--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "armanddoriot" <armanddoriot@...>
wrote:
> I've read that Germanic peoples might be a non IE people which
learned
> IE by an invading IE people, and that this original non IE's might
> have been Uralic or even Semitic, hence the oddity of Germanic as
far
> as IE languages go.
> Has anyone heard of this? And what the bases might be for this
> statem
I believe that before the arrival of an IE invading people, the
Neolithic ancestors of Germans spoke a pre-IE language. It is almost
a lapalissian statement, but holds true.
In Proto-Germanic we have a huge amount on non-IE lexicon, despite
the opinion of many parochial IEists, that consider IE every item
attested in every IE language.
For example, words of ultimately non-IE origin in English are:
"sheep", "ship", "silver", "help", "drink", "delve", "blood",
"land", "soul", "sea", "churl", "wife", "tin", "house", "knife",
"shore", "(night)mare" (only the second part of the
compound), "hut", "Hell", "if", "bone", "back", and many others.
Deriving "blood" from a IE *bhl- "to shine" is a patent absurdity:
like canis a non canendo, lucus a non lucendo, etc...
In no IE language there is a similar semantic shift, and in no IE
language a similar supposed "kenning" displaced the old inherited
word. Every strange word for "blood" such as Latin sanguis or Greek
haima is suspected to be of non-IE origin (substratum).
About the nature of this pre-Germanic substratum, I think it is
remotely related to North Caucasian. I'm working with Starostin's NC
database in order to find some relative for this substratum.
Perhaps there are some Afro-Asiatic and some Uralic loanwords.
Greetings
Marco