Re: OT: NATLANG: Romanian orthography question

At 15:15 24.11.2003, Isaac Penzev wrote:

> > 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 :) We
>may never know it, since for long time Romanian used Cyrillics where they
>didn't
>distinguish _â_ and _î_!
AFAIK, which is not very far, some instances of /i\/
derive from Vulgar Latin *a, while others derive from
*i and/or other vowels.  That's the reason they introduced
the graphemic distinction when they switched from Cyrillic
to Latin alphabet in the mid 19th century.  Not very smart
IMNSHO, since they could have followed the Polish model
and used _y_ for /i\/.  AFAIK _y_ is not otherwise used in
Romanian orthography.

/BP 8^)
--
B.Philip Jonsson mailto:melrochX@melroch.se (delete X)
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