RE: Romanian plural forms

[Laszlo, Jenia]

Yes, thank you for the explanation! We did check and for informal language, we 
were told it would be OK to drop "de". So that's where we went astray.

-----Original Message-----
From: address@hidden [mailto:address@hidden On Behalf Of John Cowan
Sent: Thursday, October 28, 2010 5:54 PM
To: Bruno Haible
Cc: Laszlo, Jenia; address@hidden; address@hidden; Khalsa, Jitka
Subject: Re: Romanian plural forms

On Thu, Oct 28, 2010 at 6:10 PM, Bruno Haible <address@hidden> wrote:

>> Your page specifies that there are multiple plural forms for Romanian.
>> However, after checking with several Romanian linguists we work with,
>> we came to the conclusion that in fact, Romanian has one singular form
>> and one plural form.
>>
>> I was wondering about the sources of your information?

It's indeed true that Romanian has only singular and plural nouns.
However, sufficiently large numbers in Romanian (as in many languages,
but not English) are themselves nouns, so one cannot say "un milion
dolari" = "a million dollars" but must say "un milion de dolari" = "a
million of dollars".  This is a feature of all the Romance languages,
and was true in English as well until about 1850.  It is not the case
in any Germanic or Slavic language that I know of.

I do not know exactly where the cutoff point in Romanian is between
true numbers and numerical nouns.