Nouns 1: gender, indefinite and definite articles
Well, this will be our first look at Romanian grammar. Let’s just get into it.
So, nouns. As you will learn Romanian, you will learn a lot of nouns, especially in the beginning, so, I thought, why not make a post about what I consider the hardest basic things for a foreigner?
As you guys may know, Romanian is a Romance language, and like its siblings, Romanian is a gendered language. However, we have a particularity, which we kept from Latin: we have not two, but three genders, just like German: masculine, feminine and neuter. Now, you might be wondering, “how can I tell what gender a noun is?“
First, you should know that some nouns have a gender that makes sense with the word, like bărbat (man), which is masculine, and femeie (woman), which is feminine, but then you have words like dulap (wardrobe), which is neuter, câine (dog), which is masculine, and pisică (cat), which is feminine. You can tell the gender of a noun by using its indefinite article, and counting, though this is more of an advanced technique used by native speakers, but I feel like it should still be mentioned.
Now, for masculine and feminine nouns there are two separate indefinite articles: un, for masculine, and o, for feminine. The indefinite article is basically the a or an that you put in English before a noun. For example: un bărbat, o femeie (a man, a woman) you can clearly tell which is masculine and which is feminine. The problem comes with neuter, as the indefinite article is un, the same one that’s used for masculine. How do you tell those two apart? Again, in Romanian, we count the nouns to tell their gender.
We don’t count too much, just up to two, since the word for two, doi, takes different forms depending on the gender of the noun. We use doi for masculine, and două for feminine. For example: doi bărbați, două femei (two men, two women) you can still see which is masculine and which is feminine. Now, neuter nouns are the weird ones, because they use the word două, like feminine nouns. This means that neuter uses masculine for singular, and feminine for plural.
For now, this is what I want you guys to know, as telling nouns’ gender by terminations is trickier and there are exceptions. If you are learning any nouns, I suggest learning or writing down their gender, as it’s important for adjectives and other stuff.
The definite article is the the you place before nouns. This is weirder in Romanian because, for one, it is glued to the end of the word. If you were to do this in English, you wouldn’t say “the man”, but “manthe”. Another weird thing is that it is not only affected by gender, but also by the case of the noun and whether it is singular or plural. And even in the same gender, you can find words with different definite articles. The following words are all masculine:
Bărbat -> Bărbatul (man -> the man)
Frate -> Fratele (brother -> the brother)
Tată -> Tatăl (father -> the father)
Popă -> Popa (priest -> the priest)
As you can see, all the definite articles are different. For now, I want you to know just the basics of how these three things work, because they are quite complicated to explain in one post, and plus, it’s better to present languages with the base idea, then build on that idea with harder concepts.
If you have any questions, things that are not clear or suggestions, by all means, ask and suggest away. I am always open to feedback. Otherwise, see you next time!
romaincrisis
andulkaphoto
discoholicmusic
annaxmalina
