Good reply, Mark, but enough to put some holes in your arguments, while not undermining them too much.
I see no evidence for a translation. Naturally, the Greeks will not have pronounced the word most accurately, and when words travel from one place to others (and even back to the original speakers, many life times later on), no one may recognize the word anymore and accept it as you did as Greek or foreign.
Furthermore, it is a story for which there is no other source; it is also not presented as a major event in Greek mythology or Greek history. No word by Plato that he translated this specific word from Egyptian.
While you present this as an assumption, you are still willing to use it to undermine the proffered story. That is wanting your cake two times. I will have to accept your argument at face value in its own category, but I do not see any undermining of the proffered story.
You may want to argue your point better but my point is that you do not have all that much that applies to undermining the word Atlantis as proffered.
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Another point is the famous word 'milk'. Linguists have found sounds on all continents with spoken languages that deliver a meaning that sketch a rather specific setting.
Words like maluk and milka (just to mention these for amusement's sake because I am using a source I remember reading about and cannot point to an actual source) can show how words can be extremely stable. I am just using this as introduction.
With similar sounding words to milk from other languages, their actual meanings fell in the range of female, sister and niece, breast and suckling. Not all languages had this similar sounding word with similar delivering meanings, but the specific connections were discovered in the most-widespread geography possible.
I can even explain the word with a sound replication for suckling milk.
M is the sound one makes with the mouth closed (around an object). M meant here as a single sound (M and not EM).
L is the sound mimicked for moving matter inside the mouth from front to back (but with the mouth open to declare that sound). L meant here as a single sound (L and not EL).
K is the sound mimicked to represent swallowing. K meant here as a single sound (K and not KAH).
Produce M-L-K twenty times in a row, and your mouth is reenacting suckling in most optimized fashion.
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Of all Indo-European languages, English changed the most. It incorporated many foreign words and this may provide the idea that languages in general change a lot, while it was English that changed a lot. As such, we need to be careful to use the image we have of our own language changing as appropriate for other languages changing as well.
Particularly when we have words that exist in the entire family group, then we can know that these are very stable words.
To give an example, the word indoctrination may not be like the original English word and we have to place it in the category of borrowed words. It is an addition, a refinement, for expressing ourselves using language.
Yet a word like home is basically found with all Germanic languages. Just the many place names that end in 'ham', 'heim', or 'hem' should be obvious enough that the word 'home' is of a very old origin and was not quickly replaced by 'dom' or 'casa'.
Other words are three and daughter, European words found as far away as India and Persia, sometimes with the exact same pronunciation.
Lastly, some cultures hold on, to an extreme extent, to their words and word order, while other cultures give up on them more easily. The people of England having spoken many different languages over a time span of 5,000 years may point to their willingness to take over a foreign language without much resistance, while the Germanic tribes do not show that in their history other than modifications rippling through the linguistic fields.
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Yes, the story about the word Atlantis is not a fact. But I hope you recognize how I brought in not just one element, but actually a large number of elements to support it.
The Doggerbank option appears to be an excellent geographic location, yet anywhere in the world where Germanic tribes were at that time, while in the presence of a melting iced-over environment, can be considered the origin for this proffered storyline.
Thank you for your reply; I appreciate it.
