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- "Antrenorul vorbește cu porta…
"Antrenorul vorbește cu portarul în a doua repriză a meciului."
Translation:The coach speaks with the goal-keeper in the second half of the game.
17 Comments
Another user explained this rule of the extra "a" article in another comment. I would post the link to that post, but I can't find the link. Here is what I copied into my Romanian "cheat sheet:"
Both Definiteness AND Adjacency required to avoid use of article al/ai/a/ale: In other words, the article is avoided when the possessed noun has both a definite article AND the possessed noun is placed right before the possessor.
If either of these two conditions is not met, then the possessive article appears:
o carte a copilului (lit. "a book of the child") (the possessed noun does not have a definite article); cartea frumoasă a copilului (lit. "the beautiful book of the child") (the possessed noun is not placed right before the possessor); o carte frumoasă a copilului (lit. "a beautiful book of the child") (the possessed noun does not have a definite article and is not placed right before the possessor).
My apologies for not linking to the original author of these examples as I did not save the link to his wonderful post.
621
So if you were to say "fata mea frumoasa" that would be okay... what about "Fată frumoasa a mea"? Is that also correct?
no, i am romanian and i do not mean it is wrong... but it does not sound good (sorry for my english) :)
It's the possessive article. It means that the half belongs to the game. Similar to "of"in the English translation.
- 1889
When does one need to use the possessive article in addition to the genitive definite?
I'm not entirely sure what the rule is. I think in this case it's because the noun determined ("repriza") has another attribute ("a doua") in addition to our genitive noun. Without that you wouldn't need the possessive article:
"Antrenorul vorbește cu portarul în repriza meciului" (doesn't make as much sense as a sentence, just illustrating the point).
You also need it when the noun is part of the predicate:
"Casa este a profesorului" ("The house belongs to the teacher"). In this case the predicate is "este a profesorului"
Compare that to the situation where "profesorului" is just an attribute of the subject:
"Casa profesorului este veche" ("The professor's house is old"). No article there.
- 1686
"Antrenorul vorbește cu portarul în pauza meciului", now it makes sense (just to give a better example, because you said it didn't make sense - but it did, actually your sentence was quite ok, it is just our brain playing tricks with teh semantics, because we know the match has two rounds, but the sentence was perfectly right in romanian)
- 1889
That actually makes it a lot clearer. Since these are all masculine nouns, I assume this possessive article does not vary by the gender of the noun it governs.
- 1686
it does vary. Here all nouns are feminine :) (repriza, casa). Do not confuse the owner with the owned object. Compare: Câinele profesorului este roșu. Câinele roșu este al profesorului. Cărțile sunt ale mele. Banii sunt ai tăi.
- 1686
It is not "a second" "a", it is just a coincidence that there is one more "a" from the numeral. Compare: ”antrenorul vorbește cu portarul in camera roșie a stadionului”. As Ovidiu said, this is how the possessive is formed in Romanian language.
- 1889
There is a second a. I specified the second a, because I did not understand its grammatical function within the sentence. When asking such a question, I try always to use a simple description of whether the item is in the word or sentence, so that the person who provides me with the answer can simply describe the grammatical function from a blank slate, as happened so helpfully here.
- 1686
Well, sorry, bad English on my side. From this perspective you are totally right, the sentence contains two "a" words :) and you were referring to the second one.
- 675
On another topic, in Britisn English, the equivalent to coach in football (soccer) would be "the manager" (refused and reported), although "the trainer", who works under the manager, was accepted,
- 621
I'm fairly certain the manager and the coach can be, and often are, two separate jobs though?
- 675
OK, I perhaps worded it a bit badly (probably through ignorance). Yes, in British football they are two separate jobs. But in Romanian Wikipedia, for example, Jürgen Klopp is given as "atrenor" of Liverpool FC. In British English he's "the manager", although it's true that he's helped by a team of coaches, probably what I was calling "trainers".
However, this course uses American English, where the equivalent of the British "manager" appears to be "head coach", or often, I think, just "coach". This would lead me to suspect that we could be talking about the main guy here, in AmE "(head) coach", in BrE "manager". So, talking specifically about football, I think the BrE variant, "manager", should also be accepted.
