From: Mark Odegard
Message: 1151
Date: 2000-01-25
You should really ask Vennemann about it, but I think he does believe in this kind of influence. His story is, in a nutshell, that before the coming of Indo-European and Finno-Ugric tribes all of northern, central and western Europe was occupied by only two families: Vasconic, the older of the two, which expanded all over the North European Plain as the Pleistocene glaciers receded, and which he claims is the source of the oldest European toponymy, and Atlantic (= Afroasiatic), which was brought to Iberia, France, the British Isles and Scandinavia by neolithic sailors from northwestern Africa, the carriers of Megalithic cultic practices. The Basques are the last surviving Vasconic people in an originally Atlantic area, and Basque can accordingly be expected to have been affected by Semitoid languages. Vennemann identifies the Picts as the last Atlantic Mohicans and reinterprets Germanic mythology in terms of an Afroasiatic substrate in Scandinavia.
I've read of Vennemann's views second-hand. What he proposes is not unreasonable, only unproveable. Quite clearly, there was at least one other language family besides Vasconic in Western Europe before IE took over, and it is the soul of reason to look to Afro-Asiatic as the most logical family for such a language. At the same time, it is just as likely, just as reasonable, just as logical for any such language[s] to represent an extinct family.If the Germanic substrate is to be considered of Afro-Asiatic origin, the time depth and geographic distances involved are so great, we would have to speak of a separate branch of A-A, with at least several thousand years of drift from anything in the historic record we can compare with today.
Whoever these 'Atlantic' people were, they were there. It's my view the move northward was motivated by the extraordinary riches of the ecologically pristine coastal region, and its abundance of seafood and marine mammals. The then fabulously rich Atlantic salmon runs began at the Loire and ran all the way north to Norway and, as I remember from a map, well into the Baltic.
Mark.