Re: Conlang Journal and being a fish

Thomas Leigh sikyal:

> > Goes to show that I haven't done anything serious with Romanian since
> > the early nineteen-nineties :-)  I like "â" being back.
>
> I like "â" too! Looks nicer in words like "când", "pâine"...
I much prefer |â| as well. Not only does it look nicer, but it avoids the
beginner's temptation to pronounce |cît| as [tS1t] (as I first did).

> > Is "sunt" pronounced [sunt], rather than [si-nt]? In that case it's
> not
> > only an *orthographic* reform, unless the pronunciation has changed
> > radically since 1982 (last time I consciously recall hearing a native
> > non-dialect* speaker say "I am").
>
> I've only ever heard [si-nt] (although I only know 3 Romanian speakers
> personally, so I don't know how much of a representative sample that
> is). I think it was just an orthographic reform, designed to bring the
> language closer to its roots or some such. It was based on etymological
> principles; the letter "î" remained in cases where it developed out of
> Latin "i", and was changed back to "â" in cases where it developed out
> of Latin "a".
The young native speakers that I met while I was there actually perceived
a different rule: |î| at the beginning of words, and |â| elsewhere. They
all agreed that the slang contraction pronounced [1s] (from "sunt") should
be spelled |îs|, although it doesn't exist in the standard language and so
has no "official" spelling. Also, they spell "to laugh" as |râde|, even
though it's from *ride.

> And in the present tense of the verb to be, it was
> replaced by u (sunt, suntem, suntet,i). The sound is always [i-] though,
> AFAIK.
Some of the educated people I met insisted that the words "should" be
pronounced with [u], reflecting the spelling. But no one (not even the
prescriptivists) actually does that.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/

"What are you, a dentist? Or a hippie?
Or some kind of hippie dentist?"
--Strong Bad (of Homestar Runner)