The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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Italian plurals in -ora and Rumanian plurals in -uri without speaking of their
origin, and I think the time has now come to deal with these plurals as a
specific category. The endings do in fact come from a Latin segment -ORA,
extracted from forms like TEMPORA, the plural of TEMPUS ‘time’, where
TEMPOR- is the stem and -A alone the ending; when the singular became
reduced to an invariable form in -US (as we saw in §4c), the -ORA of the plural
was seen as a plural ending. Similar words that have come down to Romance
are CORPUS ‘body’, PECTUS ‘breast’, PECUS ‘herd’, ‘flock’, PIGNUS ‘gage’,
FRIGUS ‘cold’, STERCUS ‘dung’, LITUS ‘shore’ (earlier also ROBUS ‘oak’,
‘strength’, which later became ROBUR), and, with -ERA in the plural, ONUS
‘burden’, OPUS ‘work’, ‘necessity’, LATUS ‘side’, GLOMUS ‘ball of thread’,
VELLUS ‘fleece’. Though Rumanian now has -uri, the earlier ending was -ure,
or, in Istro-Rumanian, -ură, as in piepture, kl’eptură ‘breasts’, so it can be seen
that -uri developed out of -ORA in the same way as the plurals in -e came from
those in -A (in some Italian dialects too the -a, -ora endings became -e, -ore),
with the further change from -e to -i seen elsewhere in feminine plurals such as
Ńări, seri, veri, guri, linguri. Though the nouns with plurals in -ORA were very
limited in number in Latin, the ending was distinctive, and, as we have seen in
§5a,c, lent itself to extension in Eastern Romance (we may note a similar
extension of the cognate -er in German); in this language zone the plural was
formed by substituting a different vowel for the final vowel of the singular
(unlike the situation in Western Romance, where the ending -s was added to the
unchanged singular form), so that the more clearly marked -ORA ending would
recommend itself as a substitute for -A, and eventually even for -I, if the sense
of -ORA’s being a “neuter” ending was lost. We find the extension already
taking place in the 4th century, and in §4d I gave examples of new
3rd-delension neuter forms declined as TEMPUS or OPUS: ARMORA, CIBORA,
ERVUS, FUNDUS, CINUS, PULVERA, FIMUS, and possibly CAPUS, to which I can
add ARCORA ‘bows’ quoted from the 5th century by Meyer-Lübke (Schicks.).