ẽnwνato-

This lexeme is attested once in a poetic inscription found at the Sardis cemetery and roughly datable to the 5^th or 4^th century BCE.

[I.Y.]

dat. sg.

ẽnwνatoλ

LW 14.9 (Sardis)

There are two cues that contribute to narrowing down the meaning of this noun: One is its morphological connection with wνẽni- ‘to acknowledge (?)’, spotted already in Meriggi 1935a:107f. n. 91. The other one is its appearance in the collocation qiraλ ẽnwνatoλ=k, where qira- belongs to the semantic domain of property (Schürr 1997a:210). Consequently, one can hypothesize that ẽnwνato- either refers to a particular kind of property that requires acknowledgement or to something that can be easily juxtaposed with it, e.g. ‘fame’. The tentative character of the proposed interpretations is self-evident.

[I.Y.]

The stem is derived with the help of the prefix ẽn- with the likely benefactive meaning, which was attached to the base *wνato-. For this stage of the derivation cf. ẽnτawλo- vs. cawλo-. The reconstructed stem *wνato- was itself derived with the help of the nominal suffix -to-. The accent in *wνato- apparently fell on the last syllable, hence the reduction ẽ > a in the first syllable. Synchronically, the final derivative is an o-stem.

[I.Y.]