The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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instance we find ramă in Rumanian only as a Megleno-Rumanian form; in
standard Rumanian the plural form is ramuri or rame, rămuri, ramure, with a
new sing. ramură created beside ram. Vegliot has ruoma (how used ?). In
Italian we find the old pl. le rama, now replaced by i rami, and OLomb. le
rame; rama is now a singular form, quoted as standard Italian for ‘branch’ by
the CID, but given as a dialect form by Rohlfs (§384). The RAMORA of the
charters is also continued in Old Tuscan (one example in Dante, Purg., 32:60)
and further south. (Cf. also armenta, romenta ‘twigs’ in the north, from Latin
pl. RAMENTA; Vää., §215.) According to Lausberg, la rama is a collective
singular meaning ‘all the branches of a tree’, and he compares It. poca rama
with Surs. pauca roma, which is the collective form corresponding to the
individual pl. roms; in this case Engadinian has ram(m)a and rams. Old French
has raime, which could be used collectively or individually, while Prov. and
Cat. rama are collectives. Ptg. rama is also a collective, but Sp. rama now
means a large individual branch, while ramo has been degraded to meaning a
smaller branch (not so in Berceo); for branches collectively, las ramas is used.
Sardinian only has masc. ramu.
As far as FOLIA goes, it has not survived as a plural, and in fact was
often used as a singular in late Latin, with a pl. FOLIAE (Chir., Diosc.). Even in
the singular it is virtually only in Rhaeto-Romance that it is found as a
collective; otherwise it has become the word for an individual leaf, leaving the
reflexes of FOLIUM for other meanings, though even here the meaning can
sometimes be collective, as in Sp. la caída de la hoja, It. esser in foglia (cf.
Engl. leaf, which originally meant ‘foliage’, and in leaf). So we find that Surs.
la feglia means ‘foliage’, as against fegls ‘leaves’ or ‘sheets of paper’ etc.; in
Engadinian la föglia can equally mean ‘foliage’, but it is also the standard word
for ‘leaf’, with a pl. föglias, in contrast to fögls meaning ‘sheets’ (Fögl Ladin is
the name of a newspaper). This is an exceptional case, and elsewhere we only
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