NO·22
| Inscription | |
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| Reading in transliteration: | quormsklp |
| Reading in original script: |         
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| Variant reading: |    quormskla
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| Object: | NO·22 San Bernardino di Briona (gravel) |
| Position: | front |
| Direction of writing: | dextroverse |
| Script: | perh. North Italic script |
| Letter height: | 1.4–2.2 cm0.551 in <br />0.866 in <br /> |
| Number of letters: | 9 |
| Number of words: | 1 |
| Number of lines: | 1 |
| Workmanship: | pecked |
| Condition: | complete |
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| Archaeological culture: | Golasecca II, Golasecca III A 1 [from object] |
| Date of inscription: | late 6th–early 5th c. BC [from object] |
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| Type: | unknown |
| Language: | unknown |
| Syntactic analysis: | unknown |
| Meaning: | unknown |
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| Alternative sigla: | none |
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| Sources: | Rubat Borel 2006: 205-207 |
Commentary
Images in Gambari 1998: 291, fig. 276 (photo = Rubat Borel 2005: 49), Rubat Borel 2011b: 392, fig. 7.23 (photo), Arcà & Rubat Borel 2024: 36, fig. 9 (photo and drawing).
Inscribed in a half-circle around (to the left and above) the armed figure on one of the pebble's relatively flat surfaces (length ca. 14 cm). The letters are executed with a hammering technique like the figure, and are well legible, if not always easy to classify. Unambiguous are upsilon , small omicron , rho , mu with the bars executed as a wavy line , rounded sigma , and kappa . The first letter can hardly be anything other than qoppa, though the letter is not otherwise attested in the Lepontic alphabet; cf. Rubat Borel 2005: 15 f., who cites Etruscan comparanda for the variant with the vertical stroke offset to one side of the circle (e.g. Pandolfini 1990: 26–29, no. I.5 [Veio, late 7th c.], 51 f., no. III.2 [Roselle, late 6th c.]).
First mentioned by Gambari 1998: 291, who saw a series of consonants and did not offer a reading or interpretation beyond some very tentative speculations; on the unlikelyhood of a fake ibid.: 301, n. 19. Rubat Borel 2005: 15 f. reads quormsklp or quormskla, and suggests that qoppa is an archaic letter which was eventually lost in the Lepontic alphabet, representing a labiovelar before its labialisation; he segments the sequence into quorms, an abbreviation for a genitive quormoiso, and klp or kla = klappa, a pre-Roman word for a flat stone reconstructed by Wartburg FEW: II.1, 735–738 from Romance dialect forms. For quormos Rubat Borel compares names in por°, which do not account for the nasal.
Bibliography
| FEW | Walther von Wartburg, Französisches etymologisches Wörterbuch, Bâle: 1922–2002. |
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