In Socotra they speak a South Arabian language,
Semitic, not Berber. Related to Berber, but very
distantly.
It's most closely related to languages spoken in
Yemen.
I don't know if it's closer to Ethiopian Semitic or
Asian Semitic or equidistant. I've read conflicting
claims in popular literature.
message 1259, Celia Ehrlich
"
The name Phoenician probably means "red-garment men."
Casson discusses
the word's origin in The Ancient Mariners(1989: 62),
saying most
linguists think the Greeks took the name from
'phoinos' meaning "dark
red," not from a word for "sea." Red dye from a
_Dracaena_ tree that
grows in Socotra was marketed from the Hadramaut in
the time of the
Periplus of the Erythraean Sea, the first century A.D.
People tend to
speak only of the Murex purple, but the _Dracaena_ was
an important
dye-source at that time. Socotra, the island not the
name, according
to Schoff (1912: 135), could be the Egyptians'
"Pa-anch,"
equivalent to Virgil's "Panchaia," home of the phoenix
bird in legend.
Resin from this tree, known as "dragon's blood," was a
profitable
export, controlled by a sheik on the Hadramaut. The
Phoenicians
themselves may have sailed no further towards India,
but Socotra was a
meeting place. The native resin-gatherers spoke a
language related to
Berber when I. H. Balfour rediscovered the _Dracaena_
tree in
1880. We know that Berber-speaking people in the
Canary Islands, the
now extinct Guanche, used resin from a closely related
species of
_Dracaena_ for embalming.
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