Vasconic substrate hypothesis

The Vasconic substrate hypothesis is a proposal that several Western European languages contain remnants of an old language family of Vasconic languages, of which Basque is the only surviving member. The proposal was made by the German linguist Theo Vennemann, but has been rejected by other linguists. According to Vennemann, Vasconic languages were once widespread on the European continent before they were mostly replaced by Indo-European languages. Relics of these languages include toponyms across Central and Western Europe. Theo Vennemann based his hypothesis on the works of Hans Krahe, who postulated an Old European substrate as the origin of the European hydronymy (Old European hydronymy). He classified the substratum language as Indo-European. Vennemann rejected the classification. He gives the following reasons: The area of the hydronymy substrate language covers the Iberic Peninsula, which he postules to be Non-Indo-European during the time the hydronymy developed according to Krahe. From a phoneme-statistical point of view, the dominance of a-vocalism and the sparseness of plosives is noteworthy. Some hydronyms survived for a long time. This led Vennemann to the "toponomastic main axiom" that: Once places are given a name, they keep it and languages that newly arrive at such a place take over the already existing toponymy. He concludes that most place names in Europe must be Pre-Indo-European. Vennemann developed his ideas in a series of papers which were collected in a book called Europa Vasconica - Europa Semitica. He accepts Krahe's theory that there was a uniform Old European language, which is the origin of the Old European Hydronymy, but proposes that it is of Vasconic origin. Vasconic is a language family proposed by Vennemann encompassing Basque as its only extant member, Aquitan, Ligurian and possibly the Iberian language and the Paleo-Sardinian language. Theo Vennemann proposes that this uniform Vasconic substrate must come from a linguistically uniform population, which can only exist within a small area.