Disputatio:Inscriptio Duenos

What is the construction of Inscriptio Duenos? Surely it needs to be Inscriptio Dueni, Inscriptio Duenana, or some other variation. --Iustinus 02:59, 22 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

I hear it as an indeclinable modifier: I'd have written it as Inscriptio "Duenos," except that I wanted to help the wiki-linking bots find it and worried that the quotation marks would thwart them. I'm open to suggestions (as anybody posting new texts should be). Maybe a comparison of various other such objects will be useful. Here are several, as they're usually called in English: the Castor and Pollux dedication, the Garigiliano bowl, The Forum Romanum cippus, the Lapis Satricanus, the Senatus Consultum de Bacchanalibus, the Carmen Arvale, the Puteolan funerary tablets—and most famously, the Praenestine fibula (or brooch), apparently a fake. Btw, I'm not sure what to call the actual object; calix could be quite wrong: to modern eyes, it could look like a candleholder for three candles. IacobusAmor 03:11, 22 Decembris 2006 (UTC)

Duenos/duonus

Greetings. Maybe this is known or maybe not, but just in case so you know, and it's not always we notice stuff: the adjective duenos, probably meaning "good", later probably changed to duonus (which can be seen in the Carmen Saliare), seem to be duo and unus, that will say duo in uno, "two in one": duenus/duonus, and two in one is good. And after hand it changed to bonus. Donatello (disputatio) 16:16, 20 Octobris 2013 (UTC).

Yes, bonus certainly comes from duonos / duenos. But what is your source for 'duo in uno'? I can't help thinking that this is just another case of folk-etymology. It has been notably difficult to find Indo-European cognates for duenos, and such a situation tends to foster unbridled figments of imagination. Though we don't know exactly the prehistory of duenos / duonos, any decent etymological explanation is bound to take into account not only bonus but also bene, bellus, and beare, beatus. Etymologies that I'm aware of analyse duenos as du-eno-s, but the initial du- has nothing to do with the numeral duo. Rather, *du- somehow relates to the Indo-European verbal root denoting 'giving'. Duenos is usually related to Sanskrit dúvaḥ 'offering, tribute', though the details are not very clear. A good starter is A.Walde & J.B.Hoffmann's Lateinisches etymologisches Wörterbuch (Heidelberg, 1938, p. 111). Neander (disputatio) 20:27, 21 Octobris 2013 (UTC)