As a Romance language, Romanian shares many characteristics with its more distant relatives: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, etc.
This could be explained by a host of factors such as: relative isolation in the Balkans, possible pre-existence of identical grammatical structures in its substratum (as opposed to the substrata over which the other Romance languages developed), and existence of similar elements in the neighboring languages.
One Latin element that has survived in Romanian while having disappeared from other Romance languages is the morphological case differentiation in nouns.
The first Romanian grammar was Elementa linguae daco-romanae sive valachicae by Samuil Micu and Gheorghe Șincai, published in 1780.
In the plural, the ending -i corresponds generally to masculine nouns, whereas feminine and neuter nouns often end in -e. In synchronic terms, Romanian neuter nouns can also be analysed as "ambigeneric", that is as being masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural (see below)[9] and even in diachronic terms certain linguists have argued that this pattern, as well as that of case differentiation, was in a sense "re-invented" rather than a "direct" continuation of the Latin neuter.
Second declension nouns were reanalysed on their semantic characteristic (cervus >cerb "stag" remained masculine but campus >câmp "field" became neutral).
For example, nominative nouns without the definite article form the plural by adding one of the endings -i, -uri, -e, or -le.
The plural formation mechanism, often involving other changes in the word structure, is an intrinsic property of each noun and has to be learned together with it.
Morphologically, the nominative and the accusative are identical in nouns; similarly, the genitive and the dative share the same form (these pairs are distinct in the personal pronouns, however).
The vocative is less used as it is normally restricted to nouns designating people or things which are commonly addressed directly.
Similarly, if the noun is determined by the definite article (an enclitic in Romanian, see that section), the genitive-dative mark is added at the end of the noun together with the article, for example băiatul – băiatului ('the boy' – 'of/to the boy'), cartea – cărții ('the book' – 'of/to the book').
In usual genitival phrases such as numele trandafirului ('the name of the rose'), the genitive is only recognized by the specific ending (-lui in this example) and no other words are necessary.
However, in other situations, usually if the noun modified by the genitive attribute is indefinite, the genitival article is required, as for example in câteva opere ale scriitorului ('some of the writer's works').
An often cited peculiarity of Romanian, which it shares with Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian, is that, unlike all other Romance languages, the definite articles are usually attached to the end of the noun as enclitics (as in Albanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and North Germanic languages) instead of being placed in front (See Balkan sprachbund).
These enclitic definite articles are believed to have been formed, as in other Romance languages, from Latin demonstrative pronouns.
There are situations in Romanian when the noun in the genitive requires the presence of the so-called genitival (or possessive) article (see for example the section "Genitive" in "Romanian nouns"), somewhat similar to the English preposition of, for example in a map of China.
They can only fulfill the syntactical functions of attribute and of adjectival complement, which in Romanian is called nume predicativ (nominal predicative).
The feminine forms of plural pronouns are used only for groups of persons or items of exclusively female gender.
Otherwise, the stressed form is usually left out, the only exception being its usage for adding emphasis to the pronoun.
They are normally used for interaction with strangers, or by children talking to adults whom they don't know well, or to teachers as a sign of respect.
The polite pronouns all have the same forms in all cases (the only exception being dumneata, with the genitive/dative form of dumitale), and they exist only in the second and third person, due to their not being used to refer to oneself: A peculiarity of Romanian among Romance languages is the development of an intermediary level of politeness created with the aid of Old Romanian dânsul/dânsa, a variant of the personal pronoun el/ea, formed from the preposition de and the focal particle îns, itself from the Latin pronoun IPSE.
Pronumele relative și interogative, the two types of pronouns are identical in form but differ in usage.
The interrogative pronouns are usually written out with a question mark after them to differentiate them from their relative counterparts.
The most common indefinite pronouns are:[15] The most common negative pronouns are:[15] In Romanian grammar, unlike English, the words representing numbers are considered to form a distinct part of speech, called numeral (plural: numerale).
Examples: As in all Romance languages, Romanian verbs are inflected according to person, number, tense, mood, and voice.
Romanian verbs are traditionally categorized into four large conjugation groups depending on the ending in the infinitive mood.
In Romanian, adverbs usually determine verbs (but could also modify a clause or an entire sentence) by adding a qualitative description to the action.
Romanian adverbs are invariant and identical to the corresponding adjective in its masculine singular form.
The only prepositions that demand the Dative Case, are: grație (thanks to), datorită (through, with), mulțumită (thanks to), conform (as per), contrar (against), potrivit (according to), aidoma — archaic — (like, similar to), asemenea (such).
Those that denote sounds made by animals or objects are called onomatopee, a form similar to the English language onomatopoeia.