> -----Original Message-----
> From: alexmoeller@... [mailto:alexmoeller@...]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 10:11 PM
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: Re: [tied] Rum. sce/sci > $te/$ti [Re: -ishte, -eshte]
>
> > But how is "sce" in Romanian "sceptru" pronounced?
> >
> > Richard.
>
> [Moeller] hmmmm.. I dont find a english word now.. you have to
> pronounce cze like in czech and a "s" before..the s is s and
> ce like cze in czech
> s+cze ( cze from czech)
>
> Someone there a beter ideea how to make the good man
> understand here?
Yes, it's called the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Unfortunately,
it needs its own letters, but we have been making compromises on Cybalist.
Various Rumanian combinations can be written straightforwardly:
<che> = /ke/
<$> = /S/
Other sounds are more complicated. If Romanian <ace> and <at$e> are
pronounced the same, then we can write /atSe/ for the sound. If they were
different, we would have to join 't' and 'S' for the first spelling, but we
cannot do that using the ASCII character set. If /k/ is 'softened', but not
all the way to /tS/, we can write /k^/.
Then the explanation of pronunciations in standard Romanian could proceed:
<che> is /ke/
<chi> is /ki/
<ce> is /tSe/
<ci> is /tSi/
<sce> is /stSe/
<> are used to show that we are talking about how a word or sound is spelt.
But /stSe/ is a difficult combination. The Russians, and probably once the
Romanians, simplified it to /StSe/ in old words. The Romanians have further
simplified it to /Ste/, and changed the spelling to <$te>.
Now, you seemed to be making the point that this change is not made in
recent loan words, that the <sce> in 'sceptru' was not /St/. But I was not
totally sure I had understand you, which is why I asked how you pronounced
it. You have replied /stS/, but George has said that that is a difficult
sound for a Romanian. When English developed such a sound, about 600-700 AD
(or may be a little later), the sequence or changes over a few centuries
went something like /sk/ > /sk^/ > /stS/ > /StS/ > /SS/ > /S/. (Perhaps we
had /Sk^/ instead of /stS/.)
Richard.
P.S. Reply at leisure. I'm going to bed!
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