Atlantic (Semitic) languages

The Atlantic languages of Semitic or "Semitidic" (para-Semitic) origin are a disputed concept in historical linguistics put forward by Theo Vennemann. The theory has found no notable acceptance in academic circles, and is criticised as being based on sparse and often misinterpreted data.

It was widely believed among British scholars of the nineteenth century that Britain and Ireland had a Semitic pre-history, which was also reflected in the Celtic languages. William Owen-Pughe in his 1832 dictionary of Welsh offered philological evidence of the close relationship between Welsh and Hebrew. The ablative-like structure of Welsh is also discussed in the dictionary. These ideas are plain to see and are a forerunner to the ideas of Vennemann. In addition, the discoveries at the Ness of Brodgar are similar to priestly Chalcolithic ritual depicted in images at Teleilat Ghassul in the Levant--and their copper ornaments resemble the carved stone balls found only in eastern Scotland.

According to Vennemann, Afroasiatic seafarers settled the European Atlantic coast and are to be associated with the European Megalithic Culture. They left a superstratum in the Germanic languages and a substratum in the development of Insular Celtic. He claims that "Atlantic" (Semitic or Semitidic) speakers founded coastal colonies beginning in the fifth millennium BC. Thus "Atlantic" influenced the lexicon and structure of Germanic and the structure of Insular Celtic. According to Vennemann, migrating Indo-European speakers encountered non-IE speakers in northern Europe who had already named rivers, mountains and settlements in a language he called "Vasconic". He considered that there were toponyms on the Atlantic coast that were neither Vasconic nor Indo-European. These he considers derive from languages related to the Mediterranean Hamito-Semitic group.

Vennemann bases his theory on the claim that Germanic words without cognates in other Indo-European languages very often belong to semantic fields that are typical for loanwords from a superstratum language, such as warfare, law and communal life. Likewise, he proposes Semitic etymologies for words of unknown or disputed origin; for instance he relates the word bee to Egyptian bj-t or the name Éire, older *īwerijū to *ʼj-wrʼ(m), 'island (of) copper', as in Akkadian weriʼum 'copper'.

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