Romanian alphabet
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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 only occur in foreign words, such as quasar, watt, and yacht. 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).
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
- {{unicode — s with comma
- {{unicode — t with comma
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. However, most of the population had only learned î spellings, so the Academy proposed a new set of rules for it. The choice between î and â is currently 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).
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.
Obsolete letters
Up to 1900, 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") — Bucureştǐ, 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" (
passer).
- A consonant, {{unicode / Ḑ (d with comma) was used to indicate the sound z where it was derived from a Latin d, such as in ḑi - "day" (
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/ | 0218 | Ș or Ș | Ş | 015E | Ş or Ş | |
| 0219 | ș or ș | ş | 015F | ş or ş | ||
| /ʦ/ | 021A | Ț or Ț | Ţ | 0162 | Ţ or Ţ | |
| 021B | ț or ț | ţ | 0163 | ţ or ţ | ||
| Phoneme | Character | Unicode position (hex) | HTML entity |
|---|---|---|---|
| /ə/ | 0102 | Ă or Ă | |
| 0103 | ă or ă | ||
| /ɨ/ | 00C2 |  or  or  | |
| 00E2 | â or â or â | ||
| 00CE | Î or Î or Î | ||
| 00EE | î or î or î |
Letters and their pronunciation
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 in "father" | |
| Ă ă (a with breve) | a in "above" | |
| Â â (a with circumflex) | e in "roses" | |
| B b | b in "ball" | |
| C c | c in "cat" | |
| ch in "chair" | ||
| D d | d in "door" | |
| E e | e in "merry" | |
| ye in "yes" | ||
| F f | f in "flag" | |
| G g | g in "goat" | |
| g in "general" | ||
| H h | h in "house" | |
| I i | i in "machine" | |
| y in "yes" | ||
| (palatalization) | ||
| Î î (i with circumflex) | e in "roses" | |
| J j | s in "treasure" | |
| K k | k in "like" | |
| L l | l in "lamp" | |
| M m | m in "mouth" | |
| N n | n in "north" | |
| O o | o in "floor" | |
| P p | p in "post" | |
| Q q | k in "kettle" | |
| R r | (trilled r) | |
| S s | s in "song" | |
| comma) | s in "sugar" | |
| T t | t in "tip" | |
| comma) | zz in "pizza" | |
| U u | u in "group" | |
| w in "cow" | ||
| V v | v in "vision" | |
| W w | v in "vision" | |
| w in "west" | ||
| X x | x in "six" | |
| x in "example" | ||
| Y y | y in "yes" | |
| i in "machine" | ||
| Z z | z in "zipper" |
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 | N | Nicolae | |||
| B | Barbu | O | Olga | |||
| C | Constantin | P | Petre | |||
| D | Dumitru | Q | Q | |||
| E | Elena | R | Radu | |||
| F | Florea | S | Sandu | |||
| G | Gheorghe | T | Tudor | |||
| H | Haralambie | U | Udrea | |||
| I | Ion | V | Vasile | |||
| J | Jiu | W | dublu V | |||
| K | kilogram | X | Xenia | |||
| L | Lazăr | Y | I grec | |||
| M | Maria | Z | zahăr |
See also
External links
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