The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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account for Prov. nos (beside no(t)), Cat. nus (earlier flanked by nu); here the
Engl. noose also suggests that the OFr. nom. nous may similarly have served as
an invariable form beside oblique nou. Anglade also says that Prov. gras beside
gra(t) points to a neuter *GRADUS ‘step’, while Meyer-Lübke (Schicks.) says
that Old French has an invariable gues beside gué (cf. Prov. g(u)as, g(u)a(t),
and Cat. place-name Rec del Gaus), which requires a neuter *VADUS ‘ford’. On
the other hand, however, the Provençal forms with -s may reflect an
intervocalic D > z, and the DCVB says that nus has come from the plural form.
Again, Anglade maintains that Prov. potz comes from a neuter *PUTEUS ‘well’
(no reasons given), while Meyer-Lübke feels that the South Italian forms
fetu/fietu point to neuter *FETUS ‘offspring’, an idea that may in fact find
support in the Prov. fes quoted by Mistral (s.v. fetus) and the Sardinian forms
given below in §10e. These are only shadowy hypotheses, but in general we
may say that one factor tending to confirm them is the fact that -ORA plurals for
these words can be found in Italian and Rumanian (for that matter we could
equally compare Prov. nis, ni(t) ‘nest’ and Lombard Latin NIDORA, It. dial.
ne(d)ora, nidura/-re).
b) With regard to the plural forms, the use of the -ORA ending is, as I
have just said, a mark of Eastern Romance, and Rohlfs says (§370) that in spite
of such forms being used in medieval documents in Lombardy they are hardly
found in North Italian; the few examples he quotes are OLomb. stercora and
tenpore and modern fossilized forms such as Moden. lògher (a new singular
based on a variant of OIt. locora), Romagn. égur (cf. the plural forms OTusc.
agora, SIt. acora). Even in Old Tuscan they do not occur much in the literary
language, though they appear with greater frequency in non-literary writings.
But as we go south we meet with more and more examples, which we will look
at in a moment. Before doing so, however, let us look at the core of words that