The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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combination of meanings; in this connection I also note that Cat. rasa < RASA
means ‘ditch’ or ‘channel’.) It will be seen that the range of meanings of the
Italian forms is so close to those found elsewhere that, if the etymon was
indeed different, there was at least a common development. In all the areas
there has clearly been crossing between the various roots, and this would seem
to have taken place independently of the French change from roie to raie,
which is relatively recent (I note that Levy, Prov. Suppl. Wört., gives an
example of raya in the sense ‘line of mountains’, though I cannot be sure of the
date of this). In the case of Cat. ratlla, which is first found as ralla, raia, I
suspect that it was, like Sp. raya and Ptg. raia, a loan from Provençal
(supposing that Prov. raia at some point became confused with Fr. roie/raie,
perhaps starting out as a deverbal from indigenous raiar, which had already
developed the senses of ‘scratch’, ‘streak’, like It. razzare), and then the
infrequently found segment [aj] was equated with the familiar [aλ] (which often
underwent “yeismo” in medieval Catalan, cf. tayar for tallar), and the [λ] was
later doubled.
One more set of forms which evidently go back to an old masculine are
those referrable to late Latin CALAMELLUS, a diminutive of CALAMUS ‘reed’,
which is also found in glosses in the forms CALAMAULA, CANNAMALA, and has
given the words for various kinds of rustic musical pipes. Here we have It.
caramella, ciaramella ‘kind of bagpipe’, OFr. chalemel(l)e, canem(i)elle,
chalemie, canemie, ‘reed-pipe’, ‘shawm’, ‘flageolet’, ‘bagpipe’, and similarly
Prov. calamella, calamina, now calamello, calamino, also forms beginning
with cara-, chala-, chara-, Cat. caramella, xeremia, OAst. chiaramia, Ptg.
charamela (transported to Japan as charumera ‘street-vendor’s pipe’), where
Spanish has the masc. caramillo ‘flageolet’; the forms with cia-, xe-, ch(i)a-
have clearly been taken from Gallo-Romance. Finally we may note that Rum.
păduche, corresponding to PEDUCULA ‘lice’, has become the unitary singular