Re: 3

> > I tell you as a native speaker of 'tri'.

As though I weren't a native-speaker myself; as though I
weren't a native-speaker of the relevant subdialect myself
-- a subdialect that doesn't have any other variant of this
numeral than <trii> [triy].

>S-o ramas: din trii - douâ;

Oh, yeah, of course: in every (I underline: every) Romanian
text published by professionals (i.e., texts perused by pro
proofreaders before being sent to the print shop), the word
is written/spelled <trii>.

> Lacking that, reading and understanding his words should have been
>in principle enough. One does _not_ pronounce "tri-" in "albaStri"
>[albaStri] like in subdialectal variant "trii" [triy]. You might
>not perceive that as a diphthong /iy/ but as long vowel /i:/, the
>idea being the same. This is sometimes spelt as above, in older
>texts, one used a "short i" sign for the yod (either in Cyrillic
>or in Latin script, nowdays there is no "short i" left in Romanian
>alphabet).

<sigh> Rumaenische Spraak schwere Spraak. :-))

> Marius Iacomi

George