Re: OT: NATLANG: Romanian orthography question

Mark J. Reed wrote:
>
> So I assume there is an etymological distinction between <â> and <î>, and
that
> at one time they represented two distinct sounds?
>
That's my impression.  Or perhaps the same Latin vowel in different
environments.  It's also my impression that â (schwa) is never stressed,
whereas î can be, but I could be wrong.

There has been frequent discussion on Cybalist of the Latin > Rom. sound
change rules for some time (and often repeated, since the recipient-- a
native speaker!-- seems to have no idea how his language developed :-((  ).
There may even be a summary  of the rules (by Miguel Carrasquer Vidal)
posted in the Files section of the Cybalist yahoogroup site.  By the way,
there has also been mention of a "romlang" site, but I've never looked for
it; probably another yahoogroup...........(not to be confused with
"romconlang")

Sidebar-- years ago on a stay in Rome, I used to listed to Radio Vaticana,
who gave the Religious News of the Day in a multitude of languages (along
with good classical music).  There was always one newscast that we could
just sort-of understand-- it was obviously a Romance language, and finally
by process of elimination we figured out that it was Romanian.

Reply