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.