Origin of Proto-Germanic Distinguishing Features

I came across a thread about the non-IE substrate of Germanic while
catching up in this group. Rather than respond to such an old thread
I'm posting this independently. While I can't offer a reason as to
WHY proto-Germanic broke up, I can offer the beginnings of a testable
hypothesis as to why Germanic has some features that seem strange
relative to the other branches of IE. It seems like an obvious
argument but I haven't seen it made elsewhere; it draws on both
linguistics and genetics.

The putative difference between Germanic and the rest of IE as
related to vocabulary is the subject of the thread that brought me to
this discussion group in the first place. Whether or not we accept
30% as the number of non-IE words in some subset of Germanic, it
stands that there are an anomalously large number of words that are
not IE, and I think most would agree, a larger number than in other
branches. I say this because I saw Piotr's claim to the contrary,
but have seen no lists of such words for, say, Slavic or Greek or
Italic. (I exclude Indic because there are a lot of non-IE words,
but we know where those came from, i.e. Dravidian).

But vocabulary is not the only difference between the Germanic branch
and the other branches. Germanic languages are well-known for
exhibiting certain notable odd characteristics. One of them is the
Germanic languages' much greater tendency to agglutination, relative
to most other IE languages (though this feature has appeared in rare
cases elsewhere in individual languages). Another more infamous one
is Germanic's preservation of IE ablaut, which happened because
stress in Germanic moved to the initial syllable. Unlike most other
branches, adjectives come before nouns, and there is leveling of past
tenses relative to other IE languages. So, morphosyntax gives us
another rich hunting ground for the substrate language, if it has
modern survivors (or at least ones that died out recently enough to
have given attested forms). Areal affects of the type and magnitude
required to actuate these changes are not at all unheard of.

Now, here's the genetic side of my argument: unfortunately for our
understanding of prehistory, languages and genes don't always go
together (living in California with people from a dozen different
language families all speaking English, I know this better than
anyone). This seemed supported in Cavalli-Sforza's principal
components analysis in _Genes, Peoples, and Languages_, which showed,
for example, that despite their non-IE language, Finns were not
terribly different than their Indo-European neighbors. However,
there was in fact a component centered on eastern Scandinavia and
radiating southwest through Europe. I think he (and most scholars)
are puzzled because we're thinking about the problem backwards.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. The Romans report
Germanic speakers first appearing at the northern bounds of their
territory about the middle of the second century BCE. They were
pushing south, which leads one to infer that up to that point,
Germanic-speakers were in Scandinavia. To my knowledge, there are no
historical or archaeological finds in conflict with this assertion.
So to explain the strange features of Germanic (including its
vocabulary), we shouldn't be looking at mainland Europe, because the
breakup of Old Germanic was already underway at the time of their
arrival further south while the substrate influence made itself felt
on all three branches. So, we should be looking in Scandinavia, not
Germany or the Netherlands.

Curiously enough, the part of Europe where Germanic-speakers lived
prior to their dispersal is home to a stress-initial agglutinating
language with adjectives that precede nouns, and fewer past tenses
than most branches of IE. In short, what I am proposing is that
proto-Germanic, during the time its speakers lived only in
Scandinavia, experienced areal effects from its Finno-Ugric neighbor
(s) and in so doing developed the unique characteristics we know as
Germanic today. To the point of adjectives preceding nouns, people
will point out that either IE branches share this feature - Slavic
and Baltic (whose homelands are both proximate to Finno-Ugric
speakers) and Indic (which may have been influenced in the same way
by Dravidian). Finnish grammarians are quick to point out that,
probably owing to influence of Scandinavian languages, Finnish has
developed another past tense not shared by other Finno-Ugric
languages. Areal effects are almost never unidirectional.

The three possibilities with respect to areal effects of Finno-Ugric
on proto-Germanic are these:

1. Proto-Germanic developed its unique features for some other
reason than proximity to Finno-Ugric, and then imprinted itself
unidirectionally on Finno-Ugric. Under scrutiny this collapses
because many of those features (except for the extra past tense) are
shared by other Finno-Ugric languages that have not had contact with
Germanic speakers.

2. The proximity and similar morphosyntactic attributes of Proto-
Germanic and Finnish (or a Finno-Ugric ancestor or relative of modern
Finnish) is purely coincidental.

3. Proto-Germanic and a Finno-Ugric language had extensive
contact and areal effects Proto-Germanic were responsible for some of
the unique (and obviously similar) characteristics the branch has
today.

The strongest linguistic evidence for my theory comes from these
grammatical similarities. Despite those, one weak spot the theory
has is that of the supposedly non-IE words, only a third of them (by
my count of one abbreviated list) have similarities to Finnish, and
some of these are obvious borrowings from Norse into Finnish.
(Cognates listed at end of message). But I know very little about
Uralic languages; a better comparison would be between Proto-Germanic
and earlier Finno-Ugric (or, depending on time-depth, even Uralic)
roots. And I would also point out that areal effects can be
propagated by language A speakers learning language B, making
mistakes in language B that are influenced by language A, without
importing language A vocabulary. My account might not tell you where
2/3 of the unique words come from, but it does account for many of
the other differentiated aspects.

This hypothesis would also be falsified if it could be shown that
Uralic speakers could not have been in contact with the Germanic
speakers before their dispersal, i.e. the first appearance of
Germanic-speakers in mainland Europe occurred before any Finno-Ugric
speakers appeared in Scandinavia.

Returning to genetics: light hair and eye color can be more safely
deduced to have appeared in Northern Europe, rather than almost
entirely disappeared from the rest of the Indo-European world. Now,
taking a six-thousand year time depth for Indo-European, and assuming
that this corresponds with the point when gene flow ceased between
geographic ends of the community, that's still not nearly enough time
for adaptive traits like light skin, hair, and eyes to develop.
People were in cold parts of Asia and North America for far longer
than that and failed to develop any such traits. On the other hand,
we have dates of 40,000 years BP for the arrival of the first modern
humans in Europe; it's much more likely that they were the ones who
first evolved these traits. This strongly supports Northern
Europeans' interbreeding with whoever was already there when they
arrived, even if they weren't Finno-Ugric speakers. This would
explain Finns' lack of strong genetic differences from the Germans
and Slavs that now surround them.


Shield (Swedish sköld, Finnish suojavaippa)
Bite (Swedish bita, Finnish pistos/pistaa)
Keel (Swedish köl, Finnish köli)
Oar (Swedish åra, Finnish airo)
Rudder (Swedish styre, Finnish ruori)
Rider, knight (Swedish riddare, Finnish rittari) (almost def.
borrowing from Norse)
Mast (Swedish masto, Finnish masto)
king (Swedish konung, kung, Finnish kuningas)
carp (Swedish karp, Finnish karppi)
lamb (Swedish lamm, Finnish lammas)
folk (Swedish volk, Finnish väki)