During the reconstruction of Proto-Germanic, what outcome is most likely if the comparative method is applied rigorously but linguists fail to account for substrate influence from pre-Germanic languages?

💡 Explanation

Substrate influence involves the imposition of phonetic or grammatical features from a prior language. Failing to account for this during reconstruction will lead to an inaccurate phoneme inventory because the sound correspondences will be misinterpreted, therefore the reconstruction reflects the substrate, rather than the true proto-language, rather than internal sound changes.

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