Am nevoie să exersez scrisul în română :)

[Gina]

Voi încerca să ţin minte. E corect?

...

Is this correct?

[AdiJapan]

Voi încerca să ţin minte. E corect?

Da.

[Gina]

Mulţumesc. Am o întrebare: cum se ştie când se foloseşte „de” iar când se foloseşte genitivul?

...

Thanks. I have a question: how do you know when to use "de" and when to use the genitive?

[AdiJapan]

Am o întrebare: cum se ştie când se foloseşte „de” iar când se foloseşte genitivul?

The question is too wide. Generally the genitive is used to express possession, while de is for other types of relationship between nouns. But give me a concrete example.

I think you overused the reflexive there: cum se știe cînd se folosește. I'd say cum știu cînd se folosește. The idea is not to confuse the listener by using the same reflexive structure with two distinct subjects.

Something is wrong with that iar. We use only și in that position. I wonder what the rule might be, but I guess iar can be used only with statements, not with questions. Think of iar as meaning „whereas”: El ascultă muzică, iar ea gătește. „He listens to music, whereas she cooks.” (In English it sounds more formal, but otherwise the meaning is the same.) You wouldn't ask in English a question like this: How do you know when to use "de", whereas when to use the genitive?

[Gina]

Mulţumesc

[oSofos]

- Diferența între oameni e mare. --- wrong
- Diferența dintre oameni e mare. --- correct

Similarly:

- Florile în casă înfloresc rar. --- wrong
- Florile din casă înfloresc rar. --- corect

- Întîlnirea la ora zece s-a anulat. --- wrong
- Întîlnirea de la ora zece s-a anulat. --- correct

Adi, I'm sorry to butt in this nice conversation but I feel compelled to add something here. What you say here about the use of the genitival/partitive form let's say for this prepositions is only true if the words determined by said prepositions in turn determine the noun in the sentence and not the verb. If they determine the verb the simple, non-partitive forms or prepositions should be used.

Diferența dintre oameni e mare. -- is a correct sentence meaning "The difference between/among people is great."

Diferența între oameni e mare. -- also a correct sentence, but meaning "Difference is great between/among people." The key here is that this sentence can be rephrased as "Diferența e mare între oameni."

Word order in Romanian is really free and such differences indicate whether the noun governed by a certain preposition determines the subject as an attributive or the verb as an object/complement.

In the first sentence "dintre oameni" is an attributive determining the subject "diferența". In the second sentence "între oameni" is a prepositional object of place (let's call it a locative complement) determining the predicate "e mare".

Similarly "Florile în casă înfloresc rar." is a perfectly fine sentence having the same meaning with "Florile înfloresc rar în casă." (i.e., The flowers blossom rarely in the house) Indeed, this sentence has a different meaning from "Florile din casă înfloresc rar." ("The flowers in the house blossom rarely.")

In the first case, if you move the locative complement (governed by the non-partitive preposition) right after subjet (which it does NOT determine) and before the verb (which it DOES determine), you bring it into focus, you add topicality to it. Of course, in indo-european languages topicality is not absolute, i.e., the complement/object does not become the only topic of the sentence, but one does call attention to it nonetheless.

Interestingly enough, one can't successfully do this to all complements. For example, using natural intonation, the following sentence is highly incorrect:

"Întîlnirea la ora zece s-a anulat." - indeed incorrect if using normal neutral intonation. Neutral enunciative intonation here turns out to be a grammatical marker indicating that after the subject ("Întîlnirea") an attributive determining it should follow.

However, if you radically change intonation putting an unusually high amount of stress on the word "zece", [the stress contour of the whole sentence rising sharply with the word "zece" then falling towards the end]

then the sentence "Întîlnirea la ora zece s-a anulat." ("The meeting was cancelled at 10 o' clock")suddenly becomes correct as a phrase where "la ora zece" is a complement determining the verb, having indeed the unusual effect that "la ora zece" becomes hyper topicalised -- i.e. the sole focus of the sentence. Additionally in this case even with such topicalisation, the natural pattern of speech would call for the word order "La ora zece s-a anulat întîlnirea". But assuming that the phrase is adversative (i.e. someone were claiming that the meeting was cancelled at 9 and a half, and then the other person says that it's actually at 10 that the meeting got cancelled), well assuming such adversative nature of the sentence, I would say it does occur naturally even with the Subject in the initial position.

If we were to use "Întîlnirea de la ora zece s-a anulat." the meaning is "The meeting at 10 o' clock, i.e. that was supposed to be at 10, was cancelled." Here "de la ora zece" is an attributive and determines "Întîlnirea".

OK, sorry for posting this kind of... technical grammatical little thingie here, but even spoken Romanian does present such features, where one word, seemingly incorrect, is in fact determining something else (thus correct) but is "sitting in another place" within the sentence, because word order in Romanian is much freer than in English for example.

Something is wrong with that iar. We use only și in that position. I wonder what the rule might be, but I guess iar can be used only with statements, not with questions.

Actually here the rule you've stated before cannot apply because "când..." and "când..." are two subordinate completive clauses. If they were main clauses, you could connect them with "iar", as in the following example.

“Când se foloseşte “de” structura este perifrasitcă, iar când se foloseşte genitivul structura este sintetică” -- as you've stated, "iar" means "and" with an implied secondary meaning of "whereas"
("When "de" is used the structure is periphrastic, and/whereas when the genitive is used the structure is synthetic.")

However in “Cum ştiu când se foloseşte “de” şi când se foloseşte genitivul?” ("How do I know when "de" is used and when the genitive is used?") you have one main clause "Cum ştiu?" ("How do I know?") and two completive subordinates "când se foloseşte “de”" and "când se foloseşte genitivul". Both these subordinates are completive and are introduced by "când".

So what do I know? "This and that", "when this" and "when that". While logically there is adversity between these sentences, however because they're both subordinate completives there is no adversative meaning in their correlation whatsoever, because the conjunction "şi" only correlates the words introducing the subordinate clauses ("when" and "when"), not with the whole clauses that said words subordinate. So while between the meaning of the words after the when's there is adversity, there is no adversity between the two when's.

“Ştiu când vine şi când pleacă.” vs. “Când vine e trist, iar când pleacă e fericit.”
("I know when he comes and when he goes." vs. "When he comes he is sad, and/whereas when he goes he is happy.")

Another example:
“Văd că uneori tace şi uneori vorbeşte.” vs. “El uneori tace, iar alteori vorbeşte.”
(I see that he is sometimes silent and [that he] sometimes speaks." vs. "He is sometimes silent and/but he sometimes speaks." )

–- although I know plenty of Romanians who would mess up the correlation between the completives in the first example here, mainly because many feel the conjunction refers to the adverbs “uneori” (or “alteori”), whereas, the correlating conjuntion “şi” actually refers to the subordinating conjunction “că”.

I’m sure you’ve heard before, Adi structures like this:

*“Văd că uneori tace iar alteori vorbeşte” (wrong because here we have a second, unxepressed conjunction “că”, which is there nonetheless).

Correct form: “Văd că uneori tace şi [că] uneori / alteori vorbeşte.” Again, while this is the only correct form here because of the second “că” which can remain unwritten (and because the conjunction correlates the two că's), many, many Romanians will mess it up and use “iar”.

[AdiJapan]

What you say here about the use of the genitival/partitive form let's say for this prepositions is only true if the words determined by said prepositions in turn determine the noun in the sentence and not the verb. If they determine the verb the simple, non-partitive forms or prepositions should be used.

I agree. What I was trying was to correct this sentence: Nu înţeleg diferenţa între „înainte" în sentinţele „Am văzut filmul înainte" şi „Am auzit „iar" înainte". Here it is clear that între introduces an attribute, and therefore it is incorrect. I wasn't trying to make an exhaustive description of how prepositions are to be used. Gina has just started learning Romanian, so I was correcting her mistakes as they came.

Also I think I was a bit harsh in saying that those wordings were "correct" and "wrong". "Unnatural" might have been the right word there. I keep seeing Romanian texts where the "wrong" preposition is used, and sometimes I even find myself using them in less obvious situations. I'm pretty sure it's an English influence.

*“Văd că uneori tace iar alteori vorbeşte” (wrong because here we have a second, unxepressed conjunction “că”, which is there nonetheless).

I simply cannot find any fault with that iar. To me it sounds totally natural. Also, I wouldn't say there is an unexpressed second că. The first că introduces both coordinate clauses, as a whole. I'm not sure that is conventional grammar, it's just how I feel it.

I agree, however, that the rule about iar I thought I had guessed was wrong or incomplete. I still don't know what the rule should look like, or even whether there is a simple rule.

[oSofos]

In *“Văd că uneori tace iar alteori vorbeşte”, the fault is that because there are two verbs and therefore two predicates, it is absolutely clear there are two subordinates not one. Every subordinate must be introduced by something, in this case by a conjunction (i.e. "Văd uneori tace" is not correct, it needs the subordinative conjunction "că"). The first "că" can't introduce both subordinates; the second "că" is simply omitted because we can deduce it's there from the presence of the first one. But that doesn't mean the first one can introduce both subordinates, it just means the second one was omitted because we can deduce it from the first.

And when you have two subordinates that need copulative coordinating, the coordinating conjunction can only coordinate whatever has introduced those subordinate clauses (be it a cubordinating conjunction or something else); the coordinating conjunction between the subordinate clauses can't coordinate words that are within those subordinates, otherwise that conjunction would be itself part of one or the other of the subordinate clauses.

Moreover, "uneori" and "alteori" are necessarily in two separate clauses, because they each determine two separate predicates. Thus there is no way that they can be coordinated.

But as you have stated, many Romanians who haven't dabbled in formal syntax would mess it up by using "iar" because the adversity between "uneori" and "alteori" is quite apparent. So, if it so used, is it really incorrect? I have no idea on that rather philosophical question.

As for what you said about the influence that our English usage can exert on us, can you believe that I have only found out a few days ago that the word "oracol" in Romanian can not refer to the person making the prediction? In English "oracle" can be the prophecy, the person making it and the temple wherein it is made. In Romanian, apparently, "oracol" can only be the temple or the prophecy itself, not the person who makes it. I simply had no idea. Not to mention how many times I have the tendency to say "scrie jos" instead of "notează".I guess it's not helping that I'm reading a lot of technical material on linguistics and the grammars of the different languages I'm learning in English.

And of course, I do have the tendency to use long or short infinitives where normally we would use the subjunctive, but I guess that most educated romanians have a higher frequency of infinitive usage compared to most of the population. I guess that our education system, infused by "Latinism", you know, as an ideology, promotes that, sometimes even being unaware of it. I attended a quite elite, quite well spoken of highschool and most of my teachers had a tendency of using the infinitive more. Now I'm a student of classics (having previously studied history). You can imagine that by the time the edcucational system is done with me, my infinitive usage might seem quite unnatural to the fish vendor at the market.

[AdiJapan]

The first "că" can't introduce both subordinates;

That may be your analysis, your interpretation. But I don't see why one couldn't accept that the two subordinates can form a solid group, and that group can be introduced by one că as a whole. This may not be what conventional grammar tells us, but it certainly describes how I perceive that sentence.

What you're doing there is declaring a sentence as grammatically incorrect, with the argument that the grammar requires the subordinates to do what you say they are doing. But grammar itself has been built by observing the way we speak. If a sentence sounds right, but contradicts the grammar, than the grammar should be corrected to reflect the facts, not the other way round.

This reminds me the problem of the agreement in sentences with majoritatea, such as Majoritatea copiilor sînt bruneți. Blindly applying the conventional grammar requires another agreement, Majoritatea copiilor este brunetă, but nobody speaks like that, which means that the particular grammatical analysis leading to such wording is wrong.

But as you have stated, many Romanians who haven't dabbled in formal syntax would mess it up [...].

Sorry for being blunt, but I don't believe people need to dabble in formal syntax to be able to speak naturally. People have been speaking for many millennia before formal syntax came to be. The first purpose of grammatical theory is to describe, not to prescribe, how we speak. If it fails to describe facts, then the theory needs to be fixed, not the facts.