-2-   23V48
Comments:

(a)	I've resisted the temptation xx in any or these to
make either Linear A or B into Greek, Illyrian, or 
indeed into I-E. I think the spelling of Minoan names 
(assuming it is a full spelling, as probable) makes 
it impossible that there was a predominant ending or 
the nominative case, certainly not one in -s. Unless 
one names nearly all belong to a language other than 
that of the inscrr, that rules out all the IE dialects 
(including Hittite), Lydian and possibly Hurrian (though 
it isn't quite settled what the function of the "agentive" 
-s is). That only leaves Etruscan, ?Carian, Lycian , or 
some other, quite unprecexdented language, as points oh 
comparison.

(b)	I certainly don't think there's anything I-E about Etrus-
can, except by casual borrowing, or by going back to 
some very pre-I-E stage of development. Admittedly Trom-
betti enlarges the field of comparison between Etruscan 
and other languages (particularly Italic) quite bewil-
deringly - he occasionally cites Tasmanian parallels, 
which is going a bit far!

(c)	The names from Knossos, Mainland, & Cyclades do seem to 
conform to a common type. To what language are they re-
ferable? lost of them look "Aegean" in type, though per-
haps we shall be able eventually to detect in them traces 
of different ethnic strata - but curiously, nothing Greek 
seems to appear anywhere , or does it?

(d)	Eteocretan, superficially, looks the sort of language whose 
nominatives one might expect to end in -s.

I admit the phrase "average frequency" is a bad one. 
Statistical methods will need accurate safeguards in method to 
give a useful result, and you're probably way ahead or me there. 
But what I chiefly meant in this context, of a possible clue
to :V: by vowel harmony, is this:- taking for example the letters
_ and _ , if _ occurs among the most frequent letters after
_ , and if _ also occurs among the most frequent letters after _, 
then there's a possibility, which can be measured relative to 
other combinations.

But this particular case I hope won't prove to be frequent 
in this way. It isn't good statistics yet, but I feel that on 
general grounds of initial frequency there's a fair chance of
_ equalling A. This ties in with frequency in pre-Hellenic 
and Etruscan words and names, and with the fact that half the 
"Keftian names" begin with aleph, _ , if the Egyptian translitera-
tion is any indication.

I've so far been chary or  admitting written long vowels 
into Linear spelling, because they represent an easy way out for 
the transliterator of impossible words; but in words which begin 
for example with _-_ -, if _  is a , then we might have to read 
taa- or t_-. If -ia- and -ua- are written -ija- and -uwa- re-
spectively, which is only a guess, then all letters coming before
_ might have to have :V: a . -a rather shaky grid possibility.
Going on to consider feminines in - _ , there is a 
possibilty that _ is also a vowel, and is used to form a long 
vowel-ending -_ after _, _ etc, rather than that it is part
of an ending -ia as I suggested, which I gather my be a recent 
feature in Etruscan (? due to Italic influence).