gpiot-@... wrote:
original article:
http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=24
> cyryll-@... wrote:
> original article:http://www.egroups.com/group/cybalist/?start=23
> > Dear Members!
> >
> > Thank you all who joined this list. I am sure this idea will be a
> > success of Indo-European studies online!
> >
> > I'm now gathering info about substratum words in Indo-European
> > languages for a new project on CyBaLiSt. I have already found
something
> > very interesting about Germanic, Greek and Celtic, but I'm sure
other
> > branches also contain lexicon which was spoken in Europe and Asia
long
> > before Indo-Europeans came.
> >
> > I would appreciate if you can share your knowledge on the matter.
> >
> > Cyril
> >
> Hi, Cyril!
>
> It's a splendid project, but how about reporting to the rest of us
briefly
> what interesting things you've found so far? Given the widespread
assumptions
> about European prehistory, one would be led to expect traces of a
Uralic
> substrate in Germanic, "Minoan", "Pelasgian", "Mediterranean" or
what-you-may-
> call-it in Greek, Theo Vennemann's "Atlantic" (Afroasiatic?) in
Celtic. Do
> your findings bear out such expectations, or do you intend to come up
with
> something really surprising?
>
>
> Piotr
>
>
I would like to comment a bit on substrate in Germanic. There is almost
certainly quite a lot of substrate influence in Germanic, probably
something like 20-30 % of the common Germanic vocabulary is apparently
not derived from IE, and there is additional non-IE vocabulary in the
north Germanic languages.
Some of this is quite central vocabulary items like 'blood' and 'sea'.
It has been noted that such words tend to cluster in some particular
fields, such as terms which has to do with the sea and boats, names of
plants and animals and with pig-keeping.
The hypothetic substrate language is sometimes referred to as the apple
language or "folkish", from two of the supposed substrate words.
As for this substrate being Uralic there does not seem to be the
slightest evidence for this, and the affiliations of "folkish" is in my
opinion quite obscure.
On the other hand there has certainly been a lot of linguistic contact
between Finnish and the (north) germanic languages. There are many
germanic loan-words in Finnish and their form show that borrowing has
been going on for a very long time (at least 2000 years). Examples of
various ages: Fin. kuningas 'king' from common Gmc *kuningaz, Fin.
kaupunki 'town' from Old Norse kaupung, Fin tykki 'cannon' from Early
Modern Swedish stycke. Loans the other way are rather less common, but
there is a limited number of examples, the most well-known being
Swedish pojke 'boy' from Fin. poika.
Strangely there is rather less evidence for contact with Saamish, while
there are a fair number of Gmc loanwords in Saamish, I am not aware of
a single well authenticated pre-modern case of borrowing from Saamish
to Swedish.
Also I am not aware of any loanwords which would indicate contact
between Germanic and Proto-Uralic or Proto-Finno-Ugric or indeed even
with proto-Baltic Finnic.
Tommy Tyrberg