sonia: Quilted wall-hanging (Default)
Sonia Connolly ([personal profile] sonia) wrote2024-11-17 08:25 pm
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Romanian language geekery

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.
jesse_the_k: cap Times Roman "S" with nick in upper corner, captioned "I shot the serif." (shot the serif)

Hooray for Unicode!

[personal profile] jesse_the_k 2024-11-18 04:22 pm (UTC)(link)

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

tshuma: (Default)

[personal profile] tshuma 2024-11-18 06:44 pm (UTC)(link)
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.
Edited 2024-11-18 18:45 (UTC)
tshuma: (abstracted thinking)

[personal profile] tshuma 2024-12-02 10:56 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh, my company had a contractor office there in eastern Romania — I went out to do trainings with developers on our software architecture.
suncat: Basic Suncat Studio avatar (Default)

[personal profile] suncat 2024-11-19 12:36 am (UTC)(link)
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!