by Numbers. When you move to a new country, you really need to have numbers down pat in whatever language they speak. And it’s no good just learning them up to 10 or 20 or 100 or whatever your book or YouTube video goes up to. When you’re living in a new country, your accommodation costs are bound to run into the thousands, no matter what currency you’re dealing with. In some places even a chocolate bar will set you back a few grand. (I’ve figured out a way to help people remember the difference between hundred and thousand in English, by the way, even if they don’t have different-sized cats. Thousand, thanks to the long “ou” sound, is more drawn out when you say it.)
In French, you say four-twenties-ten-seven for 97. In German, you say seven-and-ninety. Romanian doesn’t have anything that off-the-wall, but it has its quirks nonetheless. Up to ten, Romanian numbers look pretty similar to those of other Romance languages. Of note (to me) are patru (4) and opt (8). The ‘c’ or ‘qu’ of Latin has morphed into, of all things, a ‘p’. Heaven knows why. You see the same phenomenon in other common words such as apă (water) and lapte (milk). Beyond ten, Romanian numbers diverge from their French and Italian counterparts, and they get long. The word for 15 is cincisprezece; 17 is șaptesprezece. They’re a mouthful to me, and clearly to many Romanians too – in informal speech the –sprezece ending becomes –șpe, hence cinșpe and șapteșpe.
Between twenty and one hundred, numbers are easy enough to form: 39 is treizeci și nouă, literally “three tens and nine”. But again, Romanians often get lazy, and treizeci și nouă is mashed together to become something like treișnouă. You will hear, and have to recognise, both the formal (long) and informal (short) forms, in just about every environment. When I’m speaking, I feel most comfortable using the short forms up to 20 and the long forms beyond that. These formal and informal numbers are the first real oddity.
Hundred is sută (plural sute); thousand is mie (plural mii). Both sută and mie are feminine, so for 1100 you say “o mie o sută” (one thousand one hundred; unlike in English you never say eleven hundred). Nothing too complicated there.
But here comes the second quirk. Gender. Romanian has different forms for ‘one’ and ‘two’ depending on whether the thing you’re talking about is masculine or feminine (and if it’s neuter, Romanian’s third gender, you use the masculine form for ‘one’ but the feminine for ‘two’). This can become a problem, especially when ordering food. Are langoși (deep-fried flatbread thingies) masculine or feminine? How about gogoși (which are a bit like doughnuts)? Part of the issue is that when you see a sign for these mysterious food items, they’re shown in the plural and you can’t necessarily tell what the singular is. As it happens, the singular form of langoși is simply langoș, which is masculine, but the singular of gogoși is gogoasă, which is feminine. One way of avoiding the gender problem is to order at least three of everything (but don’t go too crazy – if you order twelve of something, or a higher number ending in 1 or 2, you’ll run into the same difficulty). If you’re just talking about a number (e.g. platform two), rather than a quantity, you always use the masculine form.
The third quirk is that if you’re talking about a quantity, you sometimes have to put de (of) between the number and the noun. The rule is that you don’t use de for numbers up to 19, or for larger numbers that end in anything from 01 to 19. Otherwise you have to use de.
7 oaks – 7 stejari
39 steps – 39 de pași
76 trombones – 76 de tromboane
101 Dalmatians – 101 dalmațieni
10,000 maniacs – 10,000 de maniaci
A new apartment block, containing 108 apartamente (note, no de) according to the sign, is being built almost next door to this hotel.
In Cluj I saw this sign, promoting Walking Month (English – aaarghh!) which showed the number of steps to various landmarks in the city:
Note the de (or lack of de) in the above sign depending on the last two digits.
Staying in the beautiful city of Cluj, but changing tack slightly, I saw this Latin inscription on a church. Why are some of the letters tall? Hmmm. It looks like some kind of puzzle. Well, the tall letters are all Roman numerals, aren’t they? And if I add the M and D and L and various C’s and V’s and I’s, I get, let me see, 1782. I think. That would seem to be when the church was built (or finished; they take a while).
Just around the corner I saw this one. It’s a bit harder to read:
1744? Note that in both of these inscriptions, the letter V (conveniently) represents both U and V. I couldn’t find any other Roman numeral puzzles besides these two. These puzzles are known as chronograms and are quite common in Central and Eastern Europe, including Transylvania.
