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. He proposed that Semitic-language-speakers occupied regions in Europe thousands of years ago and influenced the later European languages that are not part of the Semitic family. The theory has found no notable acceptance among linguists or other relevant scholars and is criticised as being based on sparse and often-misinterpreted data. 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 claimed that speakers of "Atlantic" (Semitic or Semitidic) founded coastal colonies from the 5th millennium BC. Thus, "Atlantic" influenced the lexicon and the structure of Germanic and the structure of Insular Celtic. According to Vennemann, migrating Indo-European-speakers encountered non-Indo-European-speakers in Northern Europe, who had already named rivers, mountains and settlements in a language that he called "Vasconic". He considered some toponyms on the Atlantic coast to be neither Vasconic nor Indo-European. He considered them to have derived from languages that were related to the Mediterranean Hamito-Semitic group. Vennemann based 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 proposed Semitic etymologies for words of unknown or disputed origin; for instance, he related 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'. Other evidence for a Semitic superstratum included a Semitic influence on the Germanic form of the Indo-European ablaut system and similarities between Germanic paganism and Mesopotamian mythology, such as the parallelism between Freyja and Ishtar, goddesses of war and love.