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The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language.It is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters, [1] [2] five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language.
The charts below show the way in which the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) represents Romanian language pronunciations in Wikipedia articles. For a guide to adding IPA characters to Wikipedia articles, see Template:IPA and Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Pronunciation § Entering IPA characters.
The consonant inventory of Romanian is similar to Italian. Romanian, however, lacks the palatal consonants /ɲ ʎ/, which merged with /j/ by lenition, and the affricate /d͡z/ changed to /z/ by spirantization. Romanian has the fricative /ʒ/ and the glottal fricative /h/, which do not occur in Italian.
Î is the 12th letter of the Romanian alphabet and denotes /ɨ/. This sound is also represented in Romanian as letter â. The difference is that â is used in the middle of a word, as in România, but î is used at the beginning or the end of a word: înțelegere (understanding), a urî (to hate).
S-comma Appearance of comma (upper row) and cedilla (lower row) in the Times New Roman font. Note that the cedilla is placed higher than the comma. S-comma (majuscule: Ș, minuscule: ș) is a letter which is part of the Romanian alphabet, used to represent the sound /ʃ/, the voiceless postalveolar fricative (like sh in shoe).
Instead, the most common pattern among native speakers is for individual authors to use an orthography based on the writing system of the dominant contact language: thus Romanian in Romania, Hungarian in Hungary and so on. A currently observable trend, however, appears to be the adoption of a loosely English-oriented orthography, developed ...
 is the 3rd letter of the Romanian alphabet and represents /ɨ/, which is also represented in Romanian as letter î. The difference between the two is that â is used in the middle of the word, as in "România", while î is used at the beginning and at the ends: "înțelegere" (understanding), "a urî" (to hate).
The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet. [note 7] For this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed.