The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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a modern formation). Old Italian had gomita and northern gome(dh)e, but these
have now yielded place to gomiti. Rhaeto-Romance has singular forms like
combet/cumbet, gombet/gumbet, but more often these have been changed
phonetically, thus Surs. cumbel, Eng. cundun; there are no collective forms in -a,
and the word does not have the meaning ‘cubit’. Old French has the old Latin
plural as a feminine singular coute/coude, meaning ‘cubit’, but Godefroy gives
no examples of the basic form without -s being used with a plural numeral as a
unit of measurement. The Provençal forms derived from the Latin singular are
cobde/covede/coide (now cou(i)de), and Levy quotes a single example of coyda
‘cubit’, evidently from CUBITA, in the phrase “XL coydas”. He doubts the
reading, however, thinking that “coydats” is intended; in this he seems to me to
be wrong, as the scansion of the line, “quaránta cóydas sés mentír”, surely
requires “coydas”. In Catalan the modern form derived from the old singular is
colze, said to have been changed from earlier colde under the influence of polze
‘thumb’. Other early forms are cotze, coldo, colzo. There is no apparent record
of a form in -a, but it is interesting that an early example of colde, from Llull,
comes in the form “XL coldes”, which could equally be the plural of *colda.
(Colde has come from *coude, as delme, galta, malalt from deume, gauta,
malaute.) Spanish, like Old French, has preserved the old Latin plural as a
feminine singular, coda ‘wedge for strengthening a joint (in carpentry)’. I have
not, however, been able to discover any similar form in Portuguese (is cota
‘back of a knife’ related to coto(velo) ‘elbow’?); the Portuguese unit of
measurement is côvado ‘ell’. When we come to Sardinian, on the other hand,
we are rewarded by a rare instance of the preservation of the Latin plural in the
old language in the combination of numeral plus unit of measurement, “XI
cubita de pannos” (Wagner, Flessione, §10), “XXIIII cubita de pannu” (R.
Sampson, Early Romance Texts, No. 74); Wagner also quotes a modern form,
Camp. kuida, used as a singular for the individual ‘un braccio’. Judging from all
the above forms, it seems in general as if the collective idea of ‘elbows’ was