Old European (German: Alteuropäisch) is the term used by Hans Krahe (1964) for the language of the oldest reconstructed stratum of European hydronymy (river names) in Central and Western Europe.
Geography Krahe writes in A1, chapter III, "Introducing preface" Number 2 that the old European hydronomy extended from Scandinavia to South Italy, from Western Europe including the British Isles to the Baltic countries. Of the three Mediterranean peninsulas, Italy was most completely included, whilst the Balkan Peninsula was only scarcely covered. He writes that what he presents for hydronomy also applies to mountains and ranges of mountains, and continues with "Karpaten" and "Karawanken", certainly within the Slavic settlement area, omitting the Bavarian/Austrian "Karwendel" though. This area is associated with the spread of the later "Western" Indo-European dialects, the Celtic, Italic, Germanic, Baltic, and Illyrian branches. Notably exempt is Greece. Krahe located the geographical nucleus of this area as stretching from the Baltic across Western Poland and Germany to the Swiss plateau and the upper Danube north of the Alps, while he considered the Old European river names of southern France, Italy and Spain to be later imports, replacing "Aegean-Pelasgian" and Iberian substrates, corresponding to Italic, Celtic and Illyrian "invasions" from about 1300 BC.
Origins of names
Krahe continues in III A 5, "Geographic Area and age of the paleoeuropean hydronomy", that the overwhelming majority of river and stream names originate from words that in the historical single languages cannot be found or cannot be found anymore. He uses mainly Indo-European roots to allow the river names in question to speak (rule 1), of which more than ten thousand are listed. In III A 2, "Etymology and Semasiology of the paleoeuropean river names", Krahe states that the oldest strata are composed by prerequisites of nature and that the river names especially refer to the water itself (rule 2), and that words referring to humans and culture are newer. Both rules are important arguments for considering the old European hydronomy of southern France and the north of the Iberian Peninsula as a result of secondary implementation (A 1, number 3) due to a postulated immigration about 1300 BC. In "Morphology of Paleoeuropean river names" (III A 1, number 3), Krahe concentrates on suffixes (simples and multiples) and distinguishes eleven different ones in a table. He attributes geographical (Central European vs. South European or Eastern), functional (for example affluent) or temporal (before or after a change of consonants or vowels) functions to the suffixes of the river names (rule 3). For the temporal function he claims the existence of a system of phonetic changes (Lautverschiebung), however he does not include prefixes in his considerations. Krahe's concentration on Indo-European roots and the omission of prefixes had serious negative consequences, because later those more than ten thousand roots were emphasized, or sometimes those of Old Irish, but scarcely of Gaulish and other Celtic languages or the Baltic languages and completely omitting Basque. Delamarre later included, for example, under Gaulish dubron only rivers with "B" (or similar) omitting other names, which Krahe would have termed Schwundstufe; i.e., "zero grade", the form of a root characterized by the loss of a letter (basically a vowel), sometimes combined with the inversion of letters. Krahe ignored the effect of the Moorish occupation in Spain, which resulted in frequent combinations of Arab "prefixes" (always at the beginning) on Celtic "suffixes" as seen in Guadiana (guadi "river" + anas "bayous, muddy", as it appears in Ptolemy). The tables "Comparison of old European hydronyms" show that, in contradiction to Krahe's opinion, hydronyms (and toponyms) can in some cases very well be explained even by modern Irish, Welsh, or French and certainly by Gaulish.
Krahe's influence on other scholars Krahe has influenced archaeologists, linguists and particularly experts in Celtic languages: Marija Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė) studied in Tübingen, and received her doctorate of archeology in 1946 in the same department where Krahe lectured. Gimbutas developed the Kurgan theory. Jürgen Untermann, a disciple of Krahe, whose dissertation was written in 1954 in Tübingen was professor for comparative linguistics at the University of Cologne. He was an epigraphist and Indoeuropeanist. Antonio Tovar, with preliminary studies in Berlin, later professor of the University of Salamanca, was professor for Comparative Linguistics in Tübingen from 1967 to 1979. Together with Manuel Agud and Koldo Mitxelena he prepared an etymological dictionary of the Basque language.
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