"The horses do not have water."

Translation: Caii nu au apă.

[Sandra_Moellney]

Is there a rule for when you can shorten the word "nu"? Like in "Caii n-au apă." If I had to take a wild guess, I'd say only when the following verb starts with a vowel?

[AndrewsSuzy]

Looks like it's both "nu au" or n-au" - here we read the former, and the answer given to the English has the latter? Hoping a Romanian native speaker will tell us!

[wyqtor]

Both are correct. 'N-au' tends to be found more in informal speech.

[wyqtor]

You should only use this contraction for verbs that starts with 'a-'.