Re: OT: NATLANG: Romanian orthography question

Quoting Isaac Penzev <isaacp@...>:

> On Monday, November 24, 2003 2:53 PM Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
>
> > On Mon, Nov 24, 2003 at 10:12:48AM +0200, Isaac Penzev wrote:
> > > Yes, it is an affricate. And it may be palatalised too: _unit,i-vã_
> > > [u"n_jits)_jv@] 'unite!'
> >
> > What happened to the <i>?  Is it just there to indicate the
> palatalization?
>
> Yes, you are right. Final _i_ indicates palatalization, if it is not stressed
> or doesn't go after a vowel. E.g. _luni_ [lun_j] 'Monday', _cinci_
> [tS)_jintS)_j] 'five', but _a vorbi_ [avor"b_ji] 'to speak', _copii_
> [ko"p_jij] 'children'.
However, in this case the /i/ isn't final either in pronunciation or in
spelling, so it is actually pronounced. _Unit,i-vã_ should in fact be
[u'nitsiv@]. Also, while there is some palatalization before front vowels in
Romanian it is much, much less prominent than in Slavic langs, so saying
that "vorbi" is [vor'b_ji] is rather misleading, as it sounds to my ear as
simply [vor'bi]. Romanian palatalization is in general much less pronounced
than in Slavic.


> > So I assume there is an etymological distinction between <â> and <î>, and
> that
> > at one time they represented two distinct sounds?
>
> Surely the distinction is etymogically motivated, but I don't know if there
> ever
> were distinct sounds in those places. I took only an introductory course :)
There was never a time when _â_ and _î_ were distinct sounds, unless you go all
the way back to Latin where the former was generally /a/ and the latter /i/.
Both /a/ and /i/ merged into /1/ at a very early date, and remain merged to
this day. When Romanian was first written in the Latin alphabet, two characters
were theoretically used based on the source of the word, _â_ being used when it
came from Latin /a/, and _î_ being used when it came from Latin /i/ and in
Slavic loans. This was never really standardized, though, so various reforms
and regularizations were done throughout the 20th century. The most recent one,
in 1990, made it so that the two are pure allographs: _î_ is used as the first
or last character of a word, and _â_ elsewhere.


--
JS Bangs
jaspax@glossopoesis.org

"We're counting on our virtues
   Because it's too hard to count the dead."
     -Jason Webley

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