Reverse Etymologies of Fake Words

I've been spending the last two days playing with the Online Etymology Dictionary trying to first-draft level improve the made up names of my races and languages so that the names I'm applying don't clash quite so badly with any etymological associations people better informed than I about language would bring to the text.

Right about now I wish I'd studied some Northern European languages and maybe, I dunno, Arabic.
Because Latin and French and Greek is all very nice, but not when you want root words that sound as if they're NOT derived from Latin or Greek.  And my German isn't helping me a whole lot.  Stupid limited language skills.

*whine* Reverse engineering language is *hard*.

Time periods, conquerors, ethnic groups - we know not these!

Pfeh, I say.  Perhaps the Lithin will be a nice Germanic invading tribe, and I can fill their fake vocabulary with nice Germanic stone-root words.  Then I can use my 4 years of German to mangle language to a nicety.

There are no "Celts" here!  bwahahaha.  Just not-Romans, not-Greeks, not-Arabs, and some cat people.

The fractalness of history defeats me.  No wonder fantasy novels are full of bizarrely monotonic countries.  "Everyone from the boundaries of High Forest to the font of the Big Sea speaks the same dialect!  For lo, though the printing press has not yet been invented, and the first dictionary of our language is still 300 years in the future, still have we from one side of this landen to the other all the same words and even spellings.  And why?  Because the Great Creator deemed it too complicated to write it otherwise.  Besides, know you not that if we spoke in a manner various, you would be unable to instantly identify the foreigners from other countries and tell them apart from folks who were just from another county?"

Head.  Meet desk.  (Incidentally, I found a really fun part of the BBC site with an interactive timeline, obviously meant for children.  It enchants me.  They read stuff and there's little flash animations.  Yay!)

I *swear*, next time I'm writing something set in the here-and-now.