The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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d) In Old Italian, as we have just noted, we find an original type melo
for both tree and fruit, with separate plurals meli and mela, and similarly pomo
(also a 3rd declension form pome, used by Dante amongst others), pero, pruno,
pesco, with plurals for the fruit (collective like le frutta) poma, pera, pruna
(Rohlfs, §368; presumably also pesca — does the Lombard Latin PESCORA
belong here?). This situation is continued in certain northern and southern
Italian dialects, so SCalab. milu, piru, pumu, cerasu for tree and fruit (Rohlfs,
§382); for the fruit the pl. puma is clearly quoted (Bat. & Al., Diz. Etim. It.), and
Rohlfs (§369) speaks of rare occurrences in the south of -e forms such as pire
(sing. piru), but otherwise I have found no clear references; Rohlfs only speaks
here in general of -a forms being favoured in the south, especially in S. Calabria
and Sicily, but later, in §643, he specifically quotes pumə and pirə as collectives.
Lausberg (§612) also speaks of the occurrence of a collective singular in -a in
the south, such as la pera, as an intermediate stage between the types uno pero
and una pera for ‘a pear’. (In the northern areas which have the same masculine
form for both tree and fruit, I take it that words like Pied., Emil. per have
adopted the -I type plural, following the general tendency that we have observed
for this area to abandon the -A type.)
The most usual type of formation in modern Italian is the same as that
in Rumanian, and here let me first take the case of the two words melo and
pomo, as they tend to be rival formations, and also the shades of meaning
assumed by pomo are typical of those found in the languages we shall deal
with subsequently. The first of the two follows the general pattern, that is, melo
(pl. meli) means ‘apple-tree’, and for ‘apple’ we have a fem. mela (pl. mele),
from the old neuter plural, with a similar situation in the dialects, so Bol.
meil/meila. In the case of pomo, the standard language, as in earlier times, uses
the one form for both tree and fruit, with just one plural, pomi, and we have to
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