by I learnt a new word at the weekend: dușman, meaning “enemy”. It’s Turkish in origin and pronounced “douche man”. Duș means “shower”, just as the similar-sounding word does in French and German, and puns abound on Romanian websites. That guy who fixes your shower is hostile! In English you could say “don’t be a dușman, you’re my friend” or something. I’m not very good at this: douche(bag) isn’t in my normal lexicon. If you like puns and word games, learning a new language is great; it opens up a whole new world of words, of anagrams and permutations.
I’ve spent some time on words for “this” and “that”, “these” and “those”. In English we have just those four words. In Romanian there are sixteen. Here goes:
acest băiat or băiatul acesta – this boy
acel băiat or băiatul acela – that boy
această pictură or pictura aceasta – this painting
acea pictură or pictura aceea – that painting
acești tigri or tigrii aceștia – these tigers
acei tigri or tigrii aceia – those tigers
aceste cafele or cafelele acestea – these coffees
acele cafele or cafelele acelea – those coffees
So there are different words for masculine and feminine, and you mustn’t forget that neuter nouns are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural. This takes us from four words to eight. But you can either put this/that/these/those before the noun, which is more emphatic, or after the noun. If you go for the latter option you need to articulate the noun, while the this/that/these/those word changes slightly, normally getting an extra “a”, and so the word count doubles again. And even that isn’t all (I lied when I said sixteen). Even words like “this” and “that” suffer case changes, so while “this boy” is acest băiat, “this boy’s life” requires the genitive case: viața acestui băiat. Yet another word, and there are plenty of these other words. Doamne, this is hard! I don’t expect to remember much of this.
A word about cafelele above. Coffee is cafea, which becomes cafele in the plural and the nice soothing cafelele when you want to say “the coffees”. But if that sounds soothing, how about lalea, meaning tulip. For tulips you say lalele, and for “the tulips”, yep, you guessed it, lalelele. It’s hard to stop saying (or typing) that word.
