Can the etymology of a word/name help historians assume something in lack of other proof?
I was reading about Troy/Wiliusa and how we found in Luwian texts the name Alaxandu, which sounds pretty similar to the Greek Alexander. We can be sure that “Alexander” is a Greek name, because etymologically it means something in Greek. Would historians use this as evidence of Greek presence in Wiliusa?
I am unaware if ancient cultures would use names of a different language to name their children. For instance Philippines are named after King Philip of Spain, and although the name is etymologically Greek, there is no connection between the Philippines and Greece.
A similar rephrasing of the question about the same subject would be about places in Anatolia like Miletos/Millawanda or Halicarnassus/Alos Karnos. Since the etymology of the cities is not Greek, could this be proof enough that those cities were not originally founded and inhabited by Greeks, or that assumption cannot be made by the name alone?
Etymology can be a very useful historical tool for investigating phenomena that have no written history, often in parallel with archaeology. For example, we don't have many early medieval texts from or about Finland, but there's a number of places on early maps with names such as Orjasaari that mean something like "slave island." Based on the geography of these locations and larger patterns in medieval northern history and archaeology, it seems likely that these were places for trading slaves. In contrast, place names in Norway that include a "slave" element are often paired with elements referring to agriculture, such as Trælaker, or "slave acres," which suggests that slaves were here being used for labor rather than as trade commodities.
One particular problem I'm trying to work through right now is the etymology for a common Norse (Viking Age) term for slave-girl: ambátt. Most sources typically present this as either a straightforward derivation from an older Germanic word ambahta-, or more perplexingly, as a borrowing from Latin ambactus. The problem is, the Germanic word was itself borrowed from an even older Celtic term: ambaxtos. In Celtic, this seems to have meant a high-ranking retainer. When it initially got borrowed into Latin, via none other than Caesar's Gallic Wars, it carried a similar meaning that suggested a person was part of a chieftain's warrior entourage. From either of these sources, it got borrowed into early medieval Germanic dialects, and its modern descendants typically retain a high-status meaning, such as Amtmann in German or ambassador in English.
How, then, did a word that meant a (typically male) elite vassal get turned into a Norse word for slave girl? Again, I think our best answers can be found by looking for broader patterns. This is a high-status term, so it probably moved from Celtic or a neighboring Germanic language into Old Norse among high-status speakers. Early medieval marriage was typically virilocal, that is, the man stayed in place and the woman moved to live with him. When people permanently crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries, then, those people were often women marrying into elite households. Perhaps one such woman, chaffing at an inhospitable Scandinavian lifestyle and maybe an abusive husband, proclaimed herself an ambaxtos who deserved better. Perhaps her neighbors, hearing this slovenly foreign concubine call herself an ambátt, adopted the term and began to use it for other women got brought in from abroad and treated poorly, even if they had been princesses back home.
It's hypothetical, of course, but at least it's a conjecture that fits our evidence. Remarkably, it's also paralleled by the later Laxdæla Saga, a story which features an Irish princess who was taken captive and sold as an ambátt to an Icelandic farmer in the 900s. Coincidence? Maybe so, but etymology helps us dig into some of the factors at stake and recover some of the deep historical processes not otherwise preserved in textual accounts.
To address the Alakšandu question specifically, we know virtually nothing about the language(s) spoken in Wiluša. It is possible that some of the inhabitants of the city spoke Greek, but there is virtually no evidence for this.
Only a single text has been found in the Bronze Age levels of Troy, a biconvex Anatolian hieroglyphic seal belonging to a man and his wife. This indicates little about the language(s) in use in Wiluša. For one, only the titles - written logographically using the signs SCRIBA ("scribe") and FEMINA ("woman/wife") - can be read with certainty. The glyphs used for the names are unusual and sloppily written, which has made it nearly impossible to reconstruct the names, let alone propose etymologies. Additionally, Anatolian hieroglyphic seals were very mobile. One was found at Megiddo, for example, where people certainly weren't speaking Hittite or Luwian.
The primary evidence is personal names from Hittite treaties, and we know of the kings Kukunni, Alakšandu, and Walmu from Wiluša. The first two are attested in CTH 76, a treaty between the Hittite king Muwatalli II and Alakšandu. Walmu is attested in CTH 182, the Milawata letter from a Hittite king (probably Tudḫaliya IV) to one of his vassals in western Anatolia. Unfortunately, none of the three names can be matched conclusively with a particular language. It should be noted that although it is clear Alakšandu was borrowed from Greek, it remains unclear whether the name was adapted as a Luwian name, Lydian name, or a name in some related language.
The Anatolian linguist Craig Melchert summarized the evidence in The Luwians.
Contra Starke (2001 40) the adaptation of the Greek name Alexander as a u-stem in the name of the King of Wilusa Alaksandu is at least as compatible with Lydian as it is with Luwian. Likewise there is nothing definitively Luwian in the form of the names of the other two known kings of Wilusa, Kukkunni and Walmu (in contrast to those of other western Anatolian kingdoms - see the table in Starke 2001 37). Current evidence thus also allows for the possibility of a related, but distinct Indo-European language in Wilusa/Troy in the second millennium.
Ilya Yakubovich concurred in Sociolinguistics of the Luvian Language.
At the same time one must recognize that the discussion of the ethnicity of the Trojans rests on an even shakier foundation than the debate about the ethnic constitution of the kingdom of Arzawa. In the latter case one can at least rely on a small but cohesive corpus of local personal names and on a number of texts that presumably emanate from the area. In the instance of northwestern Anatolia our resources are limited to three personal names, three theonyms, and two toponyms attested in Bronze Age cuneiform sources. Going somewhat ahead, one can observe that none of these eight elements is demonstrably Luvian or even Luvic, and most of them defy linguistic identification. The rest of the information must be supplied from the Greek poetic account of the Trojan War, whose final redaction probably postdates the historical events underlying the narrative by about five centuries. Finally, the ongoing excavations of Bronze Age Troy have failed to yield a single monumental inscription...