[wtracz]

There has always been speculation that there was a Phoenician connection to Cornwall, but not a lot of archeological evidence.

This stemmed from things like Cornish place names having an unusual number of z's (a Phoenician letter) in them, and other similarities.

[gbear605]

I don’t want to discredit this, since I don’t know your source, but linguistically that seems quite unlikely for a consonant introduced three thousand years ago to have influence on the modern Cornish place names. Three thousand years ago, the Celtic languages hadn’t even split from proto-Celtic, so any influence on Cornish should have also had influenced on the rest of the Celtic languages. In addition, the sound /z/ is a very common one across languages (so it does indicated Phoenician influence), and they didn’t have a script then to write the place names (so the orthographic letter z doesn’t mean anything).

[mprev]

I’m not an expert so forgive what might be a naive question.

Even if the languages had not split, could there still not be regionalised influences on place names?

[gbear605]

That’s true, but the long time change leaves it quite unlikely that the names would leave enough of a remnant of a particular sounds that you could point to a Phoenician influence.

[jaratec]

Can you point me to the information sources for this theory?