Re: [tied] Uralic Substrate in Germanic?

On Sun, 08 Aug 2004 21:29:40 -0000, you wrote:

>What does everyone think about the possibility of a Uralic substrate
>in Germanic? I think it's at least possible, given the following:
>
>1. "The word corresponding to Old High German muoter is not attested
>in Gothic at all, in its place we find aithai." Bammesberger,
>Alfred. "Did the 'Indo-Europeans' Collide with 'Pre-Indo-
>Europeans?" http://www.lituanus.org/1994_1/94_1_04.htm. Presumably,
>the Gothic word was pronounced /'eTe/. Compare Finnish äiti 'mother'.
>
>2. The retraction of stress-accent across the Germanic family to the
>initial syllable (presumably, the unaccented prefixes were added
>later).

Finnish _äiti_ has no cognates outside Balto-Finnic and has features
marking it as a non-native word. The direction of borrowing is
certainly the opposite to that suggested.

The free PIE accent has been replaced with predictable stress pattern
in many IE languages - Latin (the famous "Latin stress-rule"), Polish
(penultimate), Germanic and Czech (initial), French (final). It hardly
requires a substrate to account for it.

A Finnish linguist called Kalevi Wiik is an enthusiastic advocate of a
substrate theory, and e.g. attributes Germanic umlaut to the influence
of Uralic vowel harmony. But the weight of opinion is against him.

Kim Bastin