Talk:Romanian nouns

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Origin of Romanian neuter
Is the Romanian neuter gender derived / descended from the Latin neuter? Or is it a separate, independent development? Stated another way, can Romanian truly be said to have "retained" the Latin neuter gender? Richwales 02:56, 10 August 2007 (UTC)


 * That's an interesting issue, I hope somebody more knowledgeable will respond, from what I know the grammar features are pretty stable in a language (more so than words), and especially they don't appear after they are lost, so one could assume (using a kind of Occam razor) if a feature is present in a language that it remained there from the parent language rather than disappearing and then being re-imported from another language. Hope a linguist will respond because this is probable well settled issue in specialty literature and there are probably good examples pertaining to Latin and Romanian. -- AdrianTM 03:13, 10 August 2007 (UTC)


 * An interesting question indeed. From what I see here, it seems that the Romanian neuter did in fact descend from Latin. There seems to exist a similar word class in Italian, although much less populated than in Romanian. For example the Italian noun uovo (egg) behaves as a masculine noun in the singular (uovo buono) and as a feminine one in the plural (uova buone), just like its Romanian counterpart, the neuter noun ou (ou bun, ouă bune). In this particular case the Latin etymon ovum (pl. ova) is also neuter. Vestigial forms of the neuter exist in other Romance languages as well. In this situation it is hard to believe that the Romanian neuter could be a local independent development, although why Romanian has so many neuter nouns remains a good question. — Adi Japan   ☎  07:43, 10 August 2007 (UTC)