Re: Non-IE elements in Scandinavian

From: John Croft
Message: 3824
Date: 2000-09-18

Piotr wrote
> 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.

I would agree to this. Piotr, there is a Saami site on the web (I'll
try to dig it out) which is suggesting that the original Saami
language was not Uralic, but that Uralic came later over a non-Uralic
substrate.

> 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.

Agreed.

Regards

John