The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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singulars are felt to be the plurals, in a collective sense, of cognate masculine
nouns which have other plurals, formed by the addition of -s, to denote the same
objects when viewed individually, whereas the Sp. braza, leña are quite
divorced from brazo, brazos, leño, leños. Equally, they are equivalent to the
plurals of singular masculine nouns when used with numerals to form a
collective measurement, so ün bratsch, dua bratscha, whereas Spanish has
braza in the singular, with a new plural brazas. So Rhaeto-Romance occupies a
kind of intermediate position (morphologically as well as geographically)
between the languages which use the -A forms as plurals, and those which only
use them as singulars. (Sardinian belongs basically to the latter category, with
only faint traces of -A forms used other than as feminine singulars.) All these
forms will be discussed in detail as we proceed.
6. Nouns denoting parts of the body.
a) When we come to look at actual examples, taking the words that
have left reflexes in Romance one by one, it will be convenient to start with
this last-mentioned word, Lat. BRAC(C)HIUM, pl. BRAC(C)HIA. The parts of the
body provide good examples of collective neuters, because they are commonly
thought of in pairs or in groups, and this particular word also developed a use
as a unit of measurement, when combined with a numeral. To judge from
Rumanian and Italian, the neuter plural form of the definite article in late Latin
must have been *ILLAE, like the existing fem. ILLAE, with the feminine concord
that we saw earlier in the case of adjectives. (This applies at least to the cases
where the words are still felt to be plural; but if they have already become in
effect feminine singulars then the article is ILLA. It has been suggested that
*ILLAE came from ILLAEC, formed on the analogy of HAEC (Bourciez, §218a)
and serving both as feminine or neuter plural, and this, added to the use of