[1] 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).
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.
In this category obvious examples are proper names of people, or nouns designating nationality, profession, etc.
Nouns referring to animals and birds are always specific to their biological gender, and often occur in pairs the same way as we have cow and bull in English.
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.
The tables below show the plural formation modes for nouns according to their gender, in the non-articulated nominative/accusative case.
Despite many plural endings changing the number of syllables in the nouns, the word stress does not generally shift.
The only exceptions are a few irregular nouns such as: "soră" /ˈsorə/ - "surori" /suˈrorʲ/ (sister) and, "noră" /ˈnorə/ - "nurori" /nuˈrorʲ/ (daughter-in-law).
Syntactically, Romanian nouns can be in any of five grammatical cases: The short definitions above are only an approximate indication of the actual usage.
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.
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.
When these forms are changed for the genitive/dative case, the definite article becomes -lui for masculine and neuter nouns and -i for feminine.
To obtain these forms, the definite article for masculine and neuter simply affix the ending -ui after consonant l (after removing vowel e where it exists).
In the case of feminine nouns, the genitive/dative is derived not from the singular but from the plural non-articulated forms, by adding a semivocalic -i at the end.
Additionally, some nouns can have two versions of vocative which can express slightly different attitudes toward the person (animal, thing, etc.)
The genitive/dative forms require a special mention in the case of proper nouns representing people's names.
For men's names, the inflection is replaced by placing the article lui before the noun, as a separate word.
Here are some examples: Genitive usually indicates possession or belonging, but is also used to show origin and others kinds of relationship.
In such a construction, if the possessed ("balonul", the balloon) has the definite article attached to it—the most usual situation—and the possessor ("copilului", of the child) comes immediately after, no other words are necessary to express the genitival relationship.
The dative is used for the indirect object, that is, the noun representing the person/object that receives the action indicated by the verb.
The dative is required by a particular series of verbs, many of which express the general idea of giving, hence the name.
Exception to this rule make the imperative and the gerund, which require the clitic form bound at the end of the verb.
In poetry, archaic or regional speech, or invectives, the order of the compound verb elements can switch, and with them the position of the doubling pronoun will change.
Examples: A particularity of Romanian is that the direct object is marked in certain situations by the preposition pe, which in such constructions loses its original meaning (on, above).