I was watching a history lecture recently, and the professor stated that after the Greek "dark ages," during which their previously used written language was lost and forgotten, a new written language was developed by essentially stealing the pre-existing Phoenician alphabet and assigning sounds to each of the letters.
This is the earliest documented use of a phonetic alphabet in history (that I know of), and it occurred to me that the words "Phonics" and "Phoenician" might be related; in fact, this relationship makes it seem extremely unlikely that there is no relationship between the terms.
Can anyone explain the similarities between these words, and determine whether my guess is correct?
Best Answer
Etymology is much, much more complicated than most people think! Just because words sound similar, that doesn't mean they are related. In this case, chances are negligible that they should be.
Greek φωνή "voice" is spelled with an omega, whereas φοῖνιξ "Phoenician" is spelled with an omicron and an iota. Those letters represent very different vowels in Greek, and there are no phonological rules that I know of by which one could shift into the other. So that alone makes it very unlikely.
Further, the conexion between the Phoenician people, with whom the Greeks were in frequent and extensive contact, and the origin of the alphabet was not that important to the Greeks; they borrowed so many other things from the Phoenicians, of which the alphabet was only one. It would be like saying that the English word language must be related to the word Latin, because that is where English borrowed its alphabet from and the two words sound somewhat similar. Or that Dutch talen "languages" must be from Latijn "Latin", because they sound similar and the Dutch borrowed their alphabet from Latin. None of those things are true, and the similar sound is coincidental.
Lastly, the well respected etymological dictionary of Greek by Chantraine says that φωνή is probably from a Proto-Indo-European root *bho- meaning something like "sound"; but that φοῖνιξ "Phoenician" is probably either from φοινός "(blood) red", because the skin tone of the Phoenicians was perceived to be "dark red", or from an unknown (and unattested) Phoenician word, or yet from an unknown word in an older substrate language. Note that φοινός "blood red" is probably not from φόνος "murder", still according to Chantraine, despite the apparent semantic similarity.