D-comma

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

D with comma below
D with comma below

D̦ d̦ (D-comma) is a letter which is part of the Romanian transitional alphabet, used to represent the Romanian language sound /z/ or /dz/ where it was derived from a Latin d (e.g. d̦i, pronounced /zi/ came from latin die, day)[1]. It was the corespondent of the cyrillic letters З and Ѕ.

This letter was first introduced by Petru Maior in his 1819 book Ortographia romana sive Latino-Valachica, una cum clavis, qua penetralia originationis vocum reserantur...: "d̦ sicut Latinorum z ac cyrillicum з"[2].

In 1844 Ioan Eliade introduced d̦ again in his magazine Curierul de ambe sexe as a substitute for з[3].

On 23 October 1858 the Eforia Instrucţiunii Publice of Wallachia issued a decree in which, among other rules, d̦ was for the third time adopted instead of czrillic з. However, this rule will not be fully adopted until later[4].

Taking the matter in his hands, internal affairs minister Ion Ghica stated on 8 February 1860 that whoever in his order ignored the new transitional alphabet rules, was going to be fired[5].

In Moldavia, the transitional alphabet and the letter d̦ was adopted much later. In his grammar published in Paris in 1865, Vasile Alecsandri adopted this sign instead of з, viewing the coma below d as a small s (d̦ was oftenly pronounced /dz/, /ds/. This was also the case with ș — ss and ț — ts)[6].

This letter was abandoned in 1904 and is no longer in use. It is also missing a Unicode encoding, although closely resambling with the Livonian letter Ḑ (d with cedilla, U+1E10 and U+1E11).

[edit] References

  1. ^ Negruzzi, p. 234.
  2. ^ Vîrtosu, p. 208
  3. ^ Vîrtosu, p. 223.
  4. ^ Vîrtosu, p. 234 - 235.
  5. ^ Vîrtosu, p. 236.
  6. ^ Vîrtosu, p. 245

[edit] Bibliography

  • Negruzzi, Constantin, Studii asupra limbei române, in vol. "Alexandru Lăpuşneanul", Ed. Pentru Literatură, Bucharest, 1969.
  • Vîrtosu, Emil, Paleografia româno-chirilică, Ed. Ştiinţifică, Bucharest, 1968.

[edit] See also

The ISO basic Latin alphabet
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz
Letter D with diacritics
Letters using comma sign
D̦d̦ȘșȚț

history • palaeography • derivations • diacritics • punctuation • numerals • Unicode • list of letters