DID PHOENICIANS IN DENMARK FORM THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE?

DID PHOENICIANS IN DENMARK FORM THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE? John McWhorter has a special interest in what happens when two languages collide. He argues that Proto-Germanic, the ancestor of English, was “deeply affected by adults of some extraction learning it as a second language.” He begins in Denmark some 2500 years ago (I am proud to say that the parent of English and other Germanic languages has been traced to Denmark—and “southerly ends of Sweden and Norway.”) McWhorter argues that adult foreigners usually speak a second language with an accent. Grimm’s Law describes changes from the clipped sounds of “p”, “t”, and “k” (“stops” to linguists) to the “hissy” sounds of “f”, “th”, and “h.” Looking for languages that could have been spoken by adults learning Proto-Germanic as a second language 2500 years ago, Mcwhorter observes that the Semitic languages have a number of “hissy” sounds and nominates Phoenicians as the introducers of “hissy” sounds into Proto-Germanic. Phoenicians had reached Portugal by 700 B.C. and their boats were capable of reaching Denmark. McWhorter adds that about one third of the words in Proto-Germanic are “orphan words’”—they don’t trace back to Proto-Indo-European. And many of those words refer to seafaring (“sea”, “ship”) and to fish (“carp”, “eel”). McWhorter concludes that the theory will remain as an “intriguing possiblity” until there are more Semitic etymologies developed for orphan words in Proto-Germanic or until there is more archaeological evidence.