Re: Question on Albanian sy

From: tolgs001
Message: 42276
Date: 2005-11-25

>Could you imagine that Rosetti and Papahagi was aware of all this when
>they quoted fluearã?

Of course they did. But it depends on the context, i.e. whether these
authors deemed as important the insisting on the phonetics of the
word. On the one hand, in all R. dialects and subdialects the graphic
rendition of the diphtongs [ja] and [ea] were interchangeable for a
long period of time. It was the 19th century when, at least for Romanian,
[ea] and [ja] were separated. And for good reasons. However, even
today, there are subdialectal areas, especially in Transylvania and
Banat (even in Moldavia), where the strict distinction between these
two diphtongal occurrences isn't made as it is in Oltenia and Muntenia
as well as in the standard/literary Romanian. One even encounters
person names (second names) spelled for example like this: Cîmpian,
instead of Cîmpean (or Câmpean). This shows the sub/dialectal
"hesitation". And for the same reason there are older texts written
with the Romanian cyrillic alphabet where we read the spelling
<eara> instead of <iara>. No native-speaker of the Dacoromanian
dialect says [ea-ra], and it is implausible that Romanians would've
pronounced the word like this 150-200 years ago.

BTW, a modern example for the various treatment of such vowels,
either as diphtongs or not. <teatru, teatre> "theater, -s" was pronounced
only 1-2 generations ago as it should be [te-'a-tru, te-'a-tre]. This is
how my Romanian teacher in the highschool pronounced it himself
(and he was at the same time someone fond of... theater and was also
a theater director). The next generations have made of [te-a] a [tea],
i.e. [ea] as a diphtong (along with few native-speakers who, due to
subdialectally explained phonetic causes, tend to further "develop"
it as [ja] -> ['tja-tru, 'tja-tre].

(All these "collateral" aspects are IMHO important as a... caution,
to prompt us also think of occurrences that have nothing to do with
derivation techniques within ancient idioms. It is highly probable
that this also applies to <fluier>, where the <i> [j] is there only
because to the native-speaker it is more natural and easier to
pronounce ['flu-jer(@)] than ['flu-er(@)]. The latter will be perceived
by any Romanian native-speaker as unnatural and wrong, despite the
fact that it is obvious even to non-linguists that -er seems to be a
mere suffix added to flu-.)

>marius

George