Theo Vennemann genannt Nierfeld (German: [ˈfɛnəman]; born 27 May 1937) is a German historical linguist known for his controversial theories of a "Vasconic" and an "Atlantic" stratum in European languages, published since the 1990s.
[1] He was professor of Germanic and theoretical linguistics at Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich from 1974 (retired 2005).
Vennemann's book Europa Vasconica – Europa Semitica (2003) was reviewed in Lingua by linguists Philip Baldi and B. Richard Page, who made reasoned dismissals of a number of his proposals.
The reviewers still applauded Vennemann's "efforts to reassess the role and extent of language contact in the development of Indo-European languages in Europe".
[2] Vennemann's controversial claims about the prehistory of European languages include the following: