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( Romanian nouns)
This article on Romanian nouns is related to the Romanian grammar and belongs to a series of articles on the Romanian language. It describes the morphology of the noun in this language, and includes details about its declension according to number, case, and application of the definite article, all of which depend on specific gender and plural formation rules. An intrinsic property of Romanian nouns, as in all Romance languages, is their gender. However, while most Romance languages have only two genders, masculine and feminine, Romanian has a third one, the neuter. In Latin, the neuter is a separate gender, requiring all determiners to have three distinct forms, such as the adjective bona, bonus, bonum (meaning good). Comparatively, Romanian neuter is a combination of the other two genders. More specifically, in Romanian, neuter nouns behave in the singular as masculine nouns and in the plural as feminine nouns. As such, all noun determiners and all pronouns only have two possible gender-specific forms instead of three. From this perspective, one can say that in Romanian there are really just two genders, masculine and feminine, and the category labeled as neuter contains nouns whose gender switches with the number. Depending on gender, otherwise similar nouns will inflect differently. For example, the nouns "câine" (dog, compare Latin canis) and "pâine" (bread, compare Latin panis) have phonetically identical endings in the main form (nominative singular), but the former is a masculine noun, while the latter is feminine. For this reason, when inflected they behave in very different manners Also, the gender of a noun determines the morphology of most determiners, such as articles, adjectives, demonstratives, numerals. The two nouns taken as examples above will give
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