Romanian Nouns - Case

Case

Syntactically, Romanian nouns can be in any of five grammatical cases:

• nominative, when the noun is the subject;
• genitive, when the noun shows the possessor;
• dative, when the noun shows the receiver of an action;
• accusative, when the noun is the direct object, often also required by prepositions;
• vocative, when the noun shows the (usually animate) addressee of what is said.

The short definitions above are only an approximate indication of the actual usage. Here are some examples with the noun "băiat" (boy) in the various cases:

Morphologically, the five cases are expressed by giving the nouns three different forms. The nominative and the accusative share the same form, the distinction being made from the context, word order, or by the use of particular prepositions. Similarly, the genitive and the dative share the same form, distinguished syntactically or by the presence of possession articles when the nouns are in the genitive case. The vocative is less used than the other four, because it is limited to people, animals, or other things that can be addressed.

Comparatively, other Romance languages, although maintaining a syntactic distinction between cases, have reduced them to a single form and replaced morphological variation with the use of specific prepositions. Latin used to have up to seven cases, the Romanian five plus the ablative and the locative.

The case mark is always applied to the article, definite or indefinite, that determines the noun, and sometimes also to the noun itself. The indefinite article, like its English counterpart, is placed before the noun as a separate word, and has in Romanian different forms for the nominative/accusative and for the genitive/dative (the vocative cannot be determined by an indefinite article). On the other hand, the Romanian definite article is always appended as an ending (see enclitic). As the plural mark and the case mark are attached also at the end of the word, the declension becomes a complex process of combining all three endings: The definite article has special forms for the various cases and numbers, and is placed after the plural mark with possible phonetic changes to make the word easily pronounceable.

The table below gives the complete paradigm of the masculine noun "bou" (ox).