As I understand it, some linguists recognize about 30% of Germanic
languages are non-IE words. This substatum must have been the
aboriginal population the incoming IE peoples found in northern
Europe.
There were two layers of peoples previous to the IE arrival:
the earliest was the mesolithic/neolithic population of the Ertebolle
culture of Denmark. Related groups must have ranged beyond this area.
This culture basically stretches back to the terminal palaeolithic
Maglemose culture that also included Britain and much of the northern
European plain and Baltic. Was this somehow related to Finnish?
I know of no study that shows the non-IE vocabulary in Germanic was
related to Uralic or anything else.
The other group was the megalithic peoples that spread up the
Atlantic seaboard during the warm Atlantic climatic period. While it
might be intruging to equate these peoples to the modern Basques or
ancient Iberians, there is no evidence other than being part of the
same broad cultural tradition and apparently skeletal type that
either was the case.
Nautical terms were especially adopted by the early proto-Germanics
as, being the continental pastoralists that they were, their
technology and familiarity with the sea and navigation was inferior
to that of the locals'.
This is one clue that navigation was surprisingly developed in
Neolithic Atlantic Europe. How else would the early farmers make it
to Ireland, Britain, the Orkneys and Shetlands? We should not doubt
that they settled in southern Scandinavia, largely absorbing the late
Ertebolle and related people.
Might not the Skagerrak and Kattegat be corruptions of words the pre-
IE ancient mariners had for these bodies of water? Why would a
Scandinavian need to go to the Netherlands to find a name for a sea
in his own backyard?
--- In cybalist@..., "Joseph S Crary" <pva@...> wrote:
>
> That just it,
>
> when you remove all the Italic-Celto-Balt suff from
> German, you have this rather uniform, very large non IE substrat
and
> very little else.
>
>
> JS Crary