The Latin Neuter Plurals in Romance - Page ON

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standard Ptg. romã is taken from Arabic), and then marmelo ‘quince’ (the origin
of the words for ‘marmalade’ in the various languages), where the old Japanese
form marume(i)ra, beside marumero, marumeru (all dating back to the days of
the early Portuguese missionaries), seems to point to an earlier Ptg. marmela,
corresponding to Sp. membrilla. Portuguese also has maracotão/melocotão,
Transm. melgotão, corresponding formally to Sp. melocotón but still preserving
the meaning of ‘a peach grafted on to a quince’. Like Spanish, too, Portuguese
has pêra ‘pear’ (pereira ‘pear-tree’) and pêro ‘a kind of apple’ (defined by
Michaelis as ‘pearmain’, as is the tree’s name pereiro by Taylor, adding further
corroboration to the evidence of French, Catalan and Spanish). Latin PRUNA
seems to have left no direct reflex, but (a)brunho means ‘sloe’ (with no
feminine form); there is also a Gal. cirola corresponding to Sp. ciruela. (As
mentioned above, there is another local word for ‘sloe’, andrina/endrina, taken
from Spanish.) As in Spanish, again, other fruits in -a coming from the old
neuters are cereja (Gal. cereiša), sôrva (and Gal. serba, agreeing with Spanish),
amora (and old mora) ‘mulberry’ (amora-preta ‘blackberry’), nêspera ‘medlar’.
(There is no reflex of FRAGA, as the Portuguese word for ‘strawberry’ is
morango, and the Galician (a)morote; for the ‘cornel’ tree there are corniso and
corni(s)olo, to which the REW also supplies a fem. cornisola.) Other fruits
following the same pattern are groselha and framboesa from French, and
laranja (with dissimilation), lima; in this category comes also the standard
word for ‘plum’, ameixa, OPtg. améixea as Leon. méixena (cf. OPtg.
ameixenedo below). For the ‘jujube’ Portuguese has açofeifa and jujuba, similar
to the Spanish forms, but the other word ginja, by a process of confusion that
we have already observed, has replaced *guinda (cf. the placename Guindais)
in the sense of ‘sour cherry’. (Ptg. amarela refers to a different plant, the ‘tart
polygala’.) Old Latin feminines fitting into this class are avelã, amêndoa,
castanha and oliva (poetical for the usual azeitona); there is also the fem. uva
‘grape’ as in Spanish. Again as in Spanish, the ‘peach’ is the masc. pêssego (Gal.
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