>
> But even though I consider myself as having read a great deal more
about the Germanic languages than the average person, I to my
consternation am unfamiliar with the idea of the "Nordwestblock".
Are these words that are hypothesized as coming from a pre-Germanic
substratum of non-IE origin? Or something else, or something
similar?
>
Try the search function. I've written a lot about it in this forum,
and so have others.
The idea comes from a thing the German linguist Hans Kuhn was told
as young: If a word in a Germanic language has a /p/ in it(/pf/
or /ff/ in German), it can't be Germanic, since the corresponding
PIE word would have /b/ and that is exceedingly rare, therefore it
must be a loan, presumably from Latin. But he noted that many of
those words could hardly be Latin (eg. English 'put' or 'pull'), and
since Celtic loses /p/ altogether, they couldn't be Celtic either.
He concluded that they were words picked up during a Germanic
expansion into an area where an IE language was spoken that hadn't
had a Grimm shift, namely the area bounded by the rivers Weser/Aller
and Somme and the mountains of Thuringia, around the beginning of
our era.
Another group of Nordwestblock words in (West)Germanic are those in
TVT, where T is an unvoiced stop
(thus 'pick', 'top', 'kick', 'tap'), since they, if they had been
Germanic proper, would have been descended from PIE roots of the
type DVD where D is a voiced stop, a root type forbidden by the
constraints on PIE roots.
Torsten