Was there a Semitic influence on Proto-Germanic?

Question

One of the hypotheses supported by Theo Vennemann and other linguists is that Proto-Germanic was influenced by some Semitic language. The evidence they present for their case includes:

• Loss of some grammatical cases from Proto-Indo-European. This would be an indication of language contact, with adults trying to learn a different language and simplifying it in the process. This phenomenon has not occured in other languages spoken at the time, such as Latin and Greek.
• One third of Germanic roots do not trace back to PIE, and some of these words seem to have common roots with Semitic languages. For example, Proto-Germanic *furkhtaz, Proto-Semitic *prkh, 'fright'; Proto-Germanic *magaþ, Early Semitic makhat, 'maiden'.
• Grimm’s law, that has introduced the fricative consonants *[f], *[h] and *[θ]. PIE was poor in fricatives, compared to Semitic languages.
• Some deity names also seem to have common origins, such as Old High German Phol and Semitic Baal. These names can also be derived independently through regular sound changes, such as the Grimm’s law.
• Verbs are inflected for tense only in the present and past (like Semitic languages). Other Indo-European languages have a much richer system of verb inflections for marking tense.
• The use of ablaut for marking the past of strong verbs.

Are these observations strong enough to posit a Semitic substrate in Proto-Germanic?

Answer 1

This seems like a weak case. I'm sure there's a much more thorough rebuttal in the literature, but I'll give at least a few contrary remarks.

The second point, that some words in the two languages seem to have some sounds in common, is the most frequent unscientific argument presented in linguistics circles for the existence of a language family. The problem is that between any two sufficiently large sets of data (language vocabularies have thousands of items), there will nearly always be a couple dozen pairs of words that can be extracted that are "similar enough" to be cognates. But that isn't how sound change works - to demonstrate shared ancestry, you must reconstruct words of the common ancestor language, and give a series of regular sound changes that output words in the daughter languages - Grimm's law is a model example of this.

The late Basque linguist Larry Trask gave a quite readable defense against the ceaseless proposals attempting to connect Basque, a language isolate, with nearly every other language family, in "Origin and Relatives of the Basque Language" (1995), which I highly recommend for its applicability to this case.

I also fail to see how a Proto-Semitic influence would have induced PIE to replace *[k] and *[t] with *[x] and *[θ] when both languages had *[k] and *[t]. Furthermore, PS doesn't even have an *[f] sound, so PIE could not have borrowed it. (You gave *[h], instead of *[x], as the reflex of PIE *[k] - this was a later development in English).

Proto-Indo-European had only two tenses, present and past, on verbs in the imperfective aspect. Tense on other verbs was unmarked. The rich tense systems of its descendants are modern innovations.

"Ablaut" refers to a morphological alternation already present in PIE - you're thinking of Germanic umlaut, a process which is uncontroversially understood as the product of fronting a stem vowel before a suffix containing [i] (the suffix is later dropped). A substrate influence is not needed to explain this.

That being said, you're right that the loss of complexity in the case marking system and the large number of words unique to Proto-Germanic may indicate a pre-IE linguistic substrate. Unfortunately, barring a revolutionary discovery of a new trove of data, we will most likely never know.

Answer 2

I realise this is an old thread however, Sunny makes a good point in that,

"The I1 group is most closely related to what today are the semitic people (group J: arabs, jews etc.) and are believed to have migrated already a while ago from the area of israel/iraq/syria etc. to europe."

When trying to trace obscure roots etho-linguistics is very useful. Adding in DNA evidence bolsters the inductive reasoning.

Going by the DNA, linguistics and ethnicity e.g. culture, heraldry etc. we can clearly see that some of the Israelite diaspora have ended up in Europe. As Sunny pointed out,

" it seems logical that the I1's slowly adopted the indo-europen language as they mixed in. However we still find some traces in the german languages that remind us of the semitic heritage of part of the germans."

As already noted, the DNA studies point to a Semitic origin which tends to explain the presence of seemingly Afro-Asiatic root words. This, coupled with the plethora of township coat of arms, family crests etc. bearing the Tribal symbols of Israelite peoples:

i.e. eagle of Dan, wolf of Benjamin, donkey/ass of Issachar, unicorn of Ephraim, arrows of Manasseh, stag of Naphtali to name a few, it's clear that due to the multitudes of even just Israelites in Europe, there is a definite influence of a Semitic speaking people on Germanic languages, to say nothing of Arab travellers/traders/slavers.

Answer 3

I think you couldbe right... I also have thought about this. I myself found that there are a lot of words and names that have a similar sound and also a similar meaning. could be coincidence, but i compared the (seemingly semitic) german words with the ancient hebrew words and also with some latin languages and in many cases the latin languages didn't copy all the semitic words that the germans did copy. one example: the verb calling/shouting (there are different version of this word, both in hebrew as in the germanic languages.

Modern Germanic languages: 1. Dutch: roepen. Danish: ringe. German: rufen. Norwegian: ring. 2. Dutch: schreeuwen. Danish: rabe. German: schreien. Norwegian: rope. 3. Dutch: brullen. German: röhren. Danish: brol. Norwegian: roar. Eng: roar.

Old Hebrew: 1. רוע Ruwa/Roa = Shouting/calling 2. רנה Rinna = giving a shout/calling out See the bibles verses: Jozua 6:16 & Psalm 17:1 for an example of those words.

Latin: clamor & vocatio.

Scientifically this may not be usable, especially because in this example I used the modern words. Nevertheless, also looking at the Y-DNA profiles of the german men there is a real mixture visable between two groups. One which is very comon in the western latin european countries (R1b) and is present in about 50-90% of the men and another group (I1) which is less comon (20-30%) mainly found in northern europe and scandinavia. The I1 group is most closely related to what today are the semitic people (group J: arabs, jews etc.) and are believed to have migrated already a while ago from the area of israel/iraq/syria etc. to europe. the R1b group has it's origins more in the area of eastern iran/afghanistan etc. and could have always spoken a indo-european language. The I1 group however could have originately spoken a semitic language before they mixed with the R1b's. Because the R1b group is much bigger nowadays (I1 is in no place the dominant group) it seems logical that the I1's slowly adopted the indo-europen language as they mixed in. However we still find some traces in the german languages that remind us of the semitic heritage of part of the germans.

That's my theory ;)

Answer 4

A language is influenced by use, and use comes in two forms, oral and written. I can agree that oral exchange is more extensive than written; since written exchange requires other set of tools and also specific skills. However, it is traditional that members of the ruling and military classes in most cultures, dedicated time to using linguistic codes (alphabets) to communicate and govern, and that through those processes there was also creation of new sounds and symbols, and other mimetic representations. There are even cases, like the one of King Ferdinand of Spain, who had a lisp, and therefore imposed a form of speech on the Castilians that had to incorporate the phono-mechanics of a lisp in their common pronunciation and oral expression. Languages borrow forms and words from other languages both via oral and via written, and sometimes even tangentially through oral forms that become written, or viceversa. There is no isolationism in language. Therefore, I do believe that modeling an alphabet will necessarily involve the exchange of phonemic elements that will also translate into phonetic elements at some evolutionary stage.

Answer 5

Hebrew is an Afro-Asiatic and/or Afro-Semite language, whereas Proto-Germanic is an Indo-European language. Both super ethnic and cultural groups (Afro-Asiatics and Indo-Europeans) were connected through the history of trade, migrations, and the written alphabet. Afro-Asiatic cultures had trade routes throughout the Middle East, Orient, and Asia; and Indo-European cultures had both migratory and trade routes throughout the Orient, the Middle East and Europe; both groups shared these routes for thousands of years. The first written alphabet was Phoenician (Afro-Asiatic), and it was used as a model for the development of the Indo-European alphabets. Therefore, we could assume that any written Afro-Asiatic language modality precedes any written Indo-European modality.