†moruos

van den Hout 1999a:40f. suggests segmenting moruos from the sequence ¹⁷purmoruos of C.Ka 5, 17 (a Carian-Greek bilingual, but the Greek version of this passage has not been preserved, the assumed end of the sequence is probable due to the following mnos that can be a form of mno ‘son and/or servant’, see s.v.), as a dat.(-loc.) pl. “on the stela” (sic). He supported this idea both with the circumstance that such a formula frequently appears at the end of the proxeny decrees (like this text) and with similar looking Anatolian words, viz. Hier.-Luwian maluwa (see s.v.), Sidetic “malwa “stele”” (read today as malja° and it is a part of maljadas, probably meaning ‘thank-offering’, see s.v.) as well as Lydian mru-/mruwaa-/murwaa- ‘stela’ (see s.v.) from an earlier *me/or/lu̯(o)-. There are several problems with this proposal:

No l > r change is attested yet in Carian and thus, only the Lydian word might be connected. Instead, postconsonantal *u̯ becomes ‹b› in Carian (Schürr 2006a:118f., Schürr 2019d:12; Simon 2008b:460; the precise scope of the change is not clear yet, but it seems to include liquids, see s.v. Καλβις), which further weakens their proposed connection (but does not fully exclude it, since moru- can still somehow be related, at least theoretically). The segmentation is even more problematic: there is no independent evidence that pur moruos is the correct segmentation of ¹⁷purmoruos. Since it is followed by mnos, it seems plausible that the identical Auslauts (°os) are no coincidence and the word hidden in ¹⁷purmoruos is in agreement with mnos, which excludes the meaning ‘stela’, since mno means ‘son and/or servant’ (the alternative interpretation of Frei & Marek 1998a:17 n. 31 of purmoruos as a personal name arbitrarily ignores the difference between mnos and gen. sg. mnoś). Besides, the ending -s is attested until now only as dat. sg. (and thus, the phrase might be the indirect object of the following form, aitusi, if it indeed means ‘shall be made’, see s.v.), and the Carian ending of the dat. pl. has not been identified yet (but it is not -τ, as previously assumed, see Simon forthcoming).

[Zs.S.]