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I was watching a history lecture recently, and the professor stated that after the Greek "dark ages," during which their previously used written language was lost and forgotten, a new written language was developed by essentially stealing the pre-existing Phoenician alphabet and assigning sounds to each of the letters.

This is the earliest documented use of a phonetic alphabet in history (that I know of), and it occurred to me that the words "Phonics" and "Phoenician" might be related; in fact, this relationship makes it seem extremely unlikely that there is no relationship between the terms.

Can anyone explain the similarities between these words, and determine whether my guess is correct?

This is a very vexed area, in which the chances of certainty are slight for the simple reason that it becomes progressively harder to determine exact pronunciation that far back.

However, I am afraid there is no connection between ‘Phoenician’ and ‘phonic’. ‘φοινοσ’ refers to a deep red luxury dye made from murex shells, in which Phoenician merchants traded most profitably.

The word phonetic is of Greek origin (φωνή {phōni} = voice). the Greek writing probably first emerged in the 8th century BCE. What its predecessors appear to have lacked was a comprehensive representation of vowel as well as consonant sounds. We still find this in Hebrew and Arabic scripts, where the diacritical marks to indicate vowel sounds are a relatively modern development.

Greek had 7 vowels: Α (A) Ε (E) Η (pronounced ‘air’ in ancient times but ‘ee’ now) Ι Ο Υ (pronounced more like the French ‘i’) Ω (pronounced like ‘awe’). in addition were various diphthongs: AI (as in ‘eye’) AU (as in ‘how’) EI (as in ‘eight’) OI (as in ‘joy’) OU (as in shoe’). This, in turn, made it easy to record the different dialects of the language, which were driven as much as by anything by local differences of pronunciation.

Much, possibly too much, has been made of the Greek ‘invention’ of a phonetic alphabet, when the predecessors did have sounds associated with their letters. Still, it is true that the voiced vowels were a significant development.