Germanic substrate hypothesis

Supporters

The non-Indo-European substrate hypothesis attempts to explain the anomalous features of Proto-Germanic as a result of creolization between an Indo-European and a non-Indo-European language. A number of root words for modern European words seem to limit the geographical origin of the Germanic influences, such as the root word for ash (the tree), and other environmental references suggest a limited root stream subset, which can be localized to Northern Europe. The non-Indo-European substrate theory was first proposed in 1910 by Sigmund Feist, who estimated that roughly a third of Proto-Germanic lexical items came from a non-Indo-European substrate and that the supposed reduction of the Proto-Germanic inflectional system was the result of pidginization with that substrate.

Germanicist John A. Hawkins set forth in 1990 some more modern arguments for a Germanic substrate. Hawkins argued that the Proto-Germans encountered a non-Indo-European speaking people and borrowed many features from their language. He hypothesizes that the first sound shift of Grimm's law was the result of non-native speakers attempting to pronounce Indo-European sounds and that they resorted to the closest sounds in their own language in their attempt to pronounce them. The American linguist John McWhorter supported essentially the same view in 2008, except considered that it might have been a superstrate instead of substrate situation (i.e., non-Indo-European speakers struggling to learn Indo-European).

Kalevi Wiik, a phonologist, put forward a hypothesis in 2002 that the pre-Germanic substrate was of a non-Indo-European Finnic origin. Wiik claimed that there are similarities between mistakes in English pronunciation typical of Finnish-speakers and the historical sound changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic. Wiik's argument is that only three language groups were widespread in Neolithic Europe: Uralic, Indo-European, and Basque, corresponding to three ice-age refugia. Then, Uralic speakers would have been the first to settle most of Europe, and the language of the Indo-European settlers was influenced by the earlier Uralic population, producing Proto-Germanic.

Existing evidence of languages outside these three refugia (such as the proposed Tyrsenian language family or the undeciphered Vinča symbols) potentially creates a complication for Wiik's hypothesis that Uralic languages dominated the Proto-Germanic Urheimat. Moreover, his interpretation of Indo-European origins differs from that of the academic mainstream. On the other hand, the Germanic language family is believed to have dominated in southern Scandinavia for a time before spreading south. This would place it geographically close to the Finnic group during its earliest stages of differentiation from other Indo-European languages, which is consistent with Wiik's hypothesis.

Theo Vennemann put forth the Vasconic substrate hypothesis in 2003, which posits a "Vasconic" substrate (ancestral to Basque) and a Semitic or "Atlantic Semitidic" superstrate in Proto-Germanic. However, his speculations have found little support in or have been outright dismissed by the broader community of academic linguists, especially by historical linguists.

However, some other modern linguists, including McWhorter (2008), have supported (without any Finnic or "Vasconic" connections) the hypothesis of a Semitic superstrate on proto-Germanic – particularly Phoenician/Punic, via primarily maritime contact. The general outline of the idea of Semitic (or more broadly Afroasiatic) influences on northwestern Indo-European languages (including, in different ways, both Germanic and Celtic) long pre-dates McWhorter, Vennemann, Wiik, and Hawkins. It was first proposed by the Welsh lexicographer and translator John Davies in 1632, then revived and developed by Welsh grammarian John Morris-Jones in 1912, and Austrian-Czech philologist Julius Pokorny in 1927 and 1949.