Number
Like all Indo-European languages, Romanian differentiates morphologically the singular and the plural number of nouns. Within the Romance languages, regarding the plural formation, Romanian falls in the group East from the La Spezia–Rimini Line together with Italian. As such, the plural is formed by the addition or change of the final vowel of the singular noun, very often accompanied by other vocalic and/or consonantic shifts in the noun stem, consonant deletion, and/or the interposition of other phonemes. Occasionally, the plural noun has the same form as the singular. A few nouns are defective by missing either the singular or the plural. Finally, some nouns can form the plural in several ways, depending on the meaning. To illustrate, here are just a few examples:
- simple vocalic addition: "elev" - "elevi" (school student);
- simple vocalic replacement: "mamă" - "mame" (mother);
- vocalic shift in the stem: "măr" - "mere" (apple);
- consonantic shift in the stem: "perete" - "pereţi" (wall);
- consonant deletion in the stem: "cal" - "cai" (horse);
- interposition of other phonemes: "cap" - "capete" (head);
- plural identical with singular: "unchi" - "unchi" (uncle);
- only singular: "rouă" (dew);
- only plural: "grâne" (grain/crops)
- multiple plural forms: "cap" - "capete" / "capi" / "capuri" (head / leader / cape);
Most Romanian plural nouns, in their nominative non-articulated forms, end in "i" with another large category ending in "e". Only some recent borrowings make up the very few exceptions to this rule, which seems to be a very stable feature of the language. Among the old Romanian nouns the only exception is "ou" /ˈow/ (egg), which due to its particular phonology makes the plural as "ouă" /ˈowə/. Comparatively, the phonetically similar adjective "nou" /ˈnow/ (new) forms its plural as "noi" /ˈnoj/ at all genders, but such a pattern could not be applied to "ou" since "oi" /oj/ was already the plural of the equally old noun "oaie" /ˈo̯aje/ (sheep).
Morphologically, the plural is built by using one of the following four endings: -i, -uri, -e, and -(e)le. Of these, the last one used to have few representatives, such as "stea" - "stele" (star) and "nuia" - "nuiele" (wicker). Subsequent borrowings enlarged this group, in particular a series of nouns from Turkish ending in stressed "a" which were assigned to the feminine gender (although Turkish nouns do not have gender).
Read more about this topic: Romanian Nouns
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