Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue (21 page)

In the early Semitic language Assyrian, that root was used to mean
district
(i.e., a division of land), with the
kh
softening into a
g
(
p
u
l
u
g
gu
). In Hebrew today, a detachment is a
pl
a
g
a
. Maybe in Northern Europe, that root came out as
fulka
in the same meaning.

Maiden
was, in Old English,
mægden
and
mægþ
. The same word in Old Scandinavian was
magað
, in Old High German
magad
, in Gothic
magaþs
. Based on them, a plausible Proto-Germanic form would be
magaþ
. To which we can compare what can be reconstructed as an early Semitic form,
makhat:

As we saw with
puluggu
in Assyrian,
kh
easily becomes
g
. Then, the change from
t
to
th
is that Proto-Germanic kink again.

Of course one must be careful making too much of it when words with the same meaning have similar shapes in different languages. As often as not, it’s just an accident: the word for “hang down” is
sag
aru
in Japanese, but not because Germanic-speaking Vikings made a hitherto unrecorded swing over to Japan and married a bunch of the women!

But the Semitic parallels with the orphan Proto-Germanic words get more interesting when it’s relationships between words that are paralleled as well. Biblical Hebrew had a word ʕ
eƀ
ε
r
that meant “to cross,” and the three-consonant root was also used in the word for
shore
. Interesting that in Old English,
ofer
was the word for both
shore
and
over
, as in the direction one goes when crossing.

ʕeƀ
ε
r
and
ofer
are more similar than they may seem at first. The ʕ at the beginning of ʕ
eƀ
ε
r
was something we can treat as trivial, a sound produced back in the throat, similar to the one we would make if we were talking about apples and someone insisted on thinking we were talking about pears, and we said, “I’m not talking about pears. I’m talking about apples.
Apples,
damn you—
apples
!!!!” Note that especially on that final utterance of apples, you would begin the word not with the
a
vowel itself, but with a catch in the throat, just like you utter at the start of both syllables in “uh-oh!” The ʕ sound is just farther back in the throat, but for our purposes we can imagine the Biblical Hebrew word as
“eƀ
ε
r”
just as English has no “letter” for the catch in the throat before the two syllables in “uh-oh!”

And then, the
ƀ
sound in Hebrew was rather like blowing—the
v
-inflected
b
sound that you often learn in Spanish classes—which was quite similar to the
f
in
ofer
. German even maintains the connection between
shore
and
over
:
shore
is
Ufer
, while
over
is
über
.

Another one: normally, Indo-European languages’ word for
seven
has a
t
in it. French’s
sept
, Spanish’s
siete
, Greek’s
heptá
, Polish’s
siedem
(note that in your mouth
d
is a kind of
t
)—the Proto-Indo-European form was likely
septṃ
. But not in Germanic, where you get things like German’s
sieben
, Dutch’s
zeven
, Danish’s
syv
. Why? Well, Semitic languages have a
seven
word that sounds rather like Indo-European’s but lacks that
t
: Biblical Hebrew’s, for instance, was š
éƀa
ʕ. Again, the
ƀ
sound was a blowing, close to the
v
in
seven
, or the
f
in the Old English form
seofon
. And in Old High German, it came out as a straight
b
(
sibun
).

Okay—maybe. But what we want now is evidence that speakers of a Semitic language from way down in the Middle East actually migrated to the northern shore of Europe, namely, what is now Denmark and the northern tip of Germany, or the southern tips of Sweden and Norway right nearby. Here, the evidence helps us only so much.

We can know which Semitic speakers are of interest: it would be the Phoenicians, whose homeland was in today’s Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. Their language, now extinct, was especially similar to Hebrew. The Phoenicians were one of those peoples of ancient history who were seized with a desire to travel and colonize, and they did so with great diligence on both the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, taking advantage of their advanced sailing technology. This included major colonies in North Africa, at Carthage, as well as one as far west as Spain, in what is now called Cádiz.

The Phoenicians even rounded the bend northward up into Portugal a tad . . . but there, the record stops. Did they sail up past the British Isles and round past the Netherlands to hit the neck of land shared today by Denmark and Germany?

There is no record that they did so. Apparently they were very secretive about their ship routes. Also, many of the northern European coastal regions they would have occupied have since sunk under the sea. This leaves us having to make nimble surmises.

The time, at least, was right. The Phoenicians had reached Portugal by the seventh century B.C., and were vanquished by the Romans by about 200 B.C. This would mean that if they reached Northern Europe, it would have been around the middle of the final millennium B.C.—when we know Proto-Germanic was in place. We do know that technology of the time allowed people to travel from the Mediterranean all the way around to that Danish-German necklet of land, because a Greek named Pytheas recorded having done exactly that in the late fourth century B.C. We do know that the Phoenicians’ technology was up to the voyage, because the Vikings later sailed from Northern Europe down to Britain and France in ships much less sturdy. Then, remember that so many of the orphan Proto-Germanic words are about sailing . . . and fish.

The hints get ever more tantalizing. What’s up, for example, with the passing references to two gods, Phol and Balder, in a magic spell written in an ancient German ancestor, Old High German? The Phoenicians’ god of gods was Baal. About which we note three things.

First, as it happens, when Proto-Germanic’s sounds went weird, words that came into the language starting with
b
ended up starting with
p
instead. So, from Baal—if you can think where I’m going, “Paal,” anyone?

Second, one thing that happened to sounds after that, when Proto-Germanic turned into Old High German, was that
p
became a
pf
sound, written as
ph
. Not that I want to give it away, but, ahem: not Paal but
Phaal
.

Finally, another thing about sounds in Proto-Germanic was that what came in from Proto-Indo-European as a long
a
(
aa
, written
ā
) ended up as a long
o
(
ō
). So
Phaal
became
Phool
.

Put all of that together, and if you wondered what the earlier form of a word
Phol
in Old High German was, then even if you had no intention of drawing a connection to Phoenician or anything else, you would trace it backward to—
Baal
, with a long
a
sound.

And then, the Phoenicians were also given to referring to Baal as
Baal ‘Addīr
(“God great”)—that is, Great God. Sometimes they would write it as one word,
Baliddir,
or even a shorter version,
Baldir.
And there in that Old High German document is a god called
Balder
.

Finally, get this: not long ago, an intrepid German renegade archaeologist trawling the shallows of the North Sea found artifacts from between 1500 and 500 B.C. They were from, for one, Ancient Greece and the Minoan civilization of Crete, and then there were also remains of a Phoenician cooking pot! These findings were on the shore of Germany’s northerly Schleswig-Holstein province: precisely one of the areas where Proto-Germanic is thought to have arisen.

Theo Vennemann of the University of Munich puts it that in light of all of the various indications pointing in one direction, “it would be amazing if the Phoenicians had excluded Germania from their frame of reference.” In modern times, Vennemann has been the proponent par excellence of the hypothesis that Phoenician reshaped Proto-Germanic. All of the evidence in the previous paragraphs, as well as most of the Semitic-Germanic etymologies I have presented, is his work,
¹¹
and I cotton to the lawyerly kind of argumentation from fragmentary evidence that he excels at.

However, unlike in the other chapters, this will not be the place where I muse as to why linguists have not accepted Vennemann’s case hands down. Part of why his work is not mentioned in traditional sources is that most of it is published in obscure venues and often in German, while the main other source on the subject argues for influence from Semitic on Germanic only within a larger case for Semitic’s impact on Indo-European as a whole, in two magnum opuses so majestically magnum as to ward off all but super-specialists and obsessives.

However, the truth is that even if the Phoenician case had been presented in Anglophone reader-friendly articles in prominent journals, it would stand as a mere intriguing possibility until there are etymologies of a good several dozen of the orphan Proto-Germanic words. At this point, there are only about fifteen Semitic etymologies, and many of them are not of orphan words, but proposed as alternative etymologies for words long considered ordinary descendants from Proto-Indo-European.

More archaeological evidence would also help. That scholars have so far not been even looking for such evidence means that the effort may be fruitful, but it must be put forth. Moreover, scholars uninterested short of detailed historical documentation of how many Phoenicians settled exactly where, and whether or not they picked up Proto-Germanic and passed their rendition down to future generations, would be unclear on the scripture versus writing issue we have seen in this book: in 500 B.C. no Phoenician could have conceived of committing such mundane observations into writing. The linguistic data would have to be allowed to clinch the case, as with the Celtic and Viking impacts on English.

However, in those cases, we at least know that the relevant people were in England at the right time. One broken pot cannot make the case for the Phoenicians, especially since Phoenician goods could easily have been carried to Northern Europe amid trade, without the Phoenicians themselves traveling with them, much less settling there for good and transforming the local language forever.

Yet I cannot resist tossing in one more thing pointing in a certain direction. One of the Phoenicians’ main colonies was at Carthage in North Africa. Carthaginians were champion travelers; as much Phoenician migration started there as from today’s Middle East. In the Phoenician dialect spoken in Carthage, Punic words could not begin with
p
. The words that began with
p
in earlier Phoenician had come in Punic to begin with—three guesses—
f
. Fopcorn in Tunisia!

Unsettled though it currently is, the Phoenician case is worth ending this book with. First, I think the evidence is suggestive enough that it demands wider airing than it has gotten thus far. Second, however, even if there never emerges enough evidence to support the specific idea that Proto-Germanic was Proto-Indo-European as rendered by Phoenician adults, the sheer difference between Germanic and other branches of Indo-European makes a strong case that Proto-Germanic, before it split into today’s Germanic languages, was already a language deeply affected by adults of some extraction learning it as a second language. “Fopcorn.”
Sleep, slept, write, wrote.
Every second case and tense marker from its ancestral language lost to the wind. Every third word unknown in the language that gave birth to it.

The lesson: the idea that there was once an English somehow pristine, a pure issuance, is false. Even the Proto-Germanic language that gave birth to Old English was one that had seemed, to those who spoke its own Proto-Indo-European ancestor, perverted by speakers of something else.

Long before Old English started taking on words from Old Norse and then French and Latin, in a fashion that we today read as so cosmopolitan, Proto-Germanic had taken on countless words from some other language. Yet the isolated, parochial tribespeople who spoke it were not cosmopolitan in the least. They knew and cared little of the world beyond them except as a prospect for land and plunder. They were not hoarding new words as part of building a mighty literature, as they were illiterate. They took on new words because there were new people among them who used those words—as humans have done worldwide since the dawn of our species, and as Old English speakers did—passively, unremarkably. The diversity of the English vocabulary is something we should celebrate as evidence of Anglophones’ universal humanity, not as a feather in our cultural cap.