Talk:Romanian alphabet
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The claim that "the communists also crippled the language" by a spelling reform is obviously biased. It is also linguistically naïve. Please remove it.
I agree and made appropriate changes. I don't know Romanian, but I do know a good deal about linguistics and language policy. Someone who actually knows Romanian ought to take a look. But "crippled the language" - c'mon! I know everybody hates Ceaucescu, but far, far, far more radical language reforms in Dutch were undertaken by quite democratically elected governments without "crippling the language".
Diderot 14:52, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
Actually, all vowel changed into the "â" sound in some cases, especially before "n", not just i or a.
- a: romanus -> român
- e: ventus -> vânt
- i: rivus -> râu
- o: fontana -> fântâna
- u: aduncum -> adânc
Initially, these words were written etymologically, like "vênt", but it was then simplificated to the current rule: at the beginning/end of words it should be used "î" and in the middle "â". It would be an aproximation of the etymological rule and for some cases it would be wrong:
- a: angelus -> înger
- i: rivus -> râu
The communists wanted to increase the productivity by eliminating a letter thus making the spelling easier, so everywhere was used "î", including in the word "romîn" (Romanian), which made some confusions abroad, since most people didn't knew that Romînia should be pronounced Romania, so in the 60s there was made an exception for Romania and derivates.
After the communism ended, the Academy thought that everything the communists did was wrong and reverted to the pre-WWII rule.
Bogdan | Talk 16:26, 30 Jun 2004 (UTC)
It seems the Romanian consonants 'c' and 'g' undergo a "softening" process like Italian [1], in which 'c' is pronounced /tS/ before 'i' or 'e', and 'g' is similarly softened but the site I linked to doesn't specify to which phoneme. The article should mention this. Ливай | ☺ 10:16, 27 Dec 2004 (UTC)
The comma below and cedilla is more of an arbitrary distinction for political purposes than an actual distinction. I can produce scans of the children's book mentioned in the article that uses both arbitrarily. If it were generally considered a matter of correctness, the book would have been sure to get it right. --Prosfilaes 06:09, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
As a subnote: the typographers on unicode@unicode.org were disdainful of the concept of comma below as a "real" diacitic; they considered it just a degenerate form of cedilla below that was easier to do in cheap publishing, since the comma doesn't attach and so you could use an s/t and a comma instead of having a seperate piece of lead for s/t with cedilla. --Prosfilaes 06:22, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- The academy's choice of the comma below is possibly due to Turkish use of the cedilla below.
It has nothing to do with that. Turkish alphabet was created only in 1928, while S-comma was in use in the Romanian alphabet almost a hundred years earlier. Bogdan | Talk 12:26, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
-
- Can you cite or better yet quote something? I think more detail on this would be useful for the article, but we don't have a lot of hard information. The fact that none of the typographers specializing in international typography had heard of this before leaves me somewhat sceptical that this was a clear decision made a hundred years ago. My 1944 US War Department Guide to Romanian clearly uses cedillas, so it's obvious the rest of the world didn't get the memo. --Prosfilaes 22:44, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
-
- I don't know exactly, I'll have to search for it. However, in a 1884 print, I see that it was used a comma, but fused to the body of the letter. (pic)
- Also on that image can be noticed that there was no distinction between the ă and â sounds, but it was used rather etymologically, like in ănger (angel), nowadays spelt înger. Bogdan | Talk 23:42, 3 Jan 2005 (UTC)
Contents |
[edit] Suggest merging
I suggest to merge Special Romanian Unicode characters into Romanian alphabet because both articles discuss about the history of S-comma and T-comma, and that the character encoding problem is also mentioned in Romanian alphabet article. --Hello World! 16:01, 15 October 2005 (UTC)
-
- What is your opinion? --Hello World! 12:32, 6 January 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Linking Jupiter
Actually, "domine deus" is the Latin translation of Greek "kurios ho theos", i.e. "the Lord God". I'm not sure which is the connection with Jupiter. bogdan 13:07, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
- Hm. You might be right. I think I got the info from reading Xenopol a while back. Dahn 13:48, 22 February 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Phonetic alphabet
How are diacritics expressed in the phonetic alphabet? Andreas 13:39, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
- The NATO one? They are not expressed at all (since they are not used). Dahn 14:41, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
It appears that in the Romanian phonetic alphabet diacritics are not transmitted at all. In telegrams I know from personal experience that they are not transmitted, and that punctuation marks are transmitted as words ("stop" is used for the period at the end of a sentence). In the Romanian phonetic alphabets I found on the internet letter Ţ appears to be transmitted using the word "ţară" (country), but there is no mention of the other four letters with diacritics. Possibly, in the quite rare cases when a diacritic can change the meaning of a word and cannot be inferred from the context -- such as in "paturi" (beds) and "pături" (blankets) -- the diacritic is read aloud as a separate word, but this is just my personal opinion. — AdiJapan ☎ 15:32, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
[edit] ŭ - the letter did not have a majuscule version
What if a text was in all-capitals? Andreas (T) 14:13, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
- Maybe "the letter was not normally found capitalized", but then, the article makesit clear that it was never at the beginning of a word anyway, so I cut the statement. Circeus 16:18, 7 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Latin-like spelling
Maybe, this article should write about the attempts of using a closer to Latin spelling and alphabet in the 19th century.
- are unu baiatellu formosu ca unu angerullu
- are un băieţel frumos ca un înger
bogdan 21:29, 26 July 2006 (UTC)
-
- Cool. We could reference Maiorescu's verdict on such attempts as well. Do you have more info on their actual influence? Al l that I know is that Junimea thought they were damn funny. Dahn 00:18, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Q
Was q replaced with c like in Spanish? (quanto>>>cuanto)?Cameron Nedland 00:48, 30 September 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Acute accent
The acute accent seems to be liberally used in romanian newspapers for the situations where confusion is possible. Eg: copii = children, cópii = copies. Anyone knows if there's a norm for that? 86.125.104.26 10:43, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
