[3] 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).
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.
[4] 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.
[9] The following list contains various proposed loans word and other grammatical features such as case endings, prefixes and suffixes put forward by proponents of the hypothesis that allegedly do not originate from the same lexical genesis/source as other equivalent terms found throughout Indo-European sister branches.
[citation needed] The Battle Axe culture spread through a wider range of regions across Eastern and Central Europe, already close to or in contact with areas inhabited by Indo-European speakers and their putative area of origin, and none of the Indo-European proto-languages thus produced or their succeeding languages developed along the much larger line of extension of the Battle Axe culture (Celto-Italic, Illyrian, Slavic, Baltic, and others) appear to have been affected by the same changes that are limited to the Proto-Germanic.
[citation needed] Hawkins (1990)[3] and McWhorter (2008)[4] both saw Grimm's law as strongly supporting at least a superstrate if not substrate hypothesis, because of the extent of the changes from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic, which they characterized as likely the results of the struggles of speakers of one language to adapt to an unrelated and very different other one, with the more sibilant-heavy non-IE language's consonantal features being adopted systematically and IE grammar being simplified, especially through loss of most of the case system.
[12] In regards to the issue, Edgar C. Polomé (1990) wrote: "Assuming 'pidginization' in Proto-Germanic on account of the alleged 'loss' of a number of features reconstructed by the Neogrammarians as part of the verbal system of Proto-Indo-European ... is a rather specious argument. ...
The prefix *a- and the suffix *-it are the most apparent linguistic markers by which a small group of "Agricultural" substrate words - i.e. *arwīt ('pea') or *gait ('goat') – can be isolated from the rest of the Proto-Germanic lexicon.
It is proposed by Šorgo that the "Agricultural" substrate was characterized by a four-vowel system of */æ/ */ɑ/ */i/ */u/, the presence of pre-nasalized stops, the absence of a semi-vowel */j/, a mobile stress accent, and reduction of unstressed vowels.