The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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FUNDUS, ARCUS, COLFUS, NODUS, GRADUS, PUTEUS, VADUS, FETUS — we find
firstly Rum. pl. armuri (with a new sing, armur(e) alongside arm), and ierburi
‘herbs’, ‘small flowering plants’ as the plural of iarbă ‘grass’, ‘herb’. Here
Italian has no -ora forms for either, as far as I have been able to discover, unless
the Lombard Latin gerboras (“inter gerboras et terra arva”) is this word; ERVUS
appears as lero or learned ervo (and note also the erbo quoted above), but we
find erbor- or erbol- in derivatives of erba such as erborare, and I will discuss
this in a minute. For FUNDUS we have Rum. pl. funduri and Lomb. Lat. fundora;
I have not found such a form quoted from later writings, but the extended stem
is seen in OIt. sfondolare. In the case of ARCUS we have Rum. pl. arcuri as well
as old arce, Lomb. Lat. arcora, with the same form continued in Old Tuscan,
and for COLFUS the modern Rum. golfuri, which happens to balance the
COLFORA recorded at Ravenna. NODUS is represented by Rum. pl. noduri and
adj. noduros, OTusc. nodora, Calab. nudura, adj. nodoruto (thus lending
support to the idea of a neuter *NODUS surviving in Gallo-Romance), and
GRADUS by Lomb. Lat. and OIt. gradora (Rum. grad, pl. grade, is modern). For
PUTEUS we have Rum. pl. puŃuri, It. dial. pozzora, puzzure, for VADUS Rum. pl.
vaduri and Lomb. Lat. vadora, and for FETUS Lomb. Lat., Neap. fetora (here
Rumanian has masc. făt, pl. feŃi, as in Făt Frumos ‘Prince Charming’).
Elsewhere the extended stem of ARMUS is found in Sp. enarmorarse
‘rear up’, and then we come to ERVUS, about which Meyer-Lübke has an
interesting theory, though this is called into question by Corominas. His idea
(already expressed in Schicks.) is that Rum. ierburi, It. erbor- are not orginally
connected with HERBA, but come from 3rd-declension ERVUS, attested in
Venantius Fortunatus and backed up by Fr., Prov., Cat. ers; Corominas, however,
argues that this last-named form has come from the plural, saying that in
Spanish the pl. yeros is the form normally used. On the other hand, we find the
root HERBOR- diffused everywhere, It. erbor-, erbol-, Fr. herbor-, herbol-, Prov.