Talk:Substrate Theories

This is somewhat cryptic to those who don't have a background in certain sub-fields of linguistics, and ignores the main use of the concept before about 1950, when apparently strange or unexplained historical language changes in Europe were sometimes explained as being due to "substrate influence" from non-Indo-European languages, or languages from a different branch of Indo-European. So for example, the fronting of [u] to [ü] in French was claimed to be due to Celtic subtratum influence (though it's not clear how far this really "explains" anything...). AnonMoos (talk) 11:32, 5 January 2008 (UTC)