On Tue, Feb 3, 2004, at 09:19 AM, Miguel wrote:
> Romanian doesn't have palatal stops.
It has. Namely in the majority of the DR subdialects,
excepting most of the southern area (Oltenia, Muntenia,
incl. Bucharest). Esp. in central and NW Transylvania.
(Due to Slavic & Hungarian influences? I dunno.)
AFAIK, these sounds are absent in Aromanian (Macedonian
Romanian).
In Romanian standard writing, the voiceless stop is
awkwardly rendered by "che" & "chi". The voiced is
only rarely written - in comedy or satyre contexts -
as "ghe" & "ghi".
>> Even taken your approach , the Romanian is closer related with
>> Albanian than Italian is.
>
> Only in your fantasies.
Although I don't speak any Albanian, I've had
the occasion quasi on weekly and at times on daily
basis to hear/listen to Albanians talk in the streets,
buses, subway of my city. To me, Albanian sounds
seem to be closer to... Portuguese and... Farsi than
to Romanian (let alone those [T] and [D] dentals
that are not extant in Dacoromanian and Aromanian;
a Romanian native-speaker living in Romania encounters
them only whenever learning English or Spanish in
school, or get to hear them in some Greek neigbor-
hood).
BTW: despite the existence of a shared Rum.-Alb.
vocabulary, I can't distinguish anything (except
for some "international" vocab) even if the
native-speakers I occasionally listen to aren't
Gegs or Tosks in the streets, but people reading
the news bulletins on the official, state-run TV
station also broadcasting on Eutelsat Hotbird. In
contrast, I'm rather able to recognize many a word
in Slavic languages.
On the other hand, except for the [ü] and [ö], the
quality of consonants and vowels of Hungarian and
Turkish are quite close to the Romanian phon. syst.
George