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- Topic: Romanian >
- "Domnii sunt din colectiv."
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could a native english speaker please explain me what is the meaning of this sentence ? what do you call a collective ? is it an association of people who are working for beneficiency ( for exemple) or something else ? Learning a foreign language with an english basis has its pros and contras. The pros are that it helps me polishing it and the contras are that sometimes I don't know how to translate it into French or Spanish or even German, especially when Romanian uses the same words as english, like here. Thanks.
Wikipedia says that it is "a cooperative enterprise e.g. 'the anarchist collective and bookshop'". Or I suppose a collective farm. It is not a word in common usage. I'm English and I had to look it up!
thanks. it is what I thought but it is also not very much in use in French or maybe for something I am not familiar with. The communist collective farm is something familiar.
Kollektiv in several Scandinavian languages means commune, as a group of people who live together and share a common ideology. Could it be this? I wonder if a Romanian native speaker can help us with this.
The rule is that Romanian prepositions do not generally require the following noun to have a definite article with the exception of the preposition of "cu." I remember this rule by thinking to myself that all Romanian preposition are super strong -- they are so strong in fact, that they already have the definite article "the" baked into them (with the exception of poor little "cu" which is only two letters and so, is so weak that he couldn't take the extra weight of carrying around a definite article with him, poor little guy). So, for example, to say, "I go to through the kitchen," you would say, "merg prin bucăterie" because the definite article "the" is already baked into the Romanian preposition "prin."
Of course, this doesn't explain the fact that in many cases, when someone is referring to something truly definite, the definite article appears to be used with non-"cu" prepositions in spite of this so-called rule described above. Also, I fully realize that there are other two letter prepositions other than "cu" that don't behave like "cu" in this regard -- this is just my silly way of remembering this rule, not that the number of letters is dispositive as to whether the preposition is "strong" in this sense or not.
My way of thinking about this is probably all wrong from a linguistic/grammatical point of view, but sometimes it helps to come up with silly ways to remember stuff like this.
I'm English too and as we don't use the term I can't know what the Romanians might mean. I think that it is translated as union elsewhere. Which is a trade organisation for workers to represent and defend them against an employer- something we would not call a collective
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Even now, thirty years after the revolution, my friends still refer to the old State farms as the 'colectiv'. Prior to communism, there were thousands of tiny farmsteads which were seen as inefficient. Under communism the government seized the land, and centralised production in the villages into just one or two State run farms. The former landowners now worked in these aggregated farms as employees of the 'collective' - the idea being that their combined or 'collective' effort would produce more output than lots of individuals all working for themselves.
