Re: [tied] Re: Non-IE elements in Scandinavian

----- Original Message -----

From: Piotr Gasiorowski

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 11:07 AM

Subject: Re: [tied] Re: Non-IE elements in Scandinavian

 

----- Original Message -----

From: John Croft

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 6:30 AM

Subject: [tied] Re: Non-IE elements in Scandinavian

 

In every IE branch one finds a large number of words that have no external cognates. In Classical Armenian (which may be regarded as an extreme case) about 50% of the vocabulary consists of lexemes of unknown origin (inherited IE words add up to some 10%, and the remaining ones are loans from Iranian, Greek, Aramaic and other identifiable languages). Many of those enigmatic words are likely to be Urartean borrowings, but since our knowledge of Urartean vocabulary is limited, we may never be able to prove anything about their origin.

 

The proportion of "non-IE" items in Germanic vocabulary is often exaggerated. Many of the words cited in various sources as belonging to a "pre-Germanic substrate" may in fact have IE connections. In Thomas's list we have nes 'headland' < *nas-ja-, possibly related to the IE (and Germanic) 'nose' word [cf. David's posting], furu 'fir, pine' (German Föhre 'pine', OE furh-wudu 'fir grove'), a derivative of *p(e)rkW- 'oak' (the semantic development seems odd, but OHG preserves traces of the original meaning), ekorn (German Eichhörnchen, OE a:c-weorna < PGmc. *aik-werno:n), apparently related to names of small arboreal beasties in other IE branches [cf. Joao's posting]. The structure of some of the words in question (e.g. scog, related to English shag and archaic/dialectal shaw < PGmc. *skag-) looks IE, though if they are one-branch survivals their IE origin may be impossible to demonstrate. At any rate, these words are not uniquely Scandinavian, since they are found elsewhere in Germanic.

 

The proportion of recognisable Baltic Finnic or Saami loans in Germanic is surprisingly small, which indeed militates against the possibility of the hypothetical substrate being Uralic. On the other hand, Finnish contains a large number (perhaps hundreds) of very archaic Germanic (and Baltic) loans, including hydronymic and maritime terminology -- e.g. rauma 'strait' from *strauma- 'stream, current', keula 'boat' < *keula- (Norwegian kjøl 'keel', OE ce:ol 'ship'), laiva 'ship' < *flauja- (Old Norse fley) -- as if various northern IE populations (a Germanic-speaking upper class?) had been absorbed by the Baltic Finnic speakers, or as if there had been Germanic trading posts in Finnic speaking areas at a very early date.

 

The Ertebølle culture was Late Mesolithic, though it absorbed some Linear Pottery elements. The Ertebølle people manufactured pottery but were not farmers. However, they were certainly part of the ethnic substrate of the northern group of the Funnel Beaker culture, and the Neolithicisation of Schleswig-Holstein and S Scandinavia was a continuous process (via the so-called Rosenhof phase) in which the Mesolithic people and their culture were gradually assmilated rather than driven out. This would mean that the "pre-Germanic substrate" dates back to ca. 4350-4000 BC.

 

Piotr

 

 

Thomas wrote:

> As a speaker of Norwegian, German and English, I have noticed that
> Norwegian (and the other north-germanic languages) have a wealth of
> words which don't exist in other languages. Certainly any language
> will have unique words, but there are just too many to be a
> coincidence.
>
> My theory is that when IE settlers came to Scandinavia, they had to
> live in peace and harmony with the aboriginal population because of
> the harsh climate here. To survive, they had to learn new skills
> from the natives. For a long period of time they lived side by
side,
> and the Indo-europeans took up a large number of native words.
Since
> very few words in modern Norwegian bear any resemblance to Uralic
> words, I doubt the pre-IE language was Uralic.
>
> What kind of language did they have? Would it be possible to get a
> glimpse of this (or these) ancient language(s) by searching modern
> Scandinavian languages and Icelandic for non-IE elements?
>
> Examples of unique Sc. words: fjell = mountain, jente = girl, hav =
> ocean, furu = pine, ekorn = squirrel, ørret = trout, tjern =
pond,
> rar = strange/funny, nes = tiny peninsula, skog = forest

John wrote:

Interesting observation.

I have seen a paper on the net drawing attention to the interesting fact that aparently the Saami also have a high proportion of words that are not Uralic, in origin suggesting s substrate language.  Some have suggested that the language of the Ertebolle culture of Denmark and North Germany (Derived from the late Ice Age Swidderian groups) was the language of the first farmers of Scandinavia.  There is a spread of coastal fisherfolk stretching north with the warming of climates in the Sub-Atlantic phase, leading to eventual settlement in the arctic as Sammi people.

Regards

John