"cuius" and "whose", Pluralization

[David L. White]

> Isn't cuius cognate to English <whose>?

        Not with a special extended ending like that, no.  The Germanic
forms seem to go back to /ques/, which is hardly surprising.  I suppose an
extra vowel, later lost due to initial stress, might be posited, but there
would seem to be no particuar reason.
        What happened in Latin, I think, was that the regular form (at least
by analogy) would have been either /quis/ or /qui/, depending on whether
C-stems or V-stems were taken as the model, but either of these would have
been ambiguous.  This probably has much to do with why the longer form in
/-ius/ was seized upon and pressed into service as the new and improved
genitive.  This is not to deny that some sort of modeling on Etruscan may
also have played a role:  it is possible for a development to have more than
one cause after all.

        This all reminds me of something:  some of the Latin relative forms
in the singular (nominative) seem like they could in origin be plurals.  A
similar phenomenon is seemingly seen in Old English "hwa", which has the
regular plural ending (for pronouns).  Since interrogatives and indefinites
tend to be (get this) a little indefinite with regard to number (and
gender), and to overlap semantically with relatives, perhaps the singular
forms seen in Latin are intrusions of the plural indefinites into singular
relatives.  Presumably a very basic word like "quis" was too
well-established to be ousted by any such developments.

Dr. David L. White