The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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of ACUS ‘needles’, where Italian dialects have pls. acora, aghərə, acure, acola
etc. (and a sing. aca, aga), Rumanian has pl. ace and Istro-Rumanian acur. We
have already seen that GUSTUS ‘taste’ became GUSTUM in late Latin, so that
Rum. gusturi ‘tastes’ is parallel to furturi from FURTA ‘thefts’, where classical
FURTUM was flanked by a late form FURTUS; 4th-decl. SINGULTUS ‘sob’ was
replaced by *SUBGLUTTIU, the plural of which has given Rum. sughiŃuri. The
forms for ARCUS, FETUS, MANUS, PASSUS, PORTUS and SINUS have already been
looked at (the -A forms corresponding to FETUS, such as Rum. fată ‘girl’, Friul.
fede, NIt., Rh. (hapax), Prov., Rouss. feda ‘sheep’, and Montañese jeda ‘cow
that has calved’ are presumably newly-formed feminines). Finally, from
5th-declension MERIDIES ‘noon’ we have the OIt. pl. meriggia ‘shady places’ (a
deverbal?).
14. Miscellaneous neuters which only survive as feminine singulars.
a) We are left with a great number of words which have in general only
survived as feminine singulars, even in Rumanian, for the most part only with
a unitary meaning, thus confirming what we have already seen in late Latin. As
we saw in §4, many of these words already appeared as singulars in late Latin,
though it is not always clear in what sense they were used. The most
commonly quoted examples of this change taking place in Latin are OPERA and
ARMA, the implication being that these words were found as singulars in
classical Latin; this is certainly true for OPERA ‘work’, but ARMA ‘weapons’
only appears as a feminine at a much later date. Here the modern forms are
Rum. operă (newly introduced), armă, It. opera, arma ‘arm (branch) of the
forces’, arme ‘weapon’ (formerly plural, as in all’arme! ‘to arms!’), Friul. uare,
arme, Rh. ovra/oura, arma (used as a collective in en arma, portar/purter
arma), Fr. oeuvre, arme (with an OFr. pl. “s’oste ses arme”; alarme is from the
Italian), Prov., Cat. obra, arma, Sp. huebra ‘the extent ploughed by a yoke of