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As I have encountered a lot, some Romanian infinitives ending in -a (-a ending group) stick to the "-ez" suffix for indicative present tense conjugation. I know basically and normally we should eliminate last vowel of the verb stem and conjugate using each person's normal suffixes in order to conjugate; but what about those additional suffixes such as "-ez" for -a ending verbs? For example:

dirija (to direct) : 1-dirijez 2-dirijezi 3-dirijeză 4-dirijăm 5-dirijați 6-dirijeză

or

salva (to save, preserve, rescue) : 1-salvez 2-salvezi 3-salvează 4-salvăm 5-salvați 6-salvează

But for some others there would be only the verb stem without -ez suffix:

regreta (to regret): 1-regret 2-regreți 3-regretă 4-regretăm 5-regretați 6-regretă

săruta (to kiss smb.'s cheek): 1- sărut 2-săruți 3-sărută 4-sărutăm 5-sărutați 6-sărută

Does someone know when to add "-ez" suffix and when to not?

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  • My instinct says that for example -uta all follow the same pattern, but from most infinitives there is not way to predict the pattern reliably. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_verbs#Conjugation_groups. Some of the inconsistency is because many of the words are actually mediaeval or modern loans, they are not just first conjugation verbs inherited from Latin.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Commented Jul 28, 2018 at 9:16
  • "because many of the words are actually medieval or modern loans"; Then how we would understand that if they are modern loans or medieval?
    – Armin
    Commented Jul 29, 2018 at 10:07
  • It sounds like you are looking for an etymological dictionary of Rumanian.
    – jlawler
    Commented Jul 29, 2018 at 16:47
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    You can make some good guesses for some, based on knowledge of French and of patterns of transformations of words inherited directly from Latin into Romanian. I would say regreta, dirija, salva and saluta are obvious. But not for others. In any case if you are learning the language it seems easier to just memorise the patterns for the common verbs than to explicitly memorise all that other information in hope of deducing them.
    – Adam Bittlingmayer
    Commented Jul 30, 2018 at 9:51
  • @A.M.Bittlingmayer: That was my initial suspicion as well, but it just doesn't add up. Even among the given examples, the first three are all neologisms, but obviously belong to different classes. Furthermore, decreta, which rhymes with regreta, and is also neologic, has decretez, whereas the latter has regret, as has already been mentioned. To add to the confusion, the native inset(os)a has inset(os)ez.
    – Lucian
    Commented Aug 10, 2018 at 5:16

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