by The Rugby World Cup final is almost upon us again, but unlike last time when the All Blacks just squeaked by France and I was on the edge of my seat, I’m finding it really hard to care. I’m writing this to the sound of Robbie Williams’ Let Me Entertain You – they’re rehearsing for tomorrow night’s gig at the Basin which I live pretty much right next to.
A lot of languages have two genders. Some, like German, have three. English has somehow (and I’m grateful for this) evolved to have just one. So how many has Romanian got? Well, kinda two, kinda three. Officially it’s three: masculine, feminine and neuter, but the neuter gender behaves as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. Just like in French, the indefinite article (when you want to talk about a thing, or one thing) has a masculine and a feminine form (un/o), but the number two also does (doi/două). So for neuter nouns, which switch gender when they team up, you use the masculine “one” (un) but the feminine “two” (două). As for definite articles, when you want to talk about the something, well they don’t really exist in Romanian. There’s no “the” word. Instead you tack something on the end (and there are rules for what you tack on the end and when). Then to make things plural, you change the ending, or the middle, or both… Things get complicated quickly.
Masculine example
A boy: un băiat
Two boys: doi băieți
The boy: băiatul
The boys: băieții
See what I mean?
Feminine example
A girl: o fată
Two girls: două fete
The girl: fata
The girls: fetele
Diacritics matter! Here you’ve got two different words, fată and fata. There’s also față, which means “face”, and becomes fața when you want to say “the face”. And făta, făța and fâță are all words too. They’re all pronounced differently. Wonderful isn’t it?
A French bloke I flatted with in Peterborough in 2003 has just had a son to go with his daughter. He wasn’t sure whether to call him Gaétan or Gaëtan. Both options work in French, but he was having a hard time deciding which accent (the acute or the tréma) his son would be saddled with for the rest of his life. These little dots and squiggles matter.
Neuter example
A chair: un scaun
Two chairs: două scaune
The chair: scaunul
The chairs: scaunele
This one is actually fairly simple.
Another feminine example
A sheep: o oaie
Two sheep: două oi
The sheep (singular): oaia
The sheep (plural): oile
Riiight. Of course “sheep” is weird in English too, but I think it’s weirder in Romanian! While we add an ‘n’ to avoid saying “a apple”, they seem to manage fine with “o oaie”. So many vowels! (But no U of course. A sheep could be some kind of cryptic emoji meaning “missing U”.) They count sheep in Romanian just like we do. I might cover numbers in another post.
Another neuter example
An egg: un ou
Two eggs: două ouă
The egg: oul
The eggs: ouăle
In some languages “egg” can get a bit scrambled so I was intrigued to see what might happen here. In French the F of “œuf” (singular) is pronounced but it’s silent in “œufs”. I don’t know of any other French word that behaves like that. In Italian it’s one of the very few words that is masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, in other words it’s neuter! I’m not surprised that it’s neuter in Romanian too.
I’ve completely ignored cases here. The case of a noun is what the noun “does” in a sentence, and it can mean you have to make further changes to the word beyond what I’ve shown above. I might talk about that some other time.
