>Yep. You should distinguish between Romance /e/ (in the handbooks
>mostly written as e with dot underneath) which is a closed /e/ like
>French /é/ in été or German /ee/ in Idee, and Romance /E/ (in the
>handbooks written as e with ogonek/cedilla underneath), which is an
>open /E/ like French /è/, /ê/ in être or German /e/ in Elbe, or like a
>sheep's bèèèè.
Unfortunately, modern Southern Romanian (+ the standard language)
doesn't have this e-differentiation. Hence Alex' difficulty. (An other
quasi-handicap, I should say, for all of us, Romanians, is our non-
awareness of the old language, because it was written in the (Romanian
variant of the) Cyrillic alphabet; so virtually nobody knows that many
of the transition occurrences once were reflected in writting. Thus, one
of the fonts for /ea & ya/ was used for the above mentioned "open e",
too. Of course, this distinction betw. the closed and open e has no longer
been reflected for at least a century now (neither that betw. closed and
open /o/, for that matter, or betw. /i/ and the semivowel /j/). Esp. around
1900, several "etymological" features in writing with the latin alphabet
- which gave the reader additional phonetical info - were dropped for
good.
So, in AD 2003, only such native speakers are fully aware of the
existence of two /e/ and two /o/ [the open one is reflected in the
standard language by the diphtongue "oa"], who... practise them
in their subdialects every day. (Of additional help is the knowledge of
a neighboring language, e.g. Hungarian and local German, in which
these phon. occurrences are also strong or even stronger.)
>Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
George