The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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have come down from the Latin 3rd declension and see what has happened to
them, first in Italian and Rumanian, which preserved -ORA as a plural ending
(also substituting it for -ERA and certain other anomalous endings), and then in
the other languages, which only preserved secondary traces.
From TEMPORA we get It. dial. tempora (also artificially preserved in
the standard language as an ecclesiastical term for ‘ember days’) and tempore,
Rum. timpuri (we have already looked at the various developments of
TEMPORA ‘temples’, already used by Chiro as an invariable form “de tempora”).
CORPORA gives OTusc. corpora and dial. cuorpure, Rum. corpuri. For
PECTORA we have OIt. pettora, Rum piepturi (and piepŃi ‘shirt-fronts’, as It.
petti, which can also have the same meaning). LATERA, become *LATORA, gives
latora in Lombard Latin and Old Tuscan, and laturi in Rumanian, from which a
new feminine singular lature was created, which, in its turn, formed a new
plural lături in accordance with the practice of mutating the stem vowels of
feminine plurals in -i. From PECORA we have the isolated Rumanian fem. pl.
păcure ‘cattle’ (so păcurar, as It. pecoraio) and It. pecora ‘sheep’, which is
plural in the southern dialects but then passes through the stage of being a
collective singular for ‘flock’ to becoming, in the standard language and the
north, the word for an individual ‘sheep’, replacing peco, pl. peco (from the 4th
declension); the standard plural is therefore pecore, but pecora, pegora are also
found in the areas which have plurals of the type la capra (Rohlfs, §363). (Also
pecora, being feminine, is taken as denoting a ‘ewe’, giving the dial. pecoro
‘wether’.) STERCORA has given the OLomb. stercora just quoted, and Mac.
Rum. ştercuri.
c) After this Italian and Rumanian part company. PIGNORA and LITORA
are represented by OIt. pegnora and lidora, but the words have not survived in
Rumanian. FRIGORA gives Rum. friguri ‘fever’; the noun only exists in Old
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