The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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sepolchrora ‘sepulchres’. The Celtic CAMBIA ‘exchanges’ finds a counterpart in
OIt. cambiora; here Rumanian has schimburi, evidently a deverbal like OFr.
change and OSp., Sard. cambia beside cambio, cambiu. SCAMNA ‘stools’ has
given the Rum. pl. scaune ‘chairs’ and the OFr. sing. eschame and possibly the
doubtful Catalan form escauna; the parallel *SCAMNIA has given Prov. escanha
‘reeling machine’ and ONFr. escaigne, now écagne ‘skein’ (the origin of the
English word; for the semantic change cf. écheveau ‘skein’ from SCABELLU
‘stool’). A similar SCRINIA ‘caskets’ is the indirect source of Rum. sicrie
‘coffins’ (via Hungarian) and of modern scrine ‘chests-of-drawers’; in the case
of OIt. scrigne, Meyer-Lübke (Schicks.) lists the word as if a plural of scrigno
‘casket’, though the Cambridge It. Dic. quotes an old sing. scrigna (in the case
of a similar travaglie, travaglia ‘travails’, this word, and cognates elsewhere, is
evidently a deverbal). We may also include here LOCA and IOCA, which are
found in classical Latin alongside LOCI and IOCI; from LOCA ‘places’ we have
Rum. locuri (old locure) ‘ditto’ and mijloace ‘means’, Lombard Latin locas and
locora, OTusc. luogora, OUmbr. l(u)ocora, ORom. locora, SIt. lokəra, locura,
locore, and the Prov. sing. l(u)oga/lu(e)ga, now l(i)ogo/luego, while from IOCA
‘jokes’ we have Rum. jocuri, It. (Sic.) jocura, Occ. sing. jogo/juego ‘piece that
one performs’ (a deverbal ?). We have already looked at VADA in the section on
the -ORA plurals, §10e.
c) Some of the forms with plural function are limited to Rumanian.
Thus we have lucruri (old lucrure) ‘things’ from LUCRA ‘gains’, cuiburi ‘nests’,
apparently from *CUBIA though there is some doubt about this (the Mac.-Rum.
form is cul’b), and seuri as the plural of seu < SEBUM ‘tallow’. From the plant
world (not included earlier) we have the plurals aiuri, fânuri, meiuri,
oarze/orzuri, vâscuri from the reflexes of ALLIUM ‘garlic’ (cf. Ptg. alhas
‘cloves of garlic’), FENUM ‘hay’, MILIUM ‘millet’, HORDEUM ‘barley’ and
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