The Romanian pluperfect

The Romanian pluperfect, or mai-mult-ca-perfectul, is a one-word indicative tense for an action completed before another past reference point: Când am ajuns, ei plecaseră deja. (When I arrived, they had already left.)

How do you form the Romanian pluperfect?

Start from the verb's lexical stem, add the stem element used by its conjugation pattern, then add -se- and one of the six pluperfect endings. Unlike the English past perfect, Romanian does not use an auxiliary such as a avea plus a participle. The infinitive and conjugation group help you organize the patterns; they do not predict every stem, so check the conjugation groups and learn irregular verbs individually.

1. Identify the verb and its relevant past-participle relationship. For example, a tăcea has the participle tăcut, while a merge has mers.
2. Build the tense base: lucr-a-se-, cit-i-se-, hotăr-â-se-, tăc-u-se-, or the alternant mers-e-se- in the representative patterns below.
3. Attach the person ending. In careful Standard Romanian, learn the first-person plural with the visible -răm ending: lucraserăm.

What comes before -se-?

The element before -se- depends on the verb pattern. For -a, -i, and -î verbs, the traditional pattern is -a-se-, -i-se-, and -â-se-. Many -ea verbs and some -e verbs use -u-se-, often alongside a past participle in -ut. Some -e verbs with a participle in -s show -se-se-. These are useful formation families, not a license to generate an unfamiliar verb without checking its attested forms.

What do the representative paradigms look like?

Which irregular stems must you learn separately?

Irregular verbs still take the same six personal endings, but the material before those endings can change substantially. The most useful core forms are the two high-frequency verbs a fi and a avea, followed by common verbs such as a da, a lua, a sta, a bea, a vrea, and a ști. Treat the forms below as lexical bases, not as rules for every verb with a similar infinitive.

How do negation and clitics work?

Put nu immediately before the finite pluperfect form: Nu plecasem încă. (I had not left yet.) With a verb beginning in a- or î-, rapid speech may show optional elision, as in nu avusesem or n-avusesem. The full form is the neutral choice for careful writing.

• An unstressed object clitic normally comes before the verb: Îl văzusem înainte de ședință. (I had seen him before the meeting.)
• After nu, the clitic stays with the verb: Nu-l văzusem înainte de ședință. (I had not seen him before the meeting.)
• Adverbs can sit next to the verb or elsewhere in the clause: O întâlnisem deja. (I had already met her.) The clitic and the tense remain separate from any English-style auxiliary.

When do you use the pluperfect?

Use it to locate a completed past event before another past event, state, or understood reference point. The later event is often in the perfect compus, but the anchor can also be an imperfect scene or a context already established.

• Time expressions such as deja (already), până atunci (until then), înainte de (before), and înainte să (before) often make the anterior relation easy to see, but the tense can establish that relation without one of them.
• Compare Când am ajuns, ea a plecat (When I arrived, she left) with Când am ajuns, ea plecase (When I arrived, she had left). The pluperfect puts her departure before my arrival.
• The second event does not have to be stated in the same sentence. A form such as Aflasem deja totul. (I had already found out everything.) can refer back to a past situation supplied by the surrounding narrative.

How common is it in contemporary Romanian?

The pluperfect is a standard Romanian tense, not an obsolete form, but DOOM3 describes it as relatively rare in current communication and especially frequent in learned historical or memoir writing. Expect it in narrative and careful prose, and learn to recognize it in speech; in ordinary conversation, the perfect compus is more frequent for past events generally.

Mistakes to avoid

• Do not form the neutral Romanian pluperfect by mechanically putting aveam or am before a participle: use one finite word such as plecasem or plecaseră.
• For noi, learn the careful Standard Romanian form citiserăm. DOOM3 specifically recommends the visible -ră- augment rather than the shorter forms found in some texts.
• Do not assume that every verb ending in -e uses the same base. Compare cerusem from a cere with mersesem from a merge.
• Do not confuse anteriority with any past event. Use the compound past for a completed event without this earlier-than-another-past contrast, and the imperfect for a background, habitual, or ongoing past meaning when that is the point.
• Keep the full negative form in careful writing: nu avusesem is neutral; n-avusesem represents optional rapid-speech elision.