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Help with Romanian noun forms. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| nikolic993 Diglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 3781 days ago 106 posts - 205 votes  Speaks: Serbian*, English Studies: Italian, Mandarin, Romanian, Persian | Message 1 of 5 20 February 2015 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I ran into these two sentences today in my Assimil book:
4- Vrei o picătură de rom în ceai? 12- Așteaptă puțin, ceaiul e gata în zece minute. Why does "ceai" change into "ceaiul"? Same for "lup" "lupul". It remains in the singular, but what does the added suffix signify? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| daristani Senior Member United States Joined 7145 days ago 752 posts - 1661 votes Studies: Uzbek | Message 2 of 5 20 February 2015 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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If I'm not mistaken, the -ul is the postponed masculine article, with "ceaiul" meaning "the tea".
But per my understanding, unmodified objects of prepositions don't take the article, so that "in the tea" would be still be "în ceai", as you wrote. You may already be aware of it, but just in case not, a very complete reference grammar of Romanian can be downloaded for free here: http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/mainframe.jsp?nLanguageID =5 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Rniks Newbie United States Joined 3705 days ago 36 posts - 47 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Romanian | Message 3 of 5 21 February 2015 at 1:05am | IP Logged | ||
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Daristani is right here, 'ul' as a suffix is the masculine (also the neuter) form of the singular definite article. As far
as I know, daristani is also right in stating that the definite article is not used for unmodified nouns following a preposition- with the exception of nouns that follow the preposition 'cu.' Masculine and neuter nouns in the singular generally take 'ul' as an ending, while feminine nouns follow a pattern that changes the ending to 'a.' Thus, carte becomes cartea, fată to fata, and so on. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| nikolic993 Diglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 3781 days ago 106 posts - 205 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English Studies: Italian, Mandarin, Romanian, Persian | Message 4 of 5 21 February 2015 at 1:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you both very much.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 5 21 February 2015 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||
This is the definite article. It's not usually used with prepositions with the exception of "cu". The postponed article is a particularity of Balkan languages in general. Also, words that end in -u simply take -l. The u is not strictly considered part of the article, it's just a euphonic vowel to make the word sound nicer. Edited by tarvos on 21 February 2015 at 12:51pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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