Romanian grammar
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Romanian (technically called Daco-Romanian) shares practically the same grammar and most of the vocabulary and phonological processes with the other three surviving Eastern Romance languages: Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian.
As a Romance language, Romanian shares many characteristics with its more distant relatives: Italian, French, Spanish, etc. However, many linguists seem to agree that Romanian has preserved most of the Latin grammar, which could be explained by a host of arguments such as: relative isolation in the Balkans, possible preexistence of identical grammatical structures in the Dacian or other substratum (as opposed to the Germanic and Celtic substrata that the other Romance languages developed in contact with), and existence of similar elements in the neighboring languages. Examples of Latin grammar elements that survived in Romanian while having disappeared from other Romance languages include: the retention of the neutral gender in nouns (albeit Romanian neuter is a mere combination of masculine and feminine) and the morphological case differentiation in nouns, reduced however to only three forms (nominative/accusative, genitive/dative, and vocative).
Many writings on Romanian grammar, in particular most of those published by the Romanian Academy (Academia Română), are prescriptive; the rules regarding plural formation, verb conjugation, word spelling and meanings, etc. are revised periodically to include new tendencies in the language.
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[edit] Nouns
- Main article: Romanian nouns
[edit] Gender
Romanian nouns are categorized into three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter, a feature preserved from Latin. Nouns which in their dictionary form (singular, nominative, with no article) end in a consonant or in vowel/semivowel u are mostly masculine or neuter; if they end in ă or a they are usually feminine. In the plural, ending i corresponds generally to masculine nouns, whereas feminine and neuter nouns often end in e. As there are many exceptions to these rules, each noun has to be learned together with its gender.
Examples:
- Masculine: om (man, human being), bou (ox), copac (tree);
- Neuter: drum (road), cadou (present, gift), exemplu (example);
- Feminine: bunică (grandmother), carte (book), cafea (coffee).
For nouns designating people and animals the grammatical gender can only be masculine or feminine, and is strictly determined by the biological sex, no matter the phonetics of the noun. For example nouns like tată (father) and popă (priest) are masculine as they refer to male people, although phonetically they are similar to a large category of feminine nouns. Compare for example the German nouns Kind (child) and Mädchen (girl) which are neuter.
For native speakers the general rule for determining a noun's gender relies on the "one-two" test, which consists in inflecting the noun to both the singular and the plural, together with the numbers one and two. Depending on the gender, the numbers will have different forms for each of the three genders, as illustrated below.
- Masculine: un om, doi oameni (one human being, two human beings), un iepure, doi iepuri (one rabbit, two rabbits). In this case both un and doi are in their masculine forms.
- Feminine: o fată, două fete (one girl, two girls), o pasăre, două păsări (one bird, two birds). In this case both o and două are in their feminine forms.
- Neuter: un corp, două corpuri (one body, two bodies), un sertar, două sertare (one drawer, two drawers). In this case un is in its masculine form while două is in its feminine form. This is the only case in which the two numbers have different genders.
Note: Romanian numbers generally have a single form regardless of the gender of the determined noun. Exceptions are the numbers un/o (one) doi/două (two) and all the numbers made up of two or more digits when the last digit is 1 or 2; these have masculine and feminine forms. Unlike languages such as Russian, in Romanian there is no neutral form for numbers, adjectives or other noun determiners.
[edit] Number
Romanian has two numbers: singular and plural. Morphologically the plural form is built by adding specific endings to the singular form. For example, nominative nouns without the definite article form the plural by adding one of the endings -i, -uri, -e, or -le. The plural formation mechanism, often involving other changes in the word structure, is an intrinsic property of each noun and has to be learned together with it.
Examples:
- -i: pom - pomi (tree), cal - cai (horse), tată - taţi (father), barcă - bărci (boat);
- -uri: tren - trenuri (train), treabă - treburi (job, task), cort - corturi (tent);
- -e: pai - paie (straw), masă - mese (table, meal), teatru - teatre (theater);
- -le: stea - stele (star), cafea - cafele (coffee), pijama - pijamale (pajama)
[edit] Case
Romanian has inherited from Latin five cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative. Morphologically the nominative and the accusative are identical; similarly the genitive and the dative share the same form. The vocative is less used as it is normally restricted to nouns designating people or other things we can address; additionally, nouns in the vocative often borrow the nominative form even when there is a distinct vocative form available.
The genitive-dative form is obtained from the nominative. If the noun is determined by an indefinite article then the genitive-dative mark is applied to the article, not to the noun, for example un băiat - unui băiat (a boy - of/to a boy); however, for feminine nouns the plural form is used even in the singular, for example o carte - unei cărţi (a book - of/to a book). Similarly, if the noun is determined by the definite article (enclitic in Romanian, see that section), the genitive-dative mark is added at the end of the noun together with the article, for example băiatul - băiatului (the boy - of/to the boy), cartea - cărţii (the book - of/to the book). Masculine proper names designating people form the genitive-dative by placing the article lui before the noun: lui Brâncuşi (of/to Brancusi); the same applies to feminine names only when they don't have a typically feminine ending: lui Carmen.
In usual genitival phrases such as numele trandafirului (the name of the rose), the genitive is only recognized by the specific ending (-lui in this example) and no other words are necessary. However, in other situations the genitival article is required, as for example in câteva opere ale scriitorului (some of the writer's works).
Romanian dative phrases have the particularity called clitic doubling similar to that in Spanish, in which the noun in the dative is doubled by a pronoun. The position of this pronoun in the sentence depends on the mood and tense of the verb. For example, in the sentence Le dau un cadou părinţilor (I give a present to [my] parents), the pronoun le doubles the noun părinţilor without bringing any additional information.
[edit] Articles
[edit] Definite article
An often cited peculiarity of Romanian is that it is the only Romance language where definite articles are attached to the end of the noun as enclitics (as in North Germanic languages) instead of in front. They are believed to have been formed, as in other Romance languages, from Latin demonstrative pronouns. The table below shows the generally accepted etymology of the Romanian definite article.
| Masculine | Feminine | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Nominative Accusative |
Lat. illum → Rom. -lu → -l, -le |
Lat. illi → Rom. -l'i → -i |
Lat. illa → Rom. -euă → -eau → -a |
Lat. illae → Rom. -le |
| Genitive Dative |
Lat. illui → Rom. -lui |
Lat. illorum → Rom. -lor |
Lat. illaei → Rom. -ei |
Lat. illorum → Rom. -lor |
Examples:
- Masculine nouns (singular, nominative/accusative):
- codru - codrul (forest - the forest);
- pom - pomul (tree - the tree);
- frate - fratele (brother - the brother);
- tată - tatăl (father - the father).
- Neuter nouns (singular, nominative/accusative):
- teatru - teatrul (theater - the theater);
- loc - locul (place - the place);
- Feminine nouns (singular, nominative/accusative):
- casă - casa (house - the house);
- floare - floarea (flower - the flower);
- cutie - cutia (box - the box);
- stea - steaua (star - the star);
[edit] Indefinite article
The Romanian indefinite article, unlike the definite article, is placed before the noun, and has likewise derived from Latin:
| Masculine | Feminine | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | Plural | Singular | Plural | |
| Nominative Accusative |
Lat. unum → Rom. un |
Lat. ne scio → Rom. nişte |
Lat. unam → Rom. o |
Lat. ne scio → Rom. nişte |
| Genitive Dative |
Lat. unius → Rom. unui |
Lat. unorum → Rom. unor |
Lat. unae → Rom. unei |
Lat. unorum → Rom. unor |
Nouns in the vocative case cannot be determined by an indefinite article.
Examples of indefinite article usage:
- Masculine:
- nominative/accusative: singular un copil (a child) - plural nişte copii ([some] children);
- genitive/dative: singular unui copil (of/to a child) - plural unor copii (of/to [some] children);
- Neuter:
- nominative/accusative: singular un loc (a place) - plural nişte locuri ([some] places);
- genitive/dative: singular unui loc (of/to a place) - plural unor locuri (of/to [some] places);
- Feminine:
- nominative/accusative: singular o masă (a table) - plural nişte mese ([some] tables);
- genitive/dative: singular unei mese (of/to a table) - plural unor mese (of/to [some] tables);
[edit] Article appended to adjectives
When a noun is determined by an adjective, the normal word order is noun + adjective, and the article (definite or indefinite) is appended to the noun. However, the word order adjective + noun is also possible (and mostly used for emphasis on the adjective), in which pattern the article and any case marker that may be present is applied to the adjective instead. Examples follow.
- Noun + adjective (normal order):
- un student bun (a good student);
- studentul bun (the good student);
- unui student bun (to a good student);
- studentului bun (to the good student).
- Adjective + noun (reversed order):
- un bun student (a good student);
- bunul student (the good student);
- unui bun student (to a good student);
- bunului student (to the good student).
[edit] Genitival article
There are situations in Romanian when the noun in the genitive requires the presence of the so-called genitival (or possessive) article (see for example the section "Genitive" in "Romanian nouns"), somewhat similar to the English preposition of, for example in a map of China. In Romanian this becomes o hartă a Chinei, where "a" is the genitival article. The table below shows how the genitival articles depend on gender and number.
| Masculine | Neuter | Feminine | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singular | al | a | |
| Plural | ai | ale | |
The genitival article also has genitive/dative forms, which are used only with a possessive pronoun. They are: alui (m. sg.), alei (f. sg.), and alor (pl., both genders). These forms are rarely used—especially the singular ones—and the sentences are usually rephrased to avoid them.
[edit] Adjectives
Romanian adjectives determine the quality of things. They always define a noun or pronoun, numeral or copulative verb, so they can only fulfill the syntactical functions of attribute and predicative denominator
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Masculine | frumos | frumoşi | |
| Feminine | frumoasă | frumoase | |
- The number of equal forms an adjective takes in the singular are called endings, terminaţii (in this case 2)
- The number of equal forms an adjective takes both in the singular and the plural are called flexionary forms, forme flexionare (in this case 4)
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Masculine | verde | verzi | |
| Feminine | verde | verzi | |
- In this case we have 1 ending and 2 flexionary forms.
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Masculine | oranj | oranj | |
| Feminine | oranj | oranj | |
- In this case we have 1 ending and 1 flexionary form. If it is so, we call the adjective invariable, otherwise it is variable
Syntactical functions of the adjective can be:
- Attribute, in case it defines a noun, pronoun or numeral. (Ex: The blond boy is here; Băiatul blond este aici)
- Predicative Denominator, in case it defines a copulative verb. (Ex: The boy is blond ; Băiatul este blond)
An adjective also can have stages of comparison.
- Positive Stage (frumos, beautiful)
- Comparative Stage
- Of superiority (mai frumos, more beautiful)
- Of equality (la fel de frumos, as beautiful as)
- Of inferiority (mai puţin frumos, less beautiful)
- Superlative Stage
- Relative
- Of superiority (cel mai frumos, the most beautiful)
- Of inferiority (cel mai puţin frumos, the least beautiful)
- Absolute (foarte frumos, very beautiful)
- Relative
[edit] Pronouns
There are eight personal pronouns in Romanian:
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First person | eu | noi | |
| Second person | tu | voi | |
| Third person | Masc. | el | ei |
| Fem. | ea | ele | |
The pronouns above are those in the nominative case. They are usually omitted in Romanian unless required to disambiguate the meaning of a sentence. Usually, the verb ending provides information about the subject.
The accusative forms of the pronouns come in two forms: a stressed and an unstressed form:
| Singular | Plural | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stressed | Unstressed | Stressed | Unstressed | ||
| First person | (pe) mine | mă | (pe) noi | ne | |
| Second person | (pe) tine | te | (pe) voi | vă | |
| Third person | Masc. | (pe) el | îl | (pe) ei | îi |
| Fem. | (pe) ea | o | (pe) ele | le | |
The dative forms of the pronouns:
| Singular | Plural | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stressed | Unstressed | Stressed | Unstressed | ||
| First person | mie | îmi | nouă | ne | |
| Second person | ţie | îţi | vouă | vă | |
| Third person | Masc. | lui | îi | lor | le |
| Fem. | ei | îi | lor | le | |
The genitive forms of the pronouns:
| Singular | Plural | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| First person | meu | nostru | |
| Second person | tău | vostru | |
| Third person | Masc. | lui | lor |
| Fem. | ei | ||
The possessive pronouns are formed by using the articles al for masculine/neuter singular, a for feminine singular, ale for feminine/neuter plural or ai for masculine plural in front of the corresponding genitive form (example: al meu ; a mea ; ai mei ; ale mele = mine).
[edit] Reflexive pronouns
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| First person | mă | ne |
| Second person | te | vă |
| Third person | se | |
[edit] Numbers
- Main article: Romanian numbers.
In Romanian grammar, unlike English, the words representing numbers are considered to form a distinct part of speech, called numeral (plural: numerale). Examples:
- Cardinal
- Proper: doi (two);
- Multiplicative: îndoit (double);
- Collective: amândoi (both);
- Distributive: câte doi (in twos);
- Fractional: doime (half);
- Adverbial: de două ori (twice);
- Ordinal: al doilea (the second).
[edit] Verbs
- Main article: Romanian verbs.
As in all Romance languages, Romanian verbs are highly inflected according to person, number, tense, mood, voice. The usual word order in sentences is SVO. Romanian verbs are categorized into four large conjugation groups depending on the ending in the infinitive mood. The actual conjugation patterns for each group are multiple.
- First conjugation: verbs ending in –a, such as a da (to give), a cânta (to sing), including those ending in hiatus ea such as in a crea (to create);
- Second conjugation: verbs ending in –ea (only when ea is a diphthong), such as a putea (can), a cădea (to fall);
- Third conjugation: verbs ending in –e, such as a vinde (to sell), a crede (to believe);
- Fourth conjugation: verbs ending in –i or –î, such as a veni (to come), a urî (to hate).
[edit] Adverbs
[edit] Prepositions
Prepositions before a noun determines their case.
- For Nominative there are no prepositions.
- For Accusative we have:
- pe + Direct Object (for names)
- cu, de la, and other... + Indirect Object
- la, and other + Circumstantial Objects
- pentru + Attribute
- For Dative we have only:
- graţie
- datorită
- mulţumită
- conform
- contrar
- potrivit
- aidoma
- asemenea
- For Genitive there are all the others.
[edit] Conjunctions
[edit] Interjections
In Romanian there are many interjections, and they are commonly used.Those that denote sounds made by animals or objects are called onomatopee.Below are shown some interjections and their approximative equivalent in English.
Vai! - Oh My God!
Ah!
Oh!/Oauuuu! - WOW!
Of! - say it when something is bothering you
Hmmm! - say it when you're thinking
Onomatopee
lipa-lipa (the sound of a duck's steps)
ţuşti (a sound designating a quick move)
mor-mor (the sound of a bear)
cu-cu-ri-gu (the sound of a cock)
hau-hau/ham-ham (the sound of a dog)
miauuu (the sound of a cat)
cip-cirip (sound of birds singing)
muuuu (the sound of a cow)
Interjectons can take functions as parts of a sentence.e.g.:
Mi-am luat o fustă hmm-hmm.
I just bought a very cool dress. *here hmm-hmm has the meaning of cool, and is an attribute*
[edit] External links
- Very detailed Romanian grammar (PDF; 183 pages; 4.6 MB)
- Verbix: Romanian verbs conjugation (Attention: Generally good output, but a few verbs are not conjugated correctly.)
- Romanian <-> English online dictionary and Romanian verb conjugator (few mistakes)
- Romanian online dictionary and lemmatizer
[edit] References
- James E. Augerot, "Romanian / Limba română: A Course in Modern Romanian," Center for Romanian Studies (2000) ISBN 973-98392-0-7.
- Laura Daniliuc and Radu Daniliuc, "Descriptive Romanian Grammar: An Outline," Lincom Europa, München, Germany (2000) ISBN 3-89586-637-7.
- Gheorghe Doca, "Romanian language. Vol. I: Essential Structures," Ars Docendi, Bucharest, Romania (1999).
- Gheorghe Doca, "Romanian language. Vol. II: Morpho-Syntactic and Lexical Structures," Ars Docendi, Bucharest, Romania (2000).
- (Romanian) Liana Pop, Victoria Moldovan (eds), "Gramatica limbii române / Grammaire du roumain / Romanian Grammar," Echinox, Cluj-Napoca, Romania (1997).
- (Romanian) Maria Aldea, "Valori referenţiale generate de articolul definit şi de cel indefinit românesc în determinarea substantivului. Studiu de caz: Scrisoarea lui Neacşu (1521)" (available online)
