Romance plurals


This article describes the different ways of forming the plural forms of nouns and adjectives in the Romance languages, and discusses various hypotheses about how these systems emerged historically from the declension patterns of Vulgar Latin.

Two types of plural marking

Romance languages can be divided into two broad groups depending on how the regular plural forms of nouns and adjectives are formed.
One strategy is the addition of the plural suffix -s. For example:
Modern languages that have this type of plural suffix include Catalan, French, Occitan, Portuguese, Galician, Romansh, Sardinian and Spanish.
The other strategy involves changing the final vowel:
The main examples of modern Romance languages exhibiting this type of plural marking are Italian, Gallo-Italic languages and Romanian.
The historical development of these two distinct types of plural morphology is an important and controversial topic in Romance philology.

Latin

The following table illustrates the singular and plural forms of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd declensions in Classical Latin.
The corresponding Vulgar Latin forms are shown below:
singularpluralsingularpluralsingularpluralsingularplural
nominativeˈbɔnaˈbɔneˈbɔnoˈbɔniˈmadreˈmadresˈɔmoˈɔmines
accusativeˈbɔnaˈbɔnasˈbɔnoˈbɔnosˈmadreˈmadresˈɔmineˈɔmines

Origin of plural ''-s''

The plural forms in -s in languages like Spanish can be straightforwardly explained as descendants of Latin accusative forms in -as, -os and -es.
On the other hand, 3rd declension nouns and adjectives have -es in both nominative and accusative, however, so the -s plural for these words could derive from either case form. There is also evidence that Vulgar Latin may have preserved the nominative plural ending -as in the 1st declension, attested in Old Latin and replaced by -ae in literary Classical Latin. The Romance varieties that maintained the distinction between nominative and accusative cases in the medieval period have forms in -s for both nominative and accusative plurals of feminine nouns of the first declension.

Origin of vocalic plurals

There is debate over the origin of the plurals of Italian and Romanian, with some claiming that they derive from the Latin nominative endings -Ī -AE and others that they partly derive from the Latin accusative endings. The "nominative" theory appears more straightforward at first; however, the "accusative" theory is more common currently.
The Italian endings are -i, and -e ; the very few remnants of the Latin neuter nouns in can take -a or -e for the plural. The nominative theory suggests that the -o plural -i and the -a plural -e are derived straightforwardly from nominative -Ī and -AE, respectively, and that the -e plural -i is derived by analogy with the -o plural.
The accusative theory proposes that Italian -e derives from -as. One piece of evidence is that in Italian, masculine amico has plural amici with , but feminine amica has plural amiche, with that is unexpected if e < -AE, but expected if e < -ĀS.
Additionally, the isolated Italian word dunque thus corresponds to Sardinian duncas. Neither word can be derived from Latin DUMQUAM, and the isolated nature of the word means that analogical change is unlikely. Sardinian duncas suggests Proto-Romance *DUNQUAS, with dunque the expected outcome if -AS > e.
The "accusative" theory essentially suggests:
  1. Italian plurals are indeed derived from the nominative plural.
  2. However, Proto-Romance had the feminine nominative plural -ĀS, not *-AE.
  3. The following sound changes took place:
  4. #/as/ > /ai/, /es/ > /ei/.
  5. #In unstressed syllables, /ai/ > /e/, /ei/ > /i/.
The first of these changes is almost certain, given examples like tu stai "you stand" < TŪ STĀS; Italian crai "tomorrow" < CRĀS; tu sei "you are" < TŪ *SES; sei "six" < SEX. Note also noi "we" < NŌS. The second sound change is cross-linguistically extremely common. Furthermore, it explains a number of otherwise unexplainable forms in Italian:
Indicative tu ami "you love" < TŪ AMĀS is unexpected; we would expect *tu ame. However, tu ame is in fact attested in Old Tuscan. In this case, it appears that -i was generalized as the universal tu ending at the expense of -e.