This is getting kinda complicated.
Kuhn shows several examples of Wendhausen etc being documented earlier
as Winiþi (later in dat.pl. forms: (in) Winithun etc)
http://tinyurl.com/5w74e2
Udolph does not disagree, but in his bid to rein in Kuhn's attempt to
carve up Germany he states that the Winiþi names
http://tinyurl.com/6k73ry
(note that unlike Kuhn, he has found Winiþi names on the Rhine too;
whoever these Winiþi people were, they must have been fond of watrer,
although in their last phase pushed away from ihe immediate
surroundings of rivers)
should be seen in the contexts of other names in -iþi
http://tinyurl.com/5666lk
(a toponym suffix he considers safely Germanic, but to Kuhn it's a NWB
mainstay); in thois way he believes to get Kuhn away from those
imaginary Veneti.
However,
I propose instead to analyze the woird Veneti itself as *Wen-et-, with
the suffix known from Greek etc.
Udolph 'Namenkundliche Studien zum Germanenproblem',
p.274 (my translation)
'd. In one further point an extension is possible. Until now -ithi
has been rather isolated outside Germanic. The connection with Lat.
-e:tum has always been seen as a stopgap, although there are
similarities in function and meaning. In a contribution on collective
formations in Baltic languages S. Ambrazas793 pointed to
correspondences, which get very close to the Germanic formation. In
the section on *-i:tyo- he says i.a.: "In some ... Lithuanian dialects
nomina collectiva with the suffix -yte denoting the concentration of
some things or plants in one place are used, e.g. alksnýte 'alter
grove', a,z^uolýte 'oak-wood', kelmýte 'a stubby place' and others".
Also from Latvian he cites examples from the onymic field and compares
the Baltic material with the Gmc. -ithi suffix.'
So, if this is true, the Veneti was a people among many others using
the -et- suffix (of course some of the -iþi names may denote
collectives of the plants etc rather than people), but one
particularly fond of water. The -iþi peoples (if that's what they
were) were dispersed approx. from Berlin to London (see map).
Torsten