>These are the reasons that we are obliged to suspect wa
>not o>oa in Romanian /c^wara/
>
>Marius
The Romanian diphtong <oa> here (which is by no means
correctly rendered by the narrow transcription /wa/) is
a very late occurrence - a few centuries old, and specific
only to the south-eastern ("muntenian") subdialect of
Romanian. Even until the 19th century, Romanian texts
written in the Romanian variant of the cyrilic alphabet
had a mere <o> with an accent for what today is written
<oa>. At least 50% of the Romanians, if not more, do
not pronounce [oa] in <cioarã>, but an "open" /o/ (the
same way all those words that... rhyme, such as: doarã,
moarã, cocoarã etc.) - especially in subdialects, i.e.
whenever the speech isn't influenced by the "artificial"
literary/standard Romanian (which in turn rather reflects
the Romanian subdialects spoken in Muntenia, and to
a lesser extent in Oltenia and in smaller areas along
the Carpathian in Transylvania: Fagara$ and Bra$ov).
The same applies to virtually all situations where such
an "open" /o/ turned to the diphtong /oa/ (which is akin
to /wa/ but it's not the same, except for foreigners or
Romanians who, because of their subdialect, esp. in Banate
and Transylvania, are'nt "skilled" enough in order to
render an accurate /oa/ diphtong, so that it sounds rather
/wa/. The same apply to the parallel doublette: "open"
/e/ and the diphtong /ea/, which foreigners and, again,
some of the Romanians from these subdialect arias (and
part of the Moldova subdialect too) tend to pronounce
/ya/ instead of an accurate /ea/, which is indeed a rare
diphtong in the European languages; I don't know how it
sounds in Eireann, I only know how it sounds in the
Bavarian dialect of German (e.g. <tean> or <dean ma>
for <tun wir>).
#
And something related to this:
In older texts, even those <oa>s tended to be written
as <o> where there wasn't a diphtong, but a hiatus:
[o-a]. The most famous is the OCS particle in the title
of the Romanian princes (voyvodes/hospodars) abbreviated
as <Io> (or in cyrilic: <Iw>). When written in full
(which was extremely rare), the <o-a> hiatus was
rendered by an <o> (or in cyr. <w>) with a "titla". You
can see it in the Cozia monastery fresco representing
Mircea cel Batran, where you can read above the prince's
crown: IWNb (with that sort of "titla" put on W). Un-
fortunately, the diacritic sign has been left out in
this gif:
http://www.ici.ro/romania/images/istorie/himirc.gif
For a brief period of time, in the 19th century, one
experimented orthographically with <ó> (o with an
accent égu) in order to render the diphtong /oa/
in written. (Also influenced by old writing habits
with cyrilic letters.) It was soon abandoned. However,
this illustrates that one was aware of the fact that
the diphtongation is a mere rather modern alteration
of the /o/. Unfortunately, Romanian native-speakers
born in the 20th, esp. towards the end of the 20th
century, aren't aware of this because grammar in
conventional highschools don't deal with such a...
"crap" and because Romanian grammar hasn't, for many
decades now, ever dealt with aspects of true language:
grammar and style is limited to the narrow frame of
the *standard* (read: artificial) language of news-
papers, books and radio newscasts. Average people
aren't aware of the fact that the subdialect on which
this Romanian is based represents only one aspect of
the Romanian language. Nor are average people aware
of the fact that when dealing with languages one
must take into consideration the entire language,
everything that belongs to it (i.e. every occurrence,
even that which is seen as "ugly", "incorrect" etc.)
George