19 Comments
so adding ul at the end of a word makes it say the such as: the apple, the cat , the dog?
Yes. The Romanian -ul comes from the Latin demonstrative pronouns oll -e, -a, -ud added as a postposition to the determined word. It's the same story in Norwegian (en mann /a man/, mann-en /the man/) and Bulgarian/Macedonian (букъ /a beech tree/, букъ-тъ /the beech tree/ ).
@Hugoat21 - If it is masculine/neuter (i.e, masculine at singular), yes. If it is feminine it would be an A insted of UL (if it is ending in Ă it transforms in A, and A -> UA, but iI guess it is to early for that...).
Oh my! Are Romanian apples masculine, unlike French, Portuguese, Italian and Spanish? Later I found out that Romanian apples are neutral, but the masculine is used to refer to the tree. So, do neutral words use the "masculine" endings for plural?
Yeah they are. From what I can tell so far, if a word is masculine, you simply put "ul" after the word to make it "the".
Again, I have since found out that the Romanian word for apple, the fruit, is neuter but the same word is used in masculine for the tree. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/m%C4%83r
The neuter in Romanian is different from the neuter in German or English. Actually, a Romanian neuter noun HAS a gender but it is different in the singular and the plural form (masculine for singular, feminine for plural (so their "combination" is "neuter")).
As such, an apple is masculine but (more) apples are... feminine (and conjugated accordingly).
(many other nouns have gender not corresponding to their French (that I know to some extent) equivalent (German is more close, but also with some differences in gender of nouns from Romanian))
Măr - the fruit - is neuter (un măr / două mere).
Măr - the tree - is masculine (un măr / doi meri).
So definiteness in Romanian is represented by suffixing? That's certainly an interesting parallelism between Romanian and the North Germanic languages. I wonder how this feature evolved in Romanian, especially when the other Romance languages lack it (as far as I know). Time to do some research!
un mar actually means an apple as in one apple and marul means the apple! From ur Romanian girl ( i woz born there)
WHY WOULD YOU SAY MASCULINE OR FEMININE TO AN OBJECT IN THE FIRST PLACE ?!?!?!?!?!?!?! UGGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Grammatical gender can be daunting at first, but it does get easier with time. Keep practicing with the correct article, and eventually it'll be second nature (it worked for me in Spanish!). :)
English doesn't have different forms of indefinite articles ("a/an") and definite articles ("the") based on a word's gender. Even though there are some words that are gender specific (man vs. woman; actor vs. actress; hen vs. rooster), we use the same articles for either.
(P.S.: Old English actually had grammatical gender.)
