The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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examples I have given above can be called popular. When we come to our next
group, the formations in -ALIA and -ILIA, we find not only that we have a
mixture of popular and literary words, or those which Menéndez Pidal calls
“voces semicultas o exóticas”, but also that these words have everywhere
become feminine singulars; they were all in origin the neuter plural forms of
adjectives, some of which, like ANIMALIA, CUBILIA, were already used as nouns
in classical times, though the greater number became nominalized at a later date
and are often the ones that have come down to modern times in a literary or
semi-popular form. At the same time we also sometimes find that words which
seem to be eminently popular, because they are also preserved in Rumanian and
Sardinian, may take a semi-literary form. A case in point is BATTUALIA
‘gladiatorial contests’, which has given the word for ‘battle’ in many languages:
Rum. bătaie ‘beating’ (also bătălie ‘battle’, from Italian, with adaptation to the
-ie ending, see 11g), It., Rh. battaglia, Fr. bataille. Prov. batalha, Cat., Sp.
batalla (and batalia in Spanish Latin), Ptg. batalha, Sard. (Log.) battadza,
(Camp.) battalla ‘uproar’ (and battaglia ‘battle’ from Italian). Here Spanish has
-alla for the expected -aja, as found in certain other words, raising several
possibilities. Firstly, BATTUALIA may not have been preserved as a popular word
in this area, and batalla may have been introduced from Gallo-Romance
(raising the question of whether Ptg. batalha is also a loan); alternatively an
earlier *bataja may have been overlaid by the more “international”
Gallo-Romance form (introduction into Castilian from other Spanish dialects
would seem unlikely) or the ending -aja may have been replaced by the more
common -alla of the semi-literary words, just as -ança, -ença, -azón etc. gave
way to -ancia, -encia, -ación and so on. (Some manuals quote a form bataja as
if this represents the true Castilian outcome, but they seem to be basing
themselves on forms like the bataia of Alex. O 573b, 607c, which is an example
of Leonese “yeismo”.)