The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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separated from braç, as are the others from brazo, braço respectively. (Note
that the Spanish form also means ‘breaststroke’ and, in the plural, ‘braces (on a
ship)’. Thus we find that the extreme west of Romania has moved furthest from
the original Latin position, a fact which is not surprising when one considers
how innovatory Spanish is, particularly in its verb system (three conjugations,
very few strong preterites, HABERE for ESSE to form the perfect of intransitive
verbs (with invariable past participle), remodelling of the -udo p.ps. as -ido,
extension of the -ESC- interfix to all parts of the verb, etc.), and also that this
area was the first to reject the use of vowel change (from -o to -i) for forming
the plural. So it is that in the Iberian peninsula there are no traces at all of even
lingering echoes of the use of the Latin neuter plural with any plural force.
Sardinian has certain stray examples of the survival of the old plural, as we
shall see later, but in this case has only forms like rattu, rattos ‘branch(es)’,
brattsu, brattsos ‘arms’ (with br- from Italian).
d) Another part of the body often thought of collectively is the fingers.
Here we have already seen that late Latin had the collective plural DIGITA. In
Rumanian this has become degete(-le), again a single form for all purposes.
Italian has le dita (and ORom. deta) for ‘the fingers’ looked at collectively, but
i diti for ‘specific fingers’; dita is also used as a measurement, so due dita ‘two
finger’s-breadths’. In the dialects other forms are used, such as the “double
plurals” dite (popular Tuscan), di(d)e/dede (northern), and tišite (in the south),
as well as new -ORA forms (southern) such as daitərə/detərə/tetera/deštrə. We
also find the same distribution for forms corresponding to diti as for those
corresponding to bracci, so NWTusc. didi, Mil. did; similarly we find northern
dida in the combination doa dida ‘two finger’s-breadths’, with a new singular
una dida in Milan (Meyer-Lübke; cf. his un[a] bratsa). The position in
Rhaeto-Romance is similar; collective singular la detta (Surs.; formerly with