Etruscan / Pelasgian

[David L. White]

> What language in the world aspirates /t/ only after /n/? None
> that I ever heard of.

        Answering my own rhetorcal question,  I note that some African
languages do this thing which I had thought was impossible.  Furthermore,
reflection reveals that proto-Britonic almost certainly did this too,
resulting in the nasal mutations of /p-t-k/.  Nonetheless, the Hittite forms
show variants in /nd/, which suggests that their pronunciation was more like
modern English "seventy" with a /d/ in it, so my original assertion was
probably (in implication) correct.
        As for place-name formative being both Pelasgian and Anatolian,
there is nothing wrong with this.  Derivational suffixes are often borrowed
with words, as is seen in modern English "ize" from Greek and, more vaguely,
the idea that it is somehow (poetically?) appropriate for country names to
end in "ia".  If there were enough city names in /-nthos/ and /-ssos/ (I am
not sure about the /a/) around, people could well have gotten the idea that
there was some sort of appropriate and "high-class" city name suffix
involved, and applied it to their own cities, thus yielding things like
Tartessos.  (I have no idea what the frst part is.)

Dr. David L. White