Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

Ante Aikio anaikio at mail.student.oulu.fi
Mon Nov 6 16:44:37 UTC 2000


On Fri, 3 Nov 2000, Rick Mc Callister wrote:

> 	Does any of this substrate overlap with the so-called "Baltic"
> substrate in Germanic; i.e. words of non-IE, non-Uralic origin such as
> ship, sea, seal (animal), etc.?

I don't think anyone has tried to do any serious research on this. It
would be quite interesting to compare the assumed substrate vocabularies.
But there's the problem that even in a postive case, the results would
probably be doubtful at best, as the standard methods of etymology are
inapplicable when we are dealing with borrowings but have no knowledge of
the asssumed donating language.

However, there are lexical correspondences between western Uralic and
Germanic which have no further etymologies in either language family, e.g.
Germ. *saiwa- ~ Samic *saajvê 'fresh water', Finnic *kauka- 'long' ~ Germ.
*hauha- 'high', Germ. *ailda- 'fire' ~ Samic *aaltê-nkê-ssê 'lightning'.
But all of these can be explained as borrowings in one direction or the
other, so there is no special reason to asssume separate borrowing from
some substrate language in these cases.

Regards,
Ante Aikio



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