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)

It's just a style variation of the Н н, used in other slavic languages too. It evolved into an N ɴ, (I used coptic Ⲛ ⲛ), in some examples of transitional scripts, like the 1946 (2) one. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ayceman (talk • contribs) 10:40, 26 January 2010 (UTC)

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)

H and N

User:Hellerick says Romanian used Cyrillic H instead of (Latin) N. I disagree: books written with various fonts, or letters written by different people clearly use N instead of H. Here's just one source to prove my claim: Romanian scholar Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu published "Cuvente den batrani" in 1878-1879. This was a compilation of various old apocryphal text in Romanian. In his introduction, Hasdeu mentioned the equivalents he used for several Cyrillic letters, with different shapes than their Latin counterparts. "N" it's not among them! He even says that for the rest of the letters (including N), he used the Latin counterparts having the same shape. Thus, there was no need to transform a potential H into N, because N was never seen as a letter similar to the Latin H! --Alex:D (talk) 01:28, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Look at the letter Nashi of the old Cyrillic script. It did look rather N-like, and of course Hasdeu had no reason to distinguish between the Cyrillic and the Latin letters for the n-sound; back then this difference was a difference of fonts, not of scripts. The tilting of the middle line could vary, depending on many factors (like the time, the place, the personal preference of the writer), it could be diagonal, horizontal, or slightly tilted; but it still remained the same Cyrillic letter. The horizontal version win after all, and that's why the letter Н looks this way in most contemporary fonts. If you look at this character in a font representing the old Cyrillic script, you most likely will see something N-like again.

It would be pretty absurd to claim that the old Romanian alphabet consisted of 44 Cyrillic and one Latin character, wouldn't it? Hellerick (talk) 03:31, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

I guess you are both right (fancy that). The Cyrillic letter Н in old Romanian writings did in fact look much like N, with the middle bar more or less tilted. It certainly did not look like , but more like , sometimes with an even more tilted middle bar (for example Biblia de la Bucureşti, printed in 1688, has a fine example on the front cover).

The funny thing is that the letter И had the middle bar tilted just as much as Н, only in the opposite direction: , and that can be seen very distinctly on several book covers, such as Hronicul vechimii româno-moldo-vlahilor (the edition printed in 1836). Now, Hellerick, if you consider that the middle bar of N was not tilted enough to consider it an N and prefer to say it's Н, then you should probably do exactly the same thing with И and call it Н too.

The problem is that the concept of grapheme did not exist back when the old Cyrillic Romanian script was in use, neither when Hasdeu lived. It's only today that we need to assign graphemes, or codes, to those old written shapes. I would go with Hellerick and assign it to the grapheme Н, because genetically that's where the strong link is. The old Romanian letter did not come from the Latin N (but originally from the Greek nu: ν).

However, I would mention in the article that the shape of the written character was similar to N. Even better, the character table should contain not just the modern letter shapes, but the old ones too, as images, somewhat like the article on the Early Cyrillic alphabet has. Then the reader will know what the letters looked like and what graphemes they are assigned to. — AdiJapan 06:53, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

The thing is, H is a modern standard of the Cyrillic N. The Romanian N never got to be spelled as H because the alphabet started its transition to Latin early in the 18th century, and one of the first letters to be changed was N, obviously because it looked wery much like latin N. There was no Latin N in the Romanian alphabet, just the Cyrillic N. --Alex:D (talk) 21:13, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

That's the perfect reason to list the characters of the Early Cyrillic alphabet as letter samples. But we still need to link to articles that describe each character. Unfortunately for us, those articles deal mainly with the modern Cyrillic letters, and there are no separate articles for the early shapes (nor should there be any, because they are not really distinct subjects).

I would suggest that we don't display the modern shapes of the Cyrillic letters at all, because they don't actually belong to the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet, and instead insert the link under the Romanian letter names. Something like this:

Letter	Numerical value	Romanian Latin equivalent	Transitional alphabet	Moldovan Cyrillic equivalent	Phoneme	Name in Romanian
	50	N n	N n	Н н	/n/	Naş

I suppose that would be acceptable for everyone. — AdiJapan 06:32, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

In the Unicode there is only one character provided for the Cyrillic Н, and it should be shown in the table. But since many characters of the old script look very different from their contemporary forms (not only H), the best solution would be to provide a picture for every character. The way it's done here. — Hellerick (talk) 08:09, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't mind one more column with the modern shape of the Cyrillic characters. We already have two columns that are relevant to even a lesser extent: the transitional alphabet and the Moldovan alphabet. — AdiJapan 09:40, 4 February 2010 (UTC)

Adding a letter shape column would be a good idea, and it's only necessary for the first table, but as per Unicode, the „Letter” column should contain Нн. --Ayceman (talk) 14:39, 12 February 2010 (UTC)

Archaic script

Nowadays a certain font is used in Romanian to give a period flair to signs and text, not unlike Fraktur is used in English. This would be an example. I think this font is a Latinized form of the old Cyrillic script. Can you confirm? Did old Romanian Cyrillic have a special shape that is imitated now? Should it be mentioned in the article? --Error (talk) 01:00, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Yeah such fonts are used to produce the archaic feeling, they are based on old Cyrillic decorative fonts (like used in book titles), and currently are often used in religious context. Personally I feel this font is a more typical example of this. I guess such legacy of the Roman Cyrillic could be mentioned in the article. Hellerick (talk) 10:23, 5 February 2013 (UTC)

Lord's Prayer mistake

Please someone fix it or just take it off until fixed. First word on the second line is "IN Р Ъ Р Ъ Ц I Ѧ" instead of "IN П Ъ Р Ъ Ц I Ѧ". — Preceding unsigned comment added by Acct001 (talk • contribs) 10:38, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Parent systems

During all my studies I rather learned that Cyrillic is not a daughter of the Glagolitic script thought some letters were taken from it. --86.33.227.116 (talk) 17:30, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Transitional Alphabets: Who made the table?

I think the tables is very well done and the authors seems to have put a lot of effort into it. I plan on doing my research on this topic so it'd be great if the author could send me a message or if someone could point me in their direction! --Lajos vH (talk) 02:37, 2 March 2018 (UTC)