The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON
The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON
The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON
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61<br />
61<br />
uova, with dial. ove or ovi follow<strong>in</strong>g the same pattern of distribution as the<br />
words previously looked at; <strong>in</strong> Rhaeto-<strong>Romance</strong> we f<strong>in</strong>d the collective form<br />
for ‘roe’, ‘spawn’ only <strong>in</strong> Surs. ova. Here Old French has l’oeuve (ueve) or les<br />
oeuves, and Franco-Provençal and Provençal have ova (Wartburg quotes the<br />
latter from P. Meyer, Doc., without further details). <strong>The</strong> word is miss<strong>in</strong>g from<br />
Catalan, unless ova ‘k<strong>in</strong>d of seaweed (bladder-wrack?)’ (Griera) belongs here,<br />
but Spanish has hueva or huevas, and Portuguese ovas for ‘roe’, ‘spawn’; there<br />
is also an Ast. güévara, which Corom<strong>in</strong>as says suggests an orig<strong>in</strong>al such as<br />
*óvera or óvora. <strong>The</strong> other is LENDINA (gloss)/*LENDITA ‘nits’, which has<br />
produced Rum. l<strong>in</strong>d<strong>in</strong>ă, Pied. lendna, Ven. g&endena (× GLANDE ‘acorn’), MFr.<br />
landre (modern lente is ambiguous), SEFr., Prov. lendena, Cat. llemena, Ptg.<br />
lendea.<br />
7. Words denot<strong>in</strong>g units of measurement. Many of the objects we have been<br />
consider<strong>in</strong>g so far have occurred <strong>in</strong> pairs, so now I would like to take the word<br />
PARIA ‘pairs’ itself, and proceed from there to other words used as units of<br />
measurement, which are widely found <strong>in</strong> <strong>Romance</strong> <strong>in</strong> comb<strong>in</strong>ation with<br />
numerals to form a s<strong>in</strong>gle collective unit. From PARIA we have the Italian pl.<br />
paia (“due paia”), with a new s<strong>in</strong>gular un paio (also = ‘a couple of’, ‘a few’, cf.<br />
Germ. e<strong>in</strong> Paar); here we also f<strong>in</strong>d doa para <strong>in</strong> the north, and the word is used<br />
as a s<strong>in</strong>gular, una para (cf. una bratsa, una dida above), <strong>in</strong> the same way as<br />
OTusc. paria (“una paria” <strong>in</strong> Mon., 38:5), foreshadow<strong>in</strong>g the development<br />
found <strong>in</strong> Old French and Provençal. As here, so also <strong>in</strong> Rhaeto-<strong>Romance</strong> we<br />
f<strong>in</strong>d the collective s<strong>in</strong>gular comb<strong>in</strong>ed with a numeral to form a multiple unit, as<br />
<strong>in</strong> the case of dua bratscha, traia da<strong>in</strong>ta <strong>in</strong> §6b,d above, so Eng. dua (traia)<br />
pêra, Surs. dua (trei) pera, and similarly OFr. deus (treis) paire, Prov. doa<br />
(tria) paira (Grafström, §12). (Cf. Engl. five pair, which may well be directly<br />
taken from the French.) Later we f<strong>in</strong>d Fr. paires for paire (<strong>in</strong>cidentally the two