Talk:Romanian Cyrillic alphabet

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This page would be clearer if all languages had letters written in the same case. 惑乱 分からん 17:13, 30 January 2006 (UTC)

Those printers that kept using it until the 1920s were active in Bessarabia, and I'm not sure what they actually used (if it was Romanian Cyrillic or indeed Russian as applied to Romanian). Dahn 03:58, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

In transitional alphabet, has Ю actually been mapped into "io" or "iu"? Or "iу" with Cyrillic "у"?

It was with a у. I got confused, given that no source bothers to present the actual alphabet, and I had to deduce it from pictures of Bolintineanu's text. Dahn 06:45, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

What is the sound of old theta (Ѳ)? /θ/ or just /t/? (It is written as "t" in Teodor, Teofil, Matei, Marta etc.)

Kcmamu 06:24, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I guess it is /θ/ and probably just /θ/. It is hard to reconstruct how people pronounced Teodor and Teofil, but, especially since the learned were bound to know what the names were in Greek, spellings probably reflected the Greek phoneme which is virtually absent in Romanian. With the transitional alphabet, they prolly just didn't care anymore. Dahn 06:45, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

But all the neighboring nations (Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, western Ukraine) as far as I know pronounce Greek loanwords with theta just as plain "t", even when written as Latin "th" or Cyrillic "Ѳ" in old spellings. Why not in Romanian as well? Kcmamu 08:03, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

Oh, so do we. I gave T as the transliteration, but I guess that the original letter existed because it was associated with the sound. We have also had the "th" to stand for /θ/, but even that is read as a T. What I'm trying to say is that the Cyrillic letter was very likely supposed to be read as in Greek, or that such was its original mission. I guess the best way would be if we indicate that it stands for both /θ/ and /t/, by default (in theory, for /θ/; in practice, almost always, for /t/). Dahn 08:27, 6 July 2006 (UTC)

I suggest you check the image Image:Rom-chirilic.png with the correct alphabet and shapes, according to Romanian Encyclopedia (1993). The table from this article is full of mistakes.--Alex:Dan 13:40, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Nope: this is how those shpaes look when they are not written in calligraphy. We can only approximate. Dahn 17:24, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

I was talking about Ѕ with no value (but in fact dz), N, which is H here (wrong, it is simply N), the order is not the same and some characters do not have any corespondance in the Unicode.--Alex:Dan 02:49, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Feedback on Ѳ and how it was pronounced

I just looked through an 1828 essay by Ion Heliade Rădulescu (Gramatica Românească, republished by Albatros in Scrieri alese, 1978). It is an interesting source for this page in its entirety, because it deals with the inadequacies the alphabet had overall, but just a quick peek for now, so as to clarify an issue mentioned earlier. Page 173, my translation:

"Does one wish to smooth out the Romanians and render them delicate through the Ѳ, for so long made famous throughout Romanian books? That is why we learn that the language and people are not to be smoothed through the patching of language: they need ideas, information and experience in order to smoothen. In all our language, we do not find a single word that would contain this Ѳ, and even more, although we have in our language the odd word borrowed from the Greeks, featuring Ѳ, Romanians will only read it as t, or, those who wish to make a spectacle of themselves, as ft. A Romanian will say Toader or Tudor [i.e.: two versions of Theodore] and Toma [i.e.: Thomas], and not θeodor and θoma, the same as all European peoples. This Ѳ letter or sound was born in the midst of Asia and Africa's heat and indolence, where people speak mostly from their throats and the tip of their heat-widened tongues: that is whence Greeks from Greece originated and it is also from there that they have brought it along."

Absurd theories and comparisons aside, this shows that the letter was meant to show, in theory, /θ/ (in words that were supposed to have it), but was never pronounced differently (kinda like the present-day â). Dahn 23:10, 8 May 2007 (UTC)