The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

33
33
plural (evidence of the early use of a one-case plural in -OS is provided, for
African Latin at least, by an inscription, “Filios et nepotes salvos...posuerunt”;
Bourciez, §214b). In the case of Sardinian, which likewise only has one case,
Lausberg comments that the creation of new plurals like corpos, tempos points
to the identification of the -us of corpus, tempus with that of the vanished
nominative of the 2nd declension. In this Western Romance system, the
important feature is not so much the existence of a distinction between the two
cases, which was soon lost, but the fact that in the oblique case the plural was
felt to be formed by adding -s to the singular, as was the case with the feminine
nouns coming from the Latin 1st declension, so that the lexical form of the
word remained as an unchanging morpheme and the idea became established
that to form the plural one simply added a suffix, without tampering with the
final vowel of the singular.
In Eastern Romance, by contrast, the loss of -S meant that in the
singular there was no difference between the nominative and oblique cases
(except originally in imparisyllabic nouns referring to persons), and there was
no -s to act as a plural marker; instead, the final vowel of the singular was
changed to the vowel corresponding to that of the Latin nominative plural, that
is, from -ă (Rum.) or -a (It.) to -e (occasionally -i) in the first declension
(though the origin of the -e in Italian is disputed; here one has to bear in mind
the question of interference by the northern Italian type, which originally
preserved -S), from -u or -o to -i in the masculines of the 2nd declension, from
-e to -i in those of the 3rd (it seems most probable that this -i was taken from
the 2nd declension, as the same vowel also underlies the Old French and
Provençal forms), and from -u or -o to -a (or its replacement -e) in the
2nd-declension neuters. Moreover, and this is significant, there was another
group of neuter nouns ending in *-U, those of the type *CORPU, *TEMPU,
*PECTU, and these formed their plurals by changing the -U to -ORA, and had, as