petua(

edit with form

Attestation:	NO·19 (autesai:kar/nitus:petua[) (1)
Language:	Celtic
Word Type:	prob. noun
Semantic Field:	prob. personal name
Grammatical Categories:	indeterminable
Morphemic Analysis:	bet-u-ā (?)
Phonemic Analysis:	/bet(t)u̯ā/ (?)
Meaning:	'Petua' (?)

Commentary

It is not clear whether the form is complete, as words are written across line breaks in the inscription. The most immediate similarity is with Gaul. *petu̯ares 'four', *petu̯ari̯os 'fourth' (see DLG: 250 f., Matasović 2009: 179), but the compositional form of the numeral is petru- (as in CIL XIII 2494 petrudecameto 'fourteenth' and personal names like XII 2061 petrunia, see Stüber 2005: 102 f.). petua[ with this etymology could thus not be a personal name, but may be an incomplete numeral – which is unattested in Cisalpine Celtic so far, but certainly possible, especially considering that we expect a group of subjects to go with the plural verb karnitus. If the form is onomastic, which is overall more likely, petua is most probably complete, viz. an ā-stem personal name in the nominative. The best comparanda are names in betu- 'birch', especially CIL V 7230 bettuuonis (Maison Méane; reading?), even if some attestations in northern Italy may be variants of bitu- 'world, age, life'. Possibly Gaulish betu̯ā is attested twice, but only in central/southern Italy (CIL X 1090 betua [Nocera Inferiore], XI 1941 betua, betuo [Perugia]).

Bibliography

CIL	Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. (17 volumes, various supplements)
DLG	Xavier Delamarre, Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise. Une approche linguistique du vieux-celtique continental, 2nd, revised edition, Paris: Errance 2003.