ВОПРОСЫ ОНОМАСТИКИ | PROBLEMS OF ONOMASTICS

Blanca María Prósper
University of Salamanca, Salamanca, Spain

CELTO-VENETICA: INDO-EUROPEAN NAMES FROM NORTH-EASTERN ITALY AND THE DIALECTAL CLASSIFICATION OF VENETIC

For citation
Prósper, B. M. (2024). Celto-Venetica: Indo-European Names from North-Eastern Italy and the Dialectal Classification of Venetic. Voprosy onomastiki, 21(2), 9–50. https://doi.org/10.15826/vopr_onom.2024.21.2.015

Received on 1 November 2023
Accepted on 15 February 2024

Abstract: This work tries to cast some light on a number of indigenous names of north-eastern Italy. It specifically addresses a selected number of names from Brixia and its environment, which lies in the west of Venetia et Histria, and close to the border of the Gallia Transpadana, covering an area that runs from the Oglio to the Adige rivers, around the Garda Lake. Most of these names have one thing in common: they are hardly ever found anywhere else, and, as a consequence, they have obtained a label: Jürgen Untermann called them Brescianisch, thus tacitly paving the way for considering them as a trace of an independent, unknown and unclassified dialect. That these names are not attested outside this area is not necessarily diagnostic of their not being Celtic or Italic, though the path leading to their classification may prove winding and indirect. Their etymology and attribution to either Celtic or Venetic will be thoroughly discussed. The study of the Venetic name fersimo comes to confirm the evolution of the complex superlative suffix *-is-m̥(H)o- > -izʊmo- > -īmo- is common to Sabellic and Venetic, where only the name meitima provided evidence for this change. Some misidentified or overlooked derivational and compositional patterns are addressed, such as the superlatives in -umus, the Celtic compounds in -gassi- and the probably both Italic and Celtic compounds whose first member is an Indo-European root-noun *ḱlu- ‘hearing.’ The personal names qverra, dievpala, endvbro, rvtvba, rvtvmanne, barbarvtae, aprofennivs are Venetic and decidedly bely the widespread notion that Italic did not preserve Indo-European compounds as personal names. The Celtic personal name vorvodisivs and the personal or divine name boxarvae are considered as belonging to a very ancient layer of Indo-European composition and, when possible, are connected to other compounds belonging to the same “semantic paradigms.” The analysis shows that it is premature to label these forms as Brescianisch — a new Indo-European dialect not attested in indigenous sources, which is in fact little more than a label for an onomastic landscape whose members are otherwise unattested but can be unproblematically linked to Continental Celtic and Italic.

Keywords: Italic Languages; Venetic; Celtic Languages; Hispano-Celtic; anthroponymy; Indo-European language reconstruction; Indo-European morphonology; Ancient Religion

Acknowledgements
The present paper expands on a lecture given on July 14^th 2023 at Cornell University within the framework of the Small Conference on Italic Languages convened by A. J. Nussbaum and M. Weiss. The author would like to thank them for their hospitality in Ithaca.

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