Try to explain to those who are learning Italian why the book in the plural it becomes the books, the table becomes the tables, but the egg does not become the eggs. Eggin fact, is the masculine singular form, while egg is the feminine plural. Still, the arm And the arms, the knee And the kneesand a fortified city it does not have walls but walls. How is it possible for a word to change gender in the plural? It is not a linguistic whim, but rather a residue that has roots in Latin and in a grammatical genre, the neuter that has not completely become extinct, but has remained in words that we use every day.
The culprit: a (nearly) extinct third gender
Today in Italian there are two genders, masculine and feminine. Latin, however, had three: in addition to these two there was the neuter, usually reserved for inanimate things. In the transition from Latin to Italian that third gender disappeared and most of the neutral nouns were “absorbed” by the masculine: Latin ferrum was neuter, and our iron today is a regular masculine, which in the plural becomes irons.
The peculiarity of the Latin neuter was precisely in the formation of the plural: many neuter nouns came out in the singular -um and in the plural in -to: Like this ovum in the singular e ova in the plural o brachium And brachia. As Treccani and a consultant from the Accademia della Crusca explain, when we say the eggs we are keeping the Latin neuter plural ending intact. And since in Italian the -to final is the typical termination of the feminine, that old form has been “reread” as feminine: that’s it an egg in the plural it becomes the eggs.
Not just eggs: when the same noun has two different plurals
Here the story becomes even more interesting, because many of these names have not completely given up the “regular” plural, but have retained two of them: a masculine one in -the and a female one in -to. Linguists call them superabundant names, and in most cases the two forms are not interchangeable because they have different meanings.
The textbook case, cited by Crusca, is that of body parts. Arm in fact it has two plurals: the arms they are those of our body, while the arms they are those of a crane, of a river, of an armchair. Eyelash in the plural it becomes eyelash when it refers to eye protection, but also eyelasheswhat refers to the edges of a road. Lip in the plural it becomes lip if referring to mouthbut lips if we talk about one wound; bone becomes bone when we think about the skeleton as a whole, bones when we talk about those we give to the dog or we talk about “cuttlefish bones”, to quote Eugenio Montale.
The same mechanism works even if we move outside the human body: I scream wants he screams for human cries, but you scream for animal sounds – and the same happens with cry: the he shouts of the crowd, i you shout of beasts.
The rule that emerges is that the feminine form in -to tends to indicate a unitary, collective whole, while the masculine one in -the indicates the elements taken one by one, or figurative meanings. The linguist Luca Serianni summarized these pairs as a series of recurring oppositions: abstract versus concrete, general versus particular, collective versus individual. In the case of brainthe brain are the soft matter inside the skull, while the brains they are the intelligent and those educated people who sometimes “escape” abroad.
Cases for imitation: walls and fingers
Some words have taken the feminine plural in -to even without ever having been neuter in Latin, as happened to wall: in Latin murus he was a very normal male, yet today we say walls (of the city, considered as a unitary belt) next to the walls (those at home, one by one). The same happens to finger: Latin digitus it was masculine, but we say the fingers of the hand as a whole, holding the say for cases where we list them individually (e.g. “little fingers”). The model of the neuter plural was so convenient for expressing the idea of ”together” that the language extended it by imitation to words that, originally, followed a completely different path.
There is another short circuit that concerns the noun prison: in the singular it is masculine, but in the plural it becomes feminine, le prisons. The explanation of the Crusca takes us back to ancient Italian, when Latin prison (masculine) had produced two forms, including the feminine one, the prisonperhaps by analogy with the synonym prison. Here it has come down to us in the feminine plural version.
