The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

49
49
‘powder horns’, ‘corners’ (ORum. cornure, M.-L., Schicks., p. 49). Italian has
corna ‘horns (as a pair)’, ‘corns on the feet’, with dial. corne (as bracce, dide,
osse), but corni for a number of individual horns and also in transferred senses
such as ‘musical horns’, ‘horns of the moon/of the altar/of a dilemma’,
‘horn-shaped projections or objects’; corni is also found for corna in the areas
which use bracci, diti and ossi for braccia, dita and ossa. Rhaeto-Romance
follows suit with the collective singular la corna ‘horns’, ‘antlers’ (Germ.
Gehörn) as opposed to the individual ils corns (the singular is Eng. chüern, Surs.
tgiern); however, in this case la corna can also be used for a single horn, with
las cornas for ‘horns’. This is similar to the situation in Old French, where la
corne can be a collective (“exalcer vostre corne”, Psalter; Meyer-Lübke,
Schicks., p. 125, also speaks of it as a plural), but usually refers to a single item
(also used in “les cornes de l’autel”); but here cor gained ground initially, so
that corns meant ‘horns’, ‘antlers’, ‘horns of the altar’, and the singular cor was
used for the material ‘horn’ and in the phrase “cor d’abondance”, and for
‘musical horn’, ‘corner’. In modern French cor only has transferred meanings,
such as ‘musical horn’, ‘tine of an antler’ (individually countable), ‘corn on the
foot’, ‘sitfast’, while corne has become the word for a single ‘horn’ (also as the
material), and has other meanings like ‘shoehorn’, ‘hoof’, ‘dog’s-ear of a page’,
‘point of a cocked hat’. In Old Provençal, as far I have discovered, both cor(n)
and corna are used for ‘horn’, ‘musical horn’, and corna also means ‘auricle’,
‘lobe of the heart’; the modern uses are similar to the French ones, with corno
as the standard word for ‘a horn’ (and also the material), while cor is restricted
to meanings like ‘musical horn’, ‘tip’, ‘corner’, ‘corn on the foot’ (but in
Guienne and Béarn cor is used in the senses of corno). In Catalan corn is the
standard word for ‘horn’ in all senses, but in the north corna is used instead (and
has also given Spanish the word cornas ‘back-stays’). The semantic position in
Spanish is similar to that in Rhaeto-Romance, with cuerna firstly having the
collective meaning of ‘horns’ (like cornamenta) and then individually of ‘an