--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Erik Smit" <cuergomamotorist@...> wrote:
>
> It is well know that places- and waternames can give us information
> about the previous peoples who lived in a country. It is called
> substratum. For example there exist such substrata in USA and
> Australia (Indian and aboriginal names). But also the immigrants
> gave new names to rivers and mountains, for example Rocky Mountains
> and Blue Mountains (Australia).
>
> It is well known that in Scandinavia there is no substratum of
> pre-Germanic tribes. But I should like to know when the first
> Scandinavian names were written and which are the oldest names?
> Maybe there was a substratum of pre-germanic names till 1000 BC. So
> it is a reasonable thing that such old substratum might have
> disappeared in AD 800-1000. Who can give me more information?
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/cybalist/message/61266
These are river names which occur in both Scandinavia and the Baltic
countries. The Baltic countries never spoke Germanic, and these river
names don't make sense in Germanic. They must belong to a language
which was spoken in Scandinavia *and* the Baltic countries, and since
the names in Scandinavia have been modified by Grimm's law. The
Germanic speaking peoples must have arrived in Scandinavia before or
during the Grimm-shift, which we assume took place around the middle
of the first century BCE.
It is also known that in the -lev/-löv names of Scandinavia, like in
the -leben names of Thuringia, the first element is always a
non-Christian male name. In contrast, in the appr. contemporaneous
-løse/-lösa names, the first element is very difficult to interpret as
anything Germanic. It is tempting to identify the -lev/-löv
("inherited possession") names as those of places which were taken by
the invading Germanic-speakers, and -løse/-lösa ("redeemed property")
as those of places which had been left to the conquered
non-Germanic-speaking people.
It is also known that no Germanic word could have begun a p-, or be of
the form TVT where T is any unvoiced stop (p, t, k, kW) and V is a
vowel. Words of that form, of which some but not all are common to
both West and North Germanic are therefore words of a substratum in
North and West Germanic.
Torsten