Pre-PIE as a PIE substrate?

[Ante Aikio]

[Steve Long wrote]

> Putting aside for the moment the question of how much Kurgan actually ever
> came to most of Europe, the quote above suggests that if there is a substrate
> to look for in early European IE languages -- as described above -- it might
> consist of "pre-proto" IE languages.

> My question is: what would such a substrate be like?  What would one look
> for?  Thinking of other examples of where IE has folded over on itself, so to
> speak -- where one IE language exhibits a substrate of an earlier IE language
> -- where would one look for such a "pre-proto" substrate in PIE?  How would
> one separate "pre-proto" features from "proto" features, since both would
> ultimately be of the same origin?

[Joat Simeon wrote (not as a reply to the particular quote above)]

> ...Germanic has a large vocabulary that isn't reducible to PIE; the
> Baltic languages have very little. Coversely, the western Uralic
> languages have many early loans from IE languages.

And in addition to this, the western Uralic languages have a huge amount
of words of unknown origin. It seems that one is dealing here with an
extensive lexical substrate not unlike that in Germanic. Because the
putative substrate words look nothing like Indo-European (having e.g.
affricates and palatalized consonants), there must have been non-Uralic
and non-IE substrate languages in the Baltic Sea area. The Uralic data
does not seem to support the idea that there would have been some kind of
"para-IE" languages in this area before the arrival of the predecessors of
northwest IE langauges in the region.

Regards,
Ante Aikio