Timeline for So many Romanian words seem to end in "u"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
7 events
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| Nov 22, 2022 at 12:44 | comment | added | cipricus |
In fact Romanian has many nouns that end in u (ou, bou, leu, râu, fiu,grâu, lucru), which get the -l article, while the ones ending in a consonant get the -ul article. I tend to think that structurally only one article it's at play here: either -ul is the real one, which simply loses the u in contact with u-ending nouns (to avoid double-u), or -l is, which gets a u to avoid consonant+l ending.
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| Jul 13, 2021 at 14:39 | comment | added | cipricus |
ul is reduced to u not only commonly and informally, but because otherwise it would sound wrong. Because this fact is not clearly enunciated as a rule in school, the written language induced people to start pronouncing more and more the final L, but even so the normal speech tends to de-emphasize L in favor of U as much as possible.
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| Nov 19, 2019 at 11:29 | comment | added | cipricus |
That definite article is not always ul, but also just l. One could say that the essential form is l, because u is added only when the noun ends with a consonant (because the musicality of the language, the facility of pronunciation demands it). On the other hand, as most such nouns do end in a consonant, the ul article is the most frequent.
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| Nov 19, 2019 at 11:24 | comment | added | cipricus | @hippietrail - considering pronunciation is the only way of making sense of the question, otherwise the question would have been why so many words end in "L". | |
| Aug 2, 2013 at 18:04 | comment | added | Bogdan Lataianu | Commonly and informally in speaking and writing, though yes, more common in speaking | |
| Aug 2, 2013 at 6:12 | comment | added | hippietrail | I think the OP was talking about vocabulary and orthography whereas this answer is specifically about pronunciation. I'm still voting it up though because the original question was too brief and thus allows this as a good answer. | |
| Aug 1, 2013 at 2:15 | history | answered | Bogdan Lataianu | CC BY-SA 3.0 |