--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Miguel Carrasquer wrote:
> Based on a more accurate inventory, I count 10 differences between
> Albanian and Romanian:
>
> Alb Rom
> 1 /y/ y --
> 2 -- /I/ â
> 3 /k^/ q --
> 4 /g^/ gj --
> 5 /dz/ x --
> 6 /T/ th --
> 7 /D/ dh --
> 8 /n^/ nj --
> 9 /l~/ ll --
> 10 /r:/ rr --
>
> And I count 9 differences between Romanian and Italian:
>
> Ita Rom
> 1 -- /&/ ã
> 2 -- /I/ â
> 3 /E/ è --
> 4 /O/ ò --
> 5 /dz/ z --
> 6 -- /z^/ j
> 7 -- /h/
> 8 /n^/ gn --
> 9 /l^/ gl --
This holds of course for standard literary languages.
Taking into account other dialectal forms, it turns out that
Italian knows also /&/ (widespread, mostly in Southern dialects
around Naples), /z^/ (in the Northern dialects) and /h/ (as usual
pronounciation of non-palatalized initial "c-" in Tuscany - Rohlfs),
so the only canonical Romanian phoneme really missing from Italian
including dialects is the late innovation /1/ ("â/î"). On the other
hand, Aromanian (and regional Daco-Romanian) still use Common
Romanian phonemes /n^/ (written "n'" or "ñ" in AR), /l^/ (written
"l'" or "lj" in AR) and /dz/, while regional DR has all kinds of
vowel pronounciacion, including /E/ and /O/ phonologically distinct.
So for the counting one can actually leave aside most elements from
the Italian/Romanian list.
On another hand, one should note that Albanian /r/ is not at all
pronounced like in Romanian & Italian but more like in English
(say, in "frame" or "right", for not making it post-vocalic...).
So that makes 6 or 7 differences for Albanian to 1 for Italian.
Regards,
Marius Iacomi