Anyway, this has been an example of one of the better, but perhaps lesser-known cases for a family of substrate vocabulary in Greek? Hope you've enjoyed reading this. Like and subscribe etc., etc. for more of this. Yadda, yadda, yadda... I have to run now.

So if some of these (that aren't productively derived within Greek) are actually loanwords, where do they come from? Unfortunately it's not so easy to be certain when it's an enigmatic word borrowed even before the time of Homer.

The variants are not easy to explain etymologically, especially in view of the Doric forms that show -ι- for -υ- (but I'm sure someone can make something up through the Caland System if they try hard enough). Chantraine, Formation (1933: 216), already considered these probable prehistoric loanwords.

On the basis of all this we can go back to our Homeric hapax and suppose it probably meant something like:

βῆ δ᾽ ἴεναι κούρωι αἰσυμνῆτρι ἐοικώς (Il. 24.327)
He set out to go resembling a [αἰσυμνῆτρι] *princely/regal young man...

So where it occurs in Euripides we have a context of:

γήμας Κρέοντος παῖδ’, ὃς αἰσυμνᾶι χθονός. (E. Med. 19)
"[Jason] having married the daughter of Creon, who rules over this land."

All of these forms can be (more-or-less) accounted for as derived nouns from the verbal stem αἰσυμνάω, which actually occurs once in Euripides Medea 19 and scholiasts and ancient commentators to the passage gloss it variously as ἡγεῖται καὶ ἄρχει 'lead and be leader', βασιλεύει 'be king, rule'.

...also elsewhere in Ancient Greek inscriptions a Doric form αἰσιμνάτας as the title of some kind of magistrate (IG VII 15.1 αἰσιμνάτα[ς, Megara; αἰσιμνῆν I.Kalchedon 6.1) with an unexpected fluctuation of -υ-/-ι-.

Though West prints the more difficult reading, I presume Munro & Allen read αἰσυμνήτηρ on the basis of the better attested ā-stem masculine stem αἰσυμνήτης (Od. 8.258+), which is used to designate some sort of official in the games which Odysseus participates in while visiting the Phaeacians...

This word was evidently a bit confusing for the later scholastic tradition. The textual transmission of the Iliad has a few variant readings:

αἰσυμνήτηρ, -ῆρος (Munro & Allen's reading)
αἰσυιήτηρ, -ῆρος (West's reading)
αἰσυήτηρ, -ῆρος (another variant mss.)

And yes, I made my project acronym something that could only properly be a two-termination adjective in Greek (i.e. φιλόγλωσσος), but that's the only way I could get a catchy acronym to work. Please don't hurt me.

I guess I'll have to come up with a reintroduction post, though if you're following this account I assume you're probably far more likely to be already following me on my main, which is @mattitiahu.bsky.social where I am a much more silly person.

The Liddell-Scott-Jones lexicon, in its typical Victorian prudery fails to omit that Hesychius also mentioned their supposed erotic virtues.

The headword in Hesychius is in the accusative plural, so the nominative singular for a single one of these aphrodisiac cheeses would be σαύσαξ.

Seems like a perfectly reasonable assessment to me.

Right, here's Watmough's nuanced take on connecting Etruscan φersu 'performer(?), mask(?)' with Latin persōna, which boils essentially down to 'maybe it could still be saved, but you would have to make a couple of non-falsifiable assumptions'.

Not that I'm aware of. But mind, Robert Beekes tended to automatically classify all Greek nouns terminating in an -οπ-/-ωπ- as of substratum origin. I'm not sure that can be true in all cases (like οἶνοψ, etc.).

That's one that I really want to be true but I think the jury is currently out. IIRC Helmut Rix continued to accept the etymology, but Watmough, Studies in the Etruscan loanwords in Latin (Firenze, 1997) wasn't so sure. I have a copy of the latter at the office and can have a closer look tomorrow.

One might consider it odd that the word for 'person' is a loanword in Ancient Greek, but then again the word 'person' itself is a very widespread loanword in European languages ultimately from Latin persōna 'a mask; character' which has undergone secondary semantic shift.