AdiJapan wrote:- 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.
AdiJapan wrote:
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”.