MORPHOLOGY OF THE EGGS, AND WHAT IT CAN TELL US ABOUT ROMANIAN NOMINAL INFLECTION KIM SCHULTE University of Exeter 1. Introduction In several Romance languages, the plural of reflexes of Latin ŌVUM ‘egg’ shows some degree of morphological and morpho-syntactic irregularity. After a brief presentation of the diachronic process that has led to this situation, this study focuses specifically on the genitive plural of Romanian ou ‘egg’, examining present-day variation between two forms; it is argued that what can be observed is a symptom of a currently ongoing, more general process of reanalysis of nominal inflectional morphology in Romanian. 2. Latin neuter nouns in Romance The disappearance of the Latin neuter gender across the Romance-speaking world 1 was caused, at least in part, by phonological changes (erosion of word-final consonants, loss of the opposition between long and short vowels) that increased the degree of syncretism already present in the Classical Latin declensional paradigms. Most neuter nouns became formally indistinguishable from masculine nouns in the nominative and accusative singular (-US, -UM > /-o/) and were therefore generally incorporated into the masculine category, while for those ending in a consonant or -E “the new gender appears to have been arbitrarily assigned” (Penny, 1991:107). Polinsky & van Everbroeck (2003:362-363) show that the decrease of neuter nouns was a gradual process that was already well underway in Late Latin. In the plural, on the other hand, Latin neuter inflections differ significantly from their masculine and feminine counterparts, consistently ending in -A in the nominative and accusative plural, as exemplified in Table 1. 1 Some Romance varieties do preserve traces of a neuter gender (cf. e.g. Lausberg, 1956:26-27).