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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

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