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') that is NO DIPHTONG there...trust me, NO DIPHTONG there, is
> all I can say.
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.
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. Therefore, the whole diphthong-or-monophthong
controversy is irrelevant to the question of the origin of the numeral
'3' in Romanian.
Piotr