*gwh in Gmc.

[Hans-Werner Hatting]

Thanks also to Douglas Kilday for the etymolgies.

>A variation on this theme is a three-stage model for the
>Indo-Europeanization of the pre-Germanic population. In this scenario, the
>first stage of contact between pre-Germans and IE-speakers resulted in the
>borrowing of a few IE words into pre-Germanic. These few words, belonging to
>a small set of categories, were not enough to influence pre-Gmc. phonology,
>which lacked labiovelars and replaced them with (labio-)labials. The second
>stage of more intense contact brought a large influx of IE words in which
>the distinction between labials and labiovelars could not be ignored, so
>pre-Germanic acquired the labiovelars along with the words. In the third
>stage, the grammar was largely Indo-Europeanized under extensive mixing of
>populations, and pre-Gmc. became Proto-Gmc.

>This hypothesis requires justifying the early borrowing of words having Gmc.
>labials for IE labiovelars, particularly the numerals.

The scenario presented by you is certainly possible. We also could change it
a little (we4re into speculation, of course, but new ideas are always
fruitful - if necessary, we can discard them later). We could assume a first
wave of immigration, which totally Indo-Europeanised the pre-PIE poulation,
and the resulting language had labials for PIE labiovelars. The next wave
brought a superstratum which kept the labiovelars. The influence of the
second wave would have been quite strong, bringing, e.g. interrogative
pronouns. The situation could be comparable to the Norse influence on
English, which brought English pronoun forms and suppletary forms of the
verb "to be".
One argument in favour of such a scenario could be the division in "Asen"
and "Wanen" gods (sorry, I only remember the German terms). Some of the
names of the Wanen gods, which are supposed to represent an older layer,
look IE (like Old Norse "Njoerd").

>Yes, these are strong objections to the scenario I described earlier,
>particularly the difficulty with /pw/ > /kw/. The new hypothesis avoids
>this at the expense of introducing fresh assumptions about the origin of
>Germanic and its position within IE, to which I expect further objections
>to be raised.

I think similar scenarios could actually solve some problems (like all these
IE-looking substrate words), so I think it4s worth a try.

Best regards,
Hans-Werner Hatting