Hi Chris Gwinn,
You:
> I really wish that people would stop quoting this "30% non-IE
> vocabulary in Germanic" as if it was an established fact. Where are
> the scientific proofs for this? What Germanist or IE-ist has
> established this fact beyond reasonable doubt? I have only ever
seen
> one such list of alleged non-IE Germanic words (online), and
> personally I was not at all convinced that the list was very
accurate.
I found this figure among other places in Studentlitteratur's
textbook about Gothic and as Torsten also said, the expression , *by
some* is a key expression, and this was also used in the said book.
I guess it really wouldn't be and isn't hard to come up with these
kinds of figures. One procedure could be to count all the words in
Hellquists ethymological dictionary or Elias Wesséns Våra Ord and see
in what proprotion the ' obscure origin-', or 'germanic origin' are
occurring.
The problem with this is that IE "theoreticists" and others probably
can come up with some IE ethymological derivations that Hellquist or
Wessén didn't consider or thought were too far-fetched.
And that every single word in this list would be constantly disputed.
Maybe one could pick such ethymological dictionaries wich make bigger
articles about each item, and thereby assume that the words in those
are more thoroughly investigated.
But I guess that the words derivation or lack of the same would
always be disputed by some researchers, although perhaps different
researchers for different words. And some scholars perhaps could be
of the opinion that some words listed as IE in Wessén or Hellquist
perhaps, god forbid, really are not.
That's why I asked for Torsten's opinion on the matter. BTW what is
yours?
Maybe the opinion on the list is that there is no point to decide now
for an exact figure. But I'm sincerely wondering:
What order of magnitude ar we talking about? One third? one sixth?
one twelfth? one thirtieth?
Best wishes
Anders