Hej, Thomas
I posted something similar on this list not long
ago. I had read that a large part (about 30%) of the Scandinavian and Germanic
vocabulary could not be explained as coming from an Indo-European source. And
these words grouped themselves together in an interesting way: they were words
dealing with shipbuilding, navigation, fish names, weapons and war. Nothing is
known about the language from which Germanic was supposed to have borrowed these
words, but from the sound changes that separates Germanic from other
Indo-European branches, people had deduced that Germanic must have been strongly
influenced by an unknown language that was rich in fricatives (like s, f, th, z,
zh etc. - our ancestors could have been a lisping, fish eating
tribe).
All this looked very interesting and I wanted to
learn more about it. But it turned out that my books were a little too old -
since then, recent research has shown that several of these words are of IE
origin. And, as Piotr said, sound changes can happen for a lot of reasons, they
are not a proof of influence from a substrate language.
The idea of a mysterious pre-Germanic people in
Scandinavia doesn't seem to be fashionable among today's linguists. But let's dig a little deeper into this! What are the oldest
known archaeological traces of people in Scandinavia? And when did the Germanic
/ IE-speaking people come here? I know there are archaeological traces that are
at least 3-4000 years old, and the Germanics couldn't have arrived before that.
Hakan