>tyrannos is also currently linked to the Etruscan name of Venus, Turan.
I don't see the connection.
>But it's hard to me not link *tyrrhenos to IE *dHrsu- "strong, bold".
True, but as far as I see, the name would have originally been taken
from the people who called themselves Tyrrhenians. From there, the
name was toyed with to reflect more about who they were. These sea
peoples must have enjoyed much power at one time to be mentioned so
much by Greek historians. I think that the Greeks did take a foreign
name and play with it to make it more native and meaningful.
Chinese do this to foreign names all the time. Take a look at the
Mandarin word for "America" which is a phonetically similar /meiguo/.
While the word is in part taken from English "America", it has been
reanalysed according to native elements such that the word literally
means "beautiful country" (/mei/ "beautiful" + /guo/ "country").
I believe that this goes on all the time and has gone on many times
in the past. I suspect this happened to the Egyptian name "Hathor"
(literally meaning "House of Horus (the sky god)" in Egyptian), an
originally un-Egyptian name related to Semitic *`aTtar-, IndoEuropean
*xaster- "star" and, if I can help it, Tyrrhenian *xastora "Venus"
(> *attora > Etruscan /Turan/).
- gLeN
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