlantic salmon, among others) which tend to be ignored in the literature. While you had to work hard in the midnight sun of summer to ensure you kept warm in the winter, a virgin, relatively thinly-populated Scandinavia can almost be thought of as paradisical.

Scandinavia is also physically isolated. The continent-wide disturbances which have periodically afflicted Europe (e.g., warlike Indo-Iranians, Huns, Mongols, Charles V, Napoleon, to mention only a few) tend to bypass the Northland. The Fenno-Scandian block has pretty much been left alone all through history.

It is not improbable (but it's not provable either) that the pre-Germanics made it to Scandinavia at a very early date, a date so early that this founder group spoke pure Late Indo-European (the post-Anatolic variety), albeit perhaps with a 'northern accent'. The substratum language in Germanic gives it many of its seafaring words; the landlubbers from inland Eastern Europe had to learn how to manage the Baltic-and North- Sea.

In this scenario, Balto-Slavic, as the nearest Indo-European language (and one through which trade relationships would have existed), would have been an adstratum language. We talk about Lithuanian being astonishingly archaic, but it was also breathtakingly innovative, when it borrowed additional noun cases from Uralic. French left an immense adstratum (now a superstratum, if I understand Beekes' terminology correctly) on English, but English remains firmly within the Germanic family.

Germanic could be the second most ancient branch of IE.

Mark Odegard.