ama-

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

[I.Y.]

The only attestation of this lexeme occurs in the accusative plural phrase ẽnas amãs, very close to another accusative phrase in the text, alarmn kastaλcν. If the latter phrase refers to the remains (or perhaps the grave) of the author of the inscription (cf. alarm- and kastaλc(i)-), then the former one must refer to the remains (or perhaps the burials) of his ancestors. Therefore, the suggestion of Vetter 1959a:25 to interpret amãs as ‘our’ appears to go in the right direction. Its problem, however, is that the stem of the stressed first-person plural pronoun in the other Anatolian languages looks different: cf. Hittite anzel and Luwian /anzi(ya)-/ ‘our’.

Developing Vetter’s suggestion, one can propose that ama- represented the emphatic variant of the first singular possessive pronoun ẽm(in)- (cf. below under stem formation). It could be functionally equivalent to the English phrase ‘of mine’ and normally occupy the place after the head noun, as in its available single attestation. For a parallel syntactic pattern, cf. perhaps the possessive form alarmlν ‘of his own’, placed after its head in LW 14.5, which contrasts with the usual placement of alarm- before its head noun.

The interpretation proposed above is hypothetical. One cannot rule out that ama- functions as an adjective, representing, for example, a positive epithet attached to the ancestors. But the participial interpretation, tentatively offered in Meriggi 1935a:100, n.67 appears to be groundless, because the nasalization of the final vowel can be more economically explained as reflecting the accusative plural ending *-āns.

[I.Y.]

Under the proposed grammatical interpretation, ama- must be analyzed as an oxytonic a-stem, probably derived from amu ‘I, me’ within Lydian.

[I.Y.]