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Poultney's suggestion that the first word of the Novilara inscription, mimnis, meant 'monument' can now be confirmed based on the parallel Oscan form memnis with the same meaning. In the next line, rotnem can reasonably be related to Latin rota and other Indo-European words for 'wheel,' especially considering the very prominent wheels on the stone. The second word, erut, matches an expected neuter form of the Sabellic root for 'this'; compare Umbrian erek. Together these connections suggest that the inscription is in a Sabellic dialect.
Thirty some years after James W. Poultney's important article in this journal on the inscriptions of northeast Italy (Poultney 1979), the most important inscription he examined, the Novilara stele, remains un-translated- discussions of it use phrases such as "not a single word in this inscription can be confidently translated" (Mallory 1989: 92). No substantial contribution has been made in this direction in the intervening thirty years. The aim of this article is to refocus scholarly attention on this important inscription, to reaffirm some of Poultney's tentative etymologies, and to point to some further connections and interpretations. Specifically, Poultney noted that the very first word of the text, mimnis, could be "very easily...analyzed as a noun meaning 'monument' consisting of a reduplicated and zero-grade stem from the root men- 'think' plus -is" (60). Surprisingly, Poultney, an accomplished scholar of Italic dialects and of Indo- European linguistics, missed a clear etymology connecting this first word, mimnis, with a form attested in Oscan, memnim, "monument, memorial" a self-referential word we would fully expect to find at the beginning of such a monumental inscription. A full examination of this word- one whose root at least can in fact be quite confidently connected to an attested word in an Italic dialect-and a review of Poultney's insights lead to conclusions about the root etymologies of other connected words and a tentative translation of the opening phrase mimnis erut...rotnem as '[as a] memorial, this...wheel-monument.'
The text (PID 343; Fig. 1), on a sandstone stele from an ancient necropolis just south of Ravenna on the northeast coast of Italy, dating from the sixth or fifth century BCE, in Poultney's transliteration, follows:
1 mimnis . erut . gaarestades
2 rotnem . úvlin . parten . ús
3 polem...