Needless to say, an origin for a number of British and Irish names in these languages is an intriguing possibility, and such a linguistic hypothesis does, in fact, have a potential historical context too. A degree of direct contact between the ancient Punic world and pre-Roman Britain has, after all, often been argued for since the sixteenth century on the basis of a small number of Classical sources that seem to point in this direction, and in recent years this notion has gained a degree of additional support from a variety of numismatic, isotopic, and archaeological evidence, as has been discussed in previous posts.(2)
With regard to the names themselves, several points can be made by way of a brief introduction. First and foremost, it is worth observing that they are all either coastal or island names, something that obviously accords well with the idea of them having Phoenician/Punic origins, given that any contacts between pre-Roman Britain and the Punic world of southern Iberia and North Africa are likely to have been primarily maritime in nature. Likewise, the suggested Proto-Semitic/Punic roots identified by Coates and others as potentially underlying these British and Irish coastal/island names are—importantly—plausible in terms of their lexical content too, referring to islands, the coast, cliffs/rocks, plants and animals, relative positions and/or compass points, culturally significant metals, and divine words or names.(3) In other words, the basic characteristics of the group as a whole, in terms of not only their general difficulty within the overall corpus of British names, but also their shared geographic characteristics and the range of meanings that they would possess, is credible and might inspire a degree of confidence.