23v48 I hope my experiments with phonetic values don't seem too completely arbitrary to you - I feel some of us must try out some hypotheses of linguistic relationship in order to clarify the possibilities. But I agree with Sir John that any deductions from correspond- ences in the first 2 or 3 signs of name-radicals with those of Anatolian names don't really get us anywhere, because their struc- ture is such that one can find a parallel to almost any combination of syllables. What books did you find useful in looking over Carian and Lycian? I can't find anything that's much use at all- and I have the feeling Sundwall's breakdown of Asianic names often tries to divide into Lycian elements things which may have nothing to do with the Lycian language. On the whole Lycian and its neighbours have for me a decidedly 'Vorderasiatisch' look, whereas, with Schachermeyr and Pauli, my intuition, for what it is worth, sees Minoan and Etruscan as "agaisch im engsten Sinne". I have a suspicion that it is a half-Nazi ideology that makes the central European blokes see everything in the 2nd millenium from a vantage point in Hattusas, to feel that heavy-handed Nordics must have had a hand in every worthwhile cultural manifestation, and to put down all sorts of casually connected linguistic phenomena to the all-pervading influence of L_ish. We aren't able to trace historically any language of the ancient world in the process of becoming a so-called "mixed" language- by its vocabulary and morphology becoming merged with that of another language - all that we can say is that trading terms, flora and fauna, and cultural terms (practically exclusively nouns, all of them) get taken over in large numbers under given conditions, when languages suadenly move into a new geographic and cultural sphere. It's awfully easy to think of the Anatolian languages of the 1st millenium as a series of "mixtures" crystallised out from the melting-pot of the languages of the 2nd millenium - but I think it's a lot safer to assume that all the languages we know have deve- loped slowly through the period, along their own independent lines of evolution in the main, and that any divergences, such as between Etruscan, Lycian and Lydian, or between Hittite and the "normal" I-E vocabulary, must be measured in units of a thousand years, rather than by the scale of a few centuries that separate the last Minoan inscriptions from the languages of the Classical period. Yours sincerely, Michael Ventris