Re: OT: NATLANG: Romanian orthography question

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JS Bangs scripsit:


> Quoting Isaac Penzev:
> > Yes, you are right. Final _i_ indicates palatalization
>
> 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.
Any Romanian I heard IRL, was a Moldavian variant. It's deadly palatalized. And
_uniţi-vă_ was clearly without extra [i]. May it happen due to Cyrillic spelling
_униць-вэ_?

> 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.
And in the 20th century, in Cyrillics they used only _ы_ for both _â_ and _î_,
and _э_ for _ă_. In the earliest Romanian/Moldavian Cyrillic documents we also
find _ѫ_ ("big yus") for _în_. If I have time, I'll post this text to the List
later.

> 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.
That seems true AFAIK.

-- Yitzik

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