Romanian alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the Latin alphabet and consists of 28 letters:
A, a (a); Ă, ă (ă); Â, â (â din a); B, b (be), C, c (ce); D, d (de), E, e (e); F, f (fe / ef); G, g (ghe / ge); H, h (ha / haş); I, i (i); Î, î (î din i); J, j (je), K, k (ka de la kilogram), L, l (le / el); M, m (me / em); N, n (ne / en); O, o (o); P, p (pe); R, r, (re / er); S, s (se / es); Ș, ș (Șe); T, t (te); Ț, ț (țe); U, u (u); V, v (ve); X, x (ics); Z, z (ze / zet).
The letters Q, W, and Y were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words, such as quasar, watt, and yacht. The letter K is relatively older, but it is still perceived as foreign due to the fact that it appears only in borrowings, many of them still neologisms.
In cases were the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use (München, Angoulême etc., as opposed to the use of Istanbul over İstanbul).
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[edit] Diacritical marks
Five letters of the Romanian Alphabet have diacritical marks. They are considered :
- Ă ă — a with breve
- Â â — a with circumflex
- Î î — i with circumflex
- Ș ș — s with comma
- Ț ț — t with comma
The letter â is used exclusively in the middle of words; its majuscule version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.
The letters î and â are phonetically and functionally identical. The reason for using both of them is historical, denoting the language's Latin origin. During the communist regime, the Romanian government largely eliminated the letter â, replacing it with î everywhere except for the name of the country, which remained România. For example, the Latin angelus (angel) became the Romanian ânger, but today it is spelled înger. Initially, the country name and its derivatives too were spelled with "î" - Romînia, romîn etc., but this was later reverted; since the first stipulation coincided with the official designation of the country as a People's Republic, the full title of the latter was Republica Populară Romînă, whereas the Socialist Republic proclaimed in 1965 is associated with the spelling Republica Socialistă România.
After the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian Academy decided to reintroduce â from 1993 onward, in accordance to the 1904 spelling reform, thus cancelling the effects of the 1949 spelling reform. The choice between î and â is thus based on a simple rule: the letter is always spelled as â, except at the beginning and the end of words, where î is used instead. Exceptions include proper nouns where the usage of the letters is frozen, whichever it may be, and compound words, whose components are each separately subjected to the rule above, not the resulting word itself (e.g. ne+îndemânatic => neîndemânatic, not *neândemânatic). Quite a number of people and institutions (including major newspapers such as Evenimentul Zilei and Cotidianul) continue to write according to the 1949 norms and generally, usage of either the 1949 or 1993 norms is regarded as correct in most situations.
Writing letters ș and ț with a cedilla instead of a comma is considered incorrect by the language academy. Actual Romanian writings, including books created to teach children to write, treat the comma and cedilla as a variation in font. See Unicode and HTML below.
[edit] Obsolete letters
Before the spelling reform of 1904, there were several additional letters with diacritical marks.
- Vowels:
- ĭ — i with breve served to illustrate the final, "whispered" sound of the palatalized consonant, in words such as Bucureşti (/bu.ku'reʃtʲ/), lupi (/lupʲ/ - "wolves"), and greci (/greʧʲ/ - "Greeks") — Bucureşcǐ (the proper spelling at the time used c insted of t), lupǐ, grecǐ. This distinction is no longer considered necessary.
- ŭ — u with breve was used only in the ending of a word. Unvoiced, it served to indicate that the previous consonant was not palatalized, or that the vowel i was fully voiced. Once frequent, it survives today only in author Mateiu Caragiale's name - originally spelled Mateiŭ (it is not specified whether the pronunciation should adopt a version that he himself probably never used, while in many editions he is still credited as Matei).
- ĕ — e with breve. This letter is now replaced with ă. The existence of two letters for one sound, the schwa, had an etymological purpose, showing from which vowel ("a" or "e") it originally derived. For example împĕrat - "emperor" (<Imperator), vĕd - "I see" (<vedo), umĕr - "shoulder" (<humerus), păsĕri - "birds" (<cf. passer).
- A consonant, ḑ / Ḑ (d with comma) was used to indicate the sound z where it was derived from a Latin d, such as in ḑi - "day" (<dies), Dumneḑeu - God (<Domine Deus), ḑână - "fairy" (<Diana).
Their usage was relative even before 1904, with some publications (such as Timpul or Universul) choosing to use a simplified and easier to read version, one more similar to today's writing system.
[edit] Unicode and HTML
There is confusion about how to properly write the characters that denote the sounds /ʃ/ and /ʦ/. Although the officially preferred forms are, respectively, "s with comma below" and "t with comma below", many printed texts (including books created to teach children to write) use "s with cedilla" and "t with cedilla" and in practice it is used as a font variation. Historically, computers have made no distinction between the cedilla and comma below.
This usage has been aggregated into all character encoding standards for Central and Eastern Europe (such as ISO 8859-2), which include "s" and "t" with cedillas. In addition, several computer fonts, including some of those shipped with Microsoft Windows, have "s-cedilla" with a cedilla (like the Turkish equivalent), but "t-cedilla" with a comma below, resulting in inconsistent use diacritical marks. ISO 8859-16 includes "s" and "t" with comma below on the same places "s" and "t" with cedilla were in ISO 8859-2.
Ș and ț were added to Unicode in September 1999 and hence still aren't in common use. Unicode defines the "comma-below" characters in the Latin Extended-B section (hex range 0180-024F).
| Phoneme | With comma | With cedilla | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Character | Unicode position (hex) | HTML entity | Character | Unicode position (hex) | HTML entity | |
| /ʃ/ | Ș | 0218 | Ș or Ș | Ş | 015E | Ş or Ş |
| ș | 0219 | ș or ș | ş | 015F | ş or ş | |
| /ʦ/ | Ț | 021A | Ț or Ț | Ţ | 0162 | Ţ or Ţ |
| ț | 021B | ț or ț | ţ | 0163 | ţ or ţ | |
Vowels with diactitics are coded as follows:
| Phoneme | Character | Unicode position (hex) | HTML entity |
|---|---|---|---|
| /ə/ | Ă | 0102 | Ă or Ă |
| ă | 0103 | ă or ă | |
| /ɨ/ |  | 00C2 |  or  or  |
| â | 00E2 | â or â or â | |
| Î | 00CE | Î or Î or Î | |
| î | 00EE | î or î or î |
[edit] Letters and their pronunciation
- See also: Romanian phonology
Romanian spelling is mostly phonetic. The table below gives the correspondence between letters and sounds. Some of the letters have several possible readings, even if allophones are not taken into account. When vowels /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/ are changed into their corresponding semivowels, this is not marked in writing. Letters K, Q, W, and Y appear only in foreign borrowings; the pronunciation of W and Y depends on the origin of the word they appear in.
| Letter | Phoneme | Approximative pronunciation |
|---|---|---|
| A a | /a/ | a in "father" |
| Ă ă (a with breve) | /ə/ | a in "above" |
| Â â (a with circumflex) | /ɨ/ | e in "roses" |
| B b | /b/ | b in "ball" |
| C c | /k/ | c in "cat" |
| /ʧ/ | ch in "chair" | |
| D d | /d/ | d in "door" |
| E e | /e/ | e in "merry" |
| /e̯/ | (semivocalic /e/) | |
| /je/ | ye in "yes" | |
| F f | /f/ | f in "flag" |
| G g | /ɡ/ | g in "goat" |
| /ʤ/ | g in "general" | |
| H h | /h/ | h in "house" |
| I i | /i/ | i in "machine" |
| /j/ | y in "yes" | |
| /ʲ/ | (palatalization) | |
| Î î (i with circumflex) | /ɨ/ | e in "roses" |
| J j | /ʒ/ | s in "treasure" |
| K k | /k/ | k in "like" |
| L l | /l/ | l in "lamp" |
| M m | /m/ | m in "mouth" |
| N n | /n/ | n in "north" |
| O o | /o/ | o in "floor" |
| /o̯/ | (semivocalic /o/) | |
| P p | /p/ | p in "post" |
| Q q | /k/ | k in "kettle" |
| R r | /r/ | (trilled r) |
| S s | /s/ | s in "song" |
| Ș ș (s with comma) | /ʃ/ | s in "sugar" |
| T t | /t/ | t in "tip" |
| Ț ț (t with comma) | /ʦ/ | zz in "pizza" |
| U u | /u/ | u in "group" |
| /w/ | w in "cow" | |
| V v | /v/ | v in "vision" |
| W w | /v/ | v in "vision" |
| /w/ | w in "west" | |
| X x | /ks/ | x in "six" |
| /ɡz/ | x in "example" | |
| Y y | /j/ | y in "yes" |
| /i/ | i in "machine" | |
| Z z | /z/ | z in "zipper" |
[edit] Phonetic alphabet
There is a Romanian equivalent to the English-language NATO phonetic alphabet. Most code words are people's first names, with the exception of K, J, Q, W, Y, and Z. Letters with diacritics (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, Ț) are generally transmitted without diacritics (A, A, I, S, T).
| Word | IPA (unofficial) | Word | IPA (unofficial) | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | Ana | /'a.na/ | N | Nicolae | /ni.ko'la.e/ | |
| B | Barbu | /'bar.bu/ | O | Olga | /'ol.ɡa/ | |
| C | Constantin | /kon.stan'tin/ | P | Petre | /'pe.tre/ | |
| D | Dumitru | /du'mi.tru/ | Q | Q | /kju/ | |
| E | Elena | /e'le.na/ | R | Radu | /'ra.du/ | |
| F | Florea | /'flo.re̯a/ | S | Sandu | /'san.du/ | |
| G | Gheorghe | /'ɡe̯or.ɡe/ | T | Tudor | /'tu.dor/ | |
| H | Haralambie | /ha.ra'lam.bi.e/ | U | Udrea | /'u.dre̯a/ | |
| I | Ion | /i'on/ | V | Vasile | /va'si.le/ | |
| J | Jiu | /ʒiw/ | W | dublu V | /du.blu've/ | |
| K | kilogram | /ki.lo'ɡram/ | X | Xenia | /'kse.ni.a/ | |
| L | Lazăr | /'la.zər/ | Y | I grec | /'i.ɡrek/ | |
| M | Maria | /ma'ri.a/ | Z | zahăr | /'za.hər/ |
[edit] References
- (Romanian) Mioara Avram, "Ortografie pentru toţi", Editura Litera Internaţional, 2002.
