Negative imperative

[heterochronismenos]

Hi
Today I heard a Romanian lady saying to her kid "nu fă așa". Wasn't she supposed to say "nu face așa"? Is that a common colloquialism extended to other verbs?
Thanks.

 

[danielstan]

Hi
Today I heard a Romanian lady saying to her kid "nu fă așa". Wasn't she supposed to say "nu face așa"? Is that a common colloquialism extended to other verbs?
Thanks.

You are right, it is a mistake (common colloquialism, as you say)

Romanian has different ways of forming the afirmative imperative and the negative one.
Details here: Imperativul. Sau despre fii! / nu fi!, zi! / nu zice!, fă! / nu face!. Again

Short:
- most verbs (but not all of them) have for the afirmative imperative of the 2nd person singular
the same form as for the indicative 3rd person singular
- for the negative imperative, 2nd person singular the rule is:
"nu (negation) + infinitive"

For the case in question, the infinitive verb is "face" (facere which lost the termination -re over the centuries),
thus the correct form is:
Nu face așa!

Note:
I am not sure, but seems to me that Italian has the same rule for the negative imperative.
Example:
Non toccare!

 

[heterochronismenos]

I’d like to know how frequent is this mistake among native speakers of Romanian? Does it occur in other verbs too and to what extent?
Thank you again for your time!

 

[danielstan]

I don't think this is a frequent mistake among native speakers. In fact I remember hearing such wrong form, but not so frequent to be a pattern of the low educated people or some other social group.
In other verbs, also I don't recall to be hearing negative imperative taking the form of the affirmative one.
Maybe I heard "Nu zi!" instead of the correct form "Nu zice!"...
I guess that intuitively Romanians feel that negative is different in form than affirmative imperative (not a rule, but valid in 90% cases), so while speaking and searching the right word they usually say the correct form.

Also the fact that the negative imperative form is preceded by the negation "nu" offers the speaker a short delay to search in his mind the correct form, avoiding the error.
I mean: if the pattern of the negative imperative would be "fă nu așa!" or "zice nu asta!" I guess the errors in speech would be more frequent.