Romanian verbs

This article on Romanian verbs is related to the Romanian grammar and belongs to a series of articles on the Romanian language.Unlike English but similar to other Indo-European languages, verbs in Romanian are highly inflective. They conjugate according to mood, tense, voice, person and number. Aspect is not an independent feature in Romanian verbs. Also, gender is only distinct in adjective-like forms of the verb.

Verb paradigm

There are nine moods a verb can be put into, with five of them being personal — having a different form for each person — and four non-personal. As an example, the tables below show the verb "a face" (to do) at all moods, tenses, persons and numbers. Only positive forms in the active voice are given. The corresponding personal pronouns are not included; unlike English verbs, Romanian verbs generally have different forms for each person and number, so that pronouns are most often dropped or only used for emphasis. The English equivalents in the tables (one for each mood and tense) are only an approximative indication of the meaning.

Most verbs fall in the first conjugation group with another large number ending in "–i" (fourth group).

This classification only partially helps in identifying the correct conjugation pattern; each group is further split into smaller classes depending on the actual morphological processes that occur. For example, verbs "a cânta" (to sing) and "a lucra" (to work) both belong to the first conjugation group, but their indicative first person singular forms are "eu cânt" (I sing) and "eu lucrez" (I work), showing different conjugation mechanisms.

A more appropriate classification, which provides useful information on the actual conjugation pattern, groups all regular verbs into 11 conjugation classes, as shown below.

Nevertheless, even such a classification does not consider all possible sound alternances. A full classification, considering all combinations of sound changes and ending patterns, contains about seventy types, not including irregular verbs.

Irregular verbs

There are various kinds of irregularity, such as multiple radicals whose choice is conditioned phonetically or etymologically, and exceptional endings. The following is a list of the most frequent irregular verbs: "a avea" ("to have"), "a fi" ("to be"), "a vrea" ("to want"), "a sta" ("to sit", "stand", "remain"), "a da" ("to give"), "a azvârli" ("to throw"), "a lua" ("to take"), "a bea" ("to drink"), "a şti" ("to know"), "a usca" ("to dry"), "a continua" ("to continue"), "a mânca" ("to eat"), "a face" ("to do"), "a zice" ("to say"), "a duce " ("to carry").

References

*ro icon Maria Iliescu "et al.", "Vocabularul minimal al limbii române", Editura Didactică şi Pedagogică, 1981
*ro icon Valeria Guţu Romalo "et al.", "Gramatica limbii române", Editura Academiei Române, 2005

External links

* [http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/stand_alone_romanian.pdf Detailed Romanian grammar] with a good section on verbs (PDF, 183 pages, 4.6 MB)
* [http://www.verbix.com/languages/romanian.shtml Verbix.com: Romanian verbs conjugation] (Attention: Generally good output, but a few verbs are not conjugated correctly.)
* [http://www.castingsnet.com/dictionaries/ Castingsnet.com: Romanian ↔ English online dictionary] also providing a Romanian verb conjugator (few mistakes)