Romanian language geekery

[sonia]

We're singing a Romanian song Sculați gazde nu dormiți in Balkan choir, so I sent out some pronunciation links. Posting them here so I can find them again in the future, and maybe folks here are interested too.

Here's a quick reference for Romanian pronunciation: socalfolkdance.org/resources/romanian.htm

And a more detailed reference on the language, including an alphabet pronunciation video: omniglot.com/writing/romanian.htm

I got curious and looked up the diacriticals. This curved diacritical ă is called a breve, pronounced "breev" or "brehv." This one with the point up â is a circumflex, and this one with the point down ǎ is a haček "hachek" (not used in Romanian, included for comparison). Source: altcodeunicode.com/alt-codes-letter-a-with-accents/

From the omniglot page in the Romanian pronunciation notes section, Romanian is one of the few languages that uses the letters s and t with a comma below (ș, ț). Using a cedilla instead (ş, ţ) is considered incorrect by the Romanian Academy.

Comments

Hooray for Unicode!

[jesse_the_k]

Recognizing the difference between the breve and the haçek is not easy, even for my typographical-trained eye at 125% zoom.

Re: Hooray for Unicode!

[sonia]

Maybe that's why Romanian only uses the breve! But Croatian uses the haček, and so do transliterations of Cyrillic into Latin letters for Bulgarian and other Slavic languages.

Yeah, I remember when all those characters broke people's emails. Now they all work, and they're easy to enter on a Mac - hold down a letter, and get a little diacritical chooser for all the versions of that letter.

[tshuma]

I low-key love the Romanian language. I picked some of it up when working with my international team and picked up a bit more when I traveled to eastern Romania for work. I’d love to go back for less targeted travel sometime. Thanks for the references. I’d like to refresh.

[sonia]

It's a beautiful language! There's definitely a learning curve for pronunciation. How cool that you've gotten to travel there. I'm curious what kind of work that was.

[tshuma]

Oh, my company had a contractor office there in eastern Romania — I went out to do trainings with developers on our software architecture.

[suncat]

Thank you so much! Not too long ago I was doing research into Unicode, and how to type the characters, but I never saw the altcodeunicode site. This is a gold mine!

[sonia]

Glad the altcodeunicode link is useful for you! I already found that if you change the -a- in the link to another letter, it will take you to that letter's page. And you can click on characters to copy them and paste them somewhere else.

The About us page doesn't say anything about who owns the site, oddly.