Etruscan / Pelasgian

[Carol F. Justus]

Does this assumption about the Hittite writing for -nd- take into
consideration the fact that the script was cuneiform, borrowed from an Old
Babylonian scribal school in Syria, that Hittite use of the OBabyl. signs
for 'd' all came with a vowel attached? To use the Hittite data, there
needs to be a lot more argumentation.

Carol Justus

>> 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