Are there Phoenicians in phonology?

A question from Mark Seidenberg:

Is the English phono- morpheme etymologically related to Phoenicia/Phoenician, i.e., the corresponding Phoenician words?

I have looked at the OED and other sources and I cannot connect the dots.

The Phoenician word for “Phoenicia” has a couple of conjectured etymological bases unrelated to sound or voice.

The Greeks then had a word (morpheme?) phono that was related to sound/voice, which English and other languages absorbed.

Is it a coincidence that the Greek word happened to sound like name for the language whose writing system they borrowed, the inadequacies of which for representing the typologically distinct Greek language led to the identification of vowels, which could then be written by repurposing letters for a few consonants that occurred in P but not G. or so they say.

Is this an homage to Phoenicia or are these false phonological cognates?

The answer, from Don Ringe:

It's an accident. The phono- part is Greek pho:né: 'voice', which is a noun derived (by an archaic, non-productive process) from phánai (stem pha-) 'to say'. 'Phoenicians' in Greek is Phoínikes; the singular phoîniks is also used to mean (1) purple (the dye the Phoenicians boiled out of murex snails and marketed at a fabulous profit); (2) date-palm; (3) the mythical phoenix bird. It looks like the ethnonym is the original meaning, and all the others are transferences, but that's not quite clear; in particular, there are some other words meaning 'blood-red' that begin with phoin-.

But whatever the etymology of Phoínikes is, the sequences pho:n- and phoin- are absolutely different in Greek, and there can't be any etymological connection between them. (There's also the fact that the -n- of pho:né: is clearly a suffix, whereas there's no evidence that phoin- is polymorphemic.)

Mark's question was by no means a silly one. There are many examples where similar-sounding words with disparate meanings really are derived from a common source — and in contrast, many other cases where similar-sounding words, even with apparently-related meanings, have completely independent histories. The notion of "cognate word" is not at all a transparent one.

For a striking example of (genuine but non-transparent) etymological evolution among similar-sounding words , consider English cane, cannon, canon, canal, canyon, channel, etc. (I first heard this word-evolution example used in a talk 20 years ago by David Searls — you can see some other examples of his thinking about words and genes in "From Jabberwocky to genome: Lewis Carroll and computational biology", Journal of Computational Biology 2001, or in "Grammatical representations of macromolecular structure",  Journal of Computational Biology 2006.)

The OED's etymology for cane, n.1:

Middle English canne, cane, < Old French cane, later canne (= Provençal cana, Spanish caña, Italian canna) < Latin canna, < Greek κάννα, κάννη, reed, perhaps < Semitic: compare Hebrew qāneh, Arabic qanāh reed, cane. In Latin the sense was extended from ‘(hollow) reed or cane’ to ‘tube or pipe’, a sense retained in Romanic, and prominent in the derivatives canneau, cannella, etc.

For cannon, n.1:

In 16th cent. also canon , Scottish cannoun , < French canon (14th cent. in Littré) = Provençal canon , Catalan canó , Spanish cañon , Italian cannone , lit. ‘great tube, barrel’, augmentative of canna , canne cane n.1, reed, pipe, tube. The spellings canon and cannon occur side by side down nearly to 1800, though the latter is the more frequent after c1660.

For canon, n.1:

Found in Old English as canon , < Latin canon rule, < Greek κανών rule. Early Middle English had ˈcanon , probably < Old English, and caˈnun , caˈnoun , < Old French canun , canon , the French descendant of the Latin.

[LSJ gives the literal meaning of κανών as "straight rod, bar, esp. to keep a thing straight", which I'm following David Searls in assuming to be related to κάννα, κάννη, reed. This might be a mistake, in which case the example covers both real and false etymological connections :-)]

For canal, n.:

< French canal (16th cent. in Littré), a refashioning, after Latin canāl-em or Italian canale , of the earlier French chenal(chanel , chenel ): see cannel n.1, channel n.1 (The 15th cent. instance may be from Latin.) The words canel , cannel n.1, and chanel , channel n.1, from the same Latin source, but immediately from old French, were in much earlier use in English: when canal was introduced it was to some extent used as a synonym of these, but the forms were at length differentiated.

For canyon, n.:

A phonetic spelling of Spanish cañon, designed to represent the proper spoken word: compare canion n.

cañon, n.3:

< Spanish cañon tube, pipe, conduit, barrel, cannon, etc. (augmentative of caña < Latin canna reed, pipe, quill, cane n.1; thus the same word as Italian cannone , Portuguese canhão , Provençal canon , French canon , English cannon , and canion ), but spec. applied by the Spaniards of New Mexico in the sense in which it has been adopted from them by their English-speaking neighbours. In order to retain the pronunciation and prevent confusion with canon , which would result from the frequent want of the Spanish letter ñ, ñ (enye ), in English typography, the word is frequently spelt canyon n., q.v.

And for channel, n.1:

Middle English chanel , < Old French chanel, ‘old form of canal ’ (Littré) < Latin canāl-em ; see canal n., which also compare for the senses.