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

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

From: Thomas Nordengen

To: cybalist@egroups.com

Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2000 10:44 PM

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

 

 

The German linguist Theo Venneman believes that groups of people speaking what he calls "Semitidic" Atlantic languages (a lost branch of the Afroasiatic family) came from NW Africa in Neolithic times and colonised the Atlantic seaboard including the British Isle and Scandinavia. He identifies them with the European megalith-builders and attributes a significant proportion of the "non-IE substrate" in Germanic to their linguistic influence. Another possible source for loans in Celtic and Germanic is, according to him, the "Vasconic" family that originated in Central Europe and is now extinct except for Basque.

 

Vennemann has in fact offered Afroasiatic etymologies for a number of Germanic words. We met last week at a conference in Spain, but I wasn't able to listen to his lecture on the origin of the word "key" (which he considers to be a Vasconic loan, for a change), as I was reading my own paper in a parallel session. So far, the reception his theories by other scholars has been somewhat mixed.

 

Vennemann identifies the Picts (who survived in Scotland until the mid-9th century) as the last Atlantic speakers. I'm not sure what his exact dates for Norway would be, but his articles seem to suggest that Atlantic speakers were an adstrate to Germanic-speaking Scandinavians almost down to historical times.

 

I don't know much about Norwegian hydronymy, and river-names are notoriously deceptive. A few of those you quote look possibly Germanic to me, but I couldn't swear to that without a more careful examination.

 

Piotr

 

 

I'm no expert in indo-european languages, so many of my examples are of IE
origin. I just mentioned a few words which I hadn't heard in other
languages and thought could be non-IE. But also remember that many
Scandinavian words were spread widely during the Viking ages (ca. 1000
AD), for example vindu = window. Although most of my examples have been
explained as IE, some remain. Fjell = mountain and hav = ocean are my best
candidates for non-IE. It's also interesting that names of rivers, some
lakes and regions in Norway are of unknown origin. Ancient, unexplained
names like Trysil, Hemsil, Tolga, Rena, Madla, Bandak and Totak do not
resemble other Norwegian names or words.

Maybe the pre-germanic languages survived longer in some isolated parts of
Norway? What time did they most likely go extinct?