Neptune's tongue

An old theory from 1972 is that those -ssa suffixes in Greek are non-IndoEuropean; but "preGreek" like Basque is preCastilian. Alternatively they could be from the Luwian adjectival suffix. In the late 2000s, one Robert Beekes revived 1972 in attempts to debooonk the Luwianism. In 2010 Robert Beekes with Lucien van Beek got published an Etymological Dictionary of Greek through Brill, no less. This hypothesis has, via a map, trickled over to the Turtle: in keeping with perturbant planet Neptune, famous thalassa came from *talakya. So: let's read modern reactions to the Beekses.

Stella Merlin has done a dive into the Dictionary and finds several examples of words as can be explained by means other than loans from a single preGreek substrate. Some might be IndoEuropean, like Greek, but variously distorted by other IndoEuropean languages (like Phrygian) or close-enough (Lydian or Luwian).

I don't know that Brill made the right call in publishing so strident an argument as the Beekses'. Merlin seems right.