--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski <gpiotr@...> wrote:
>
> W dniu 2010-08-30 21:13, dgkilday57 pisze:
>
> > There is no good reason why the principal god of the Jovian religion
> > should have had a reconstructible consort. It is very difficult to
> > connect <Ju:no:> with <Ju:piter> etymologically and I prefer to connect
> > with <ju:ni:x> 'heifer', <ju:nior> 'younger', <juvencus> 'young bull',
> > <juvenis> 'young man', etc. I do not regard Juno as a goddess of youth
> > as such, but of fecundity, and her epithet <Lu:cina> refers to leading
> > babies, calves, etc. into the light. She appears to have been originally
> > a Q-Italic goddess (not mentioned in the Iguvine Tables, but worshipped
> > at Falerii, Lanuvium, and other "Latin" towns), borrowed by the
> > Etruscans of Veii and Caere as Uni. Her association with Jupiter does
> > not appear explicitly before the lectisternium of 217 BCE, and should be
> > regarded as an artefact of Hellenization, identifying her with Hera, not
> > an ancient feature.
>
> In her 2004 article on IE nasal stems, Birgit Olsen discusses the
> etymology of <Iu:no:> in a footnote, suggesting, as one of the
> possibilities (beside the <iuvenis> connection), a "Hoffmannian" preform
> like *djú-h3(o)n- 'having heavenly authority' > pre-Latin
> *juwo:/*ju:nis, regularised into Lat. iu:no:/iu:no:nis. While the
> proposed normalisation may look somewhat acrobatic, at least she points
> out that the expected weak stem *iu:n- is attested as the base of
> <iu:nius> 'June'. Of course *h2ju-h3(o)n- 'young' could have produced
> identical derivatives, which Olsen duly admits.
Another morphological possibility is that <Ju:no:> continues an old /oi/-stem feminine with nom. sg. *-o:i, voc. sg. *-oi. The nom. sg. would regularly yield Latin -o: like the dat. sg. of /o/-stems. It is very likely that the other cases, being of unusual formation, would then be remodelled after those of familiar /o:n/-stems.
The /oi/-stem class is well represented in Greek (Chantraine, Form. §§90-91). The original nom. sg. -o:i is preserved in inscriptions of Megara, but appears in Attic as oxytone -ó: beside the voc. sg. -oî. No plurals are attested. Both deverbatives denoting abstracts like <peithó:> 'persuasion' and denominatives denoting females like <the:ló:> 'wet nurse' occur.
For our purposes the best Greek example is <Morphó:> 'the Beautiful', epithet of Aphrodite at Sparta (on the semantics, 'full of form' = 'full of beauty', cf. Lat. <formo:sa>). Grk. <morphé:> does not exhibit root-gradation but Lat. <juvenis> originally had it, as we see from <ju:nior> and the Sanskrit paradigm (nom. pl. <yúva:nas>, inst. pl. <yúvabhis>, acc. pl. <yú:nas>). If, as I suppose, Juno originally governed fecundity, her name was actually an epithet 'Full of Offspring' vel sim., with the zero-grade *yu:n- reflecting PIE *h2yuh3n-. The month-name <Ju:nius> need not be derived from <Ju:no:>; it may simply have been the month associated with calving.
One reason I favor an old /oi/-stem is that it is otherwise very difficult to explain Etruscan <Uni>, which is well attested and invariant in form, without an ad-hoc stem-change in archaic Q-Italic. (The loss of initial /y/ in archaic Etruscan borrowings from Italic is regular, as in <Ane> 'Janus'.) Now, the Italic languages have /i:/ in the 'wine' word (Latin <vi:num>, Umbrian <vinu>, Volscian <uinu>), which thus cannot be borrowed directly from Western Greek <woînos>, but probably comes from Etr. <vinum>, which has multiple attestations in the Liber Linteus. But this <vinum> can hardly be native Etruscan; most likely it was borrowed from the WGrk acc. <woînon>. Other examples show that while Etruscan formed its nom./acc. zero-case of borrowed theonyms and personal names from the Greek vocative or nominative, appellatives denoting inanimates were borrowed from the accusative, and final -n could become -m later, e.g. Etr. <pruchum> 'pitcher' from the Grk. acc. <prókhoun>. Thus we have evidence for Greek -oi- becoming Etr. -i:- in one loanword. (It is sometimes claimed in the literature that Etruscan had no phonemic vowel-length distinction, but this claim is based on a-priori beliefs about the vowel-system rather than careful analysis of the facts. As a counter-example, Lat. <catami:tus> is clearly borrowed from Etr. <Cat(u)mite> 'Ganymede', whose <i> must represent a long vowel continuing the /e:/ in Grk. <Ganumé:de:s>.) I propose that in Etr. <Uni> both vowels were long, and the name was the regular result of borrowing from the Proto-Q-Italic vocative *Ju:noi.
Two objections to this proposal might be made. First, Attic-Ionic <Le:tó:> is represented by Etr. <Letun> (securely identified on mirror-scenes from Orvieto and Chiusi), which cannot continue the unmodified nom. or the voc. <Le:toî>. Here however we also find Lat. <La:to:> and <La:to:na> with Doric vocalism, showing that the Greeks had alternative endings for this name. Moreover Chantraine considers <Le:tó:> a rearrangement of a borrowed, that is Pre-Greek, name. The Etruscan form could thus have been adapted from an Ionic by-form *Le:tó:n (nom. or voc.).
Second, Etr. <Phuinis> and <Phuipa> represent Grk. <Phoînix> and (Dor.) <Phoíba:>, showing -ui- rather than -i:- from Grk. -oi-. These names however were probably borrowed long after the 'wine' word, which indeed might have been the very first Greek loanword into Etruscan, when the Greeks began trading for Etruscan metals back in preliterate times. It is thus possible that Etr. <vinum> and <Uni> involve an old soundlaw which had ceased to operate when <Phuinis> and <Phuipa> were borrowed.
I should mention that the bilingual inscription of Pyrgi (ca. 500 BCE) equates Uni with the Phoenician `As^tart, the consort of Ba`al. Since the latter was identified with Zeus/Jupiter, we have here an indirect coupling of Juno with Jupiter almost three centuries before the lectisternium of 217. Of course, we know that Etruscan religion was heavily Hellenized already in the 7th century. Probably the Etruscans, expanding southwards into Q-Italic territory, adopted Juno into their pantheon as Uni, equated her with the Greek Hera, and coupled her with their Tin, whom they had already identified with Zeus.
DGK