[tied] Re: 3

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

> 09-12-03 18:13, alexandru_mg3 wrote:
>
>> But in this case, once again, as a NATIVE speaker, I wanted ONLY
>> to say to you and to George (that you are not NATIVE speakers
>> of 'tri')

He _is_, as all Northern Daco-Romanian speakers.

>> that is NO DIPHTONG there...trust me, NO DIPHTONG there, is
>> all I can say.

... which leads us to the conclusion you either don't know what
the diphthong [iy] is and how it sounds like, or you have a very-
very special way of pronouncing the word, not common for the vast
majority of native speakers in the area.

> One has to be careful: many speakers of English whose phonetic
> realisation of /i:/ in <three> is an [Ij]-type diphthong are not
> aware of the diphthongal movement and will swear by all that is
> dear to them that they have a "pure" vowel. We can't study your
> pronunciation directly, so it's impossible to determine who's
> right.

That's my point. Actually, the few spelling problems in Romanian
arise frequently around number of "i"s to be written at the end or
even inside the words. People not having well understood differences
between [i] and [y] are the overwhelming majority and they can argue
for a long time on a dimension just missing from their awareness,
fanatically backing some erroneous spelling they think justified.

> OK, assuming for the sake of the argument that your
> self-observation is correct and that really have a monophthong
> there, it's still clear that the historical source of the
> monophthong is the smoothing of the diphthong /ei/, which
> represents the regular development of Latin <tre:s> in East
> Romance.

Perfectly right. If he really says [tri], that can't be anything
but the result of [trey] > [triy] (lenition, N. Romanian) > [tri]
(oversimplification due to some really lazy people having spread
the idea; as said, the normal Northern Daco-Romanian pronunciation
is [triy]).

> Therefore, the whole diphthong-or-monophthong controversy is
> irrelevant to the question of the origin of the numeral '3' in
> Romanian.

Ditto.
Regards,
Marius Iacomi