Marc wrote -
Germanic does have a
proportion of vocabulary which appears to be non-IE,
the origin of which is
still unsure.
I read somewhere (G.Gritter 1993 "Van oerklank tot
moedertaal" Kosmos
Utrecht) that words like "drink, drive, sea, soul,
broad..." could have come
from the megalithic culture in S-Scandinavia (no
further explanation in the
book).
About 30% of the Germanic vocabulary is of non-IE origin. Many
of these non-IE words belong to distinct categories in an interesting
way:
naval terms (ship, sea, keel, boat, rudder, mast,
steer, sail, ebb, north, south, east, west)
war and weapons (sword, shield, helmet)
animal names, especially names of fish
titles and social relations (king,
wife)
What language did these words come from? The most
informative book I've found on this subject says that the Germanic peoples
probably entered southern Scandinavia before 1,000 BC, where they met an
unknown, non-IE-speaking people whose language had a deep influence on the
development of Germanic. From the sound changes that separated early Germanic
from other IE languages (Grimm's law), they have deduced that this unknown
language must have been rich in fricative sounds (such as s,
sh, th, zh,
f, ch) while it lacked voiced stops
(b, d, g). It seems like this
is about all we know.
Hakan