The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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loanwords and verbal nouns; it is also sometimes added to feminine nouns,
giving făinuri ‘kinds of flour’, lânuri ‘fleeces’, mătăsuri ‘silks’, cărnuri ‘meats’.
The ending -e is used to form the plurals of newly introduced verbal nouns, like
acte, subiecte, procese, following the model of old participial neuters like
păcate ‘sins’, fapte ‘acts’, ‘deeds’; it is also used equally with -uri to form the
plurals of loanwords. In the case of Italian, the situation in the southern dialects
(which are better exemplars than Tuscan of Eastern Romance) can be broadly
compared to that in Rumanian, though it differs in detail. Both -A and -ORA are
kept as plural endings (sometimes replaced by -AE and *-ORAE), and many of
the forms correspond to the Rumanian ones and will be discussed later when we
examine all the Romance forms together, but one interesting new development
is the substitution of -a for -i in masculine nouns (without changing their
gender) in those areas where -e and -i are confused, the purpose being to
distinguish masculine from feminine. So you get i pila (for standard i peli), i
mula (i muli), i latruna (i ladri), tri jorna (tre giorni), i furna (i forni) and so on
(Rohlfs, §368). There are similar examples of the use of the -ORA ending, so
mulərə (muli), vareləra (barili), maretəra (mariti), bukəra (buchi), zianərə (zii),
jaddərə (galli), kanatərə (cognati), amešərə (amici), kəssprenərə (cugini),
furnure (forni), chiuppira (pioppi), jardinura (giardini), and even for feminines,
so ripura (ripe), casara (case). In Tuscan the neuter plurals are much more
restricted, and are in general, as I said, limited to collectives; there are, however,
in Old Tuscan a certain number of new formations using -ora, such as borgora,
boscora, bustora, cambiora, fornora, elmora, nomora, some of them, like the
Lombard Latin forms we have already looked at in §4e, being loanwords from
Germanic. In northern Italy the use of the neuter plural is still more restricted,
especially in modern times (though the new -ORA(S) forms are found in the
Lombard Latin of this region), and the words concerned are all collective in
meaning. This is only to be expected, as this region really comes within the
Western Romance area, and in fact, since the preferred form is the double plural,