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The Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used for writing the Romanian language. It is a modification of the
classical Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters originally used by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language. Largely unaltered with the exception of extensions (such as diacritics), it used to write English and the o ...
and consists of 31 letters, five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language: The letters Q (''chiu''), W (''dublu v''), and Y (''igrec'' or ''i grec,'' meaning "Greek i") were formally introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as ''
quasar A quasar is an extremely Luminosity, luminous active galactic nucleus (AGN). It is pronounced , and sometimes known as a quasi-stellar object, abbreviated QSO. This emission from a galaxy nucleus is powered by a supermassive black hole with a m ...
'', '' watt'', and '' yacht''. The letter ''K'', although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as ''kilogram'', ''broker'', ''karate''. These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such as ''nomenklatură'' (normally ''nomenclatură'', meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled with ''k'' instead of ''c'' if referring to members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as ''
nomenklatura The ''nomenklatura'' ( rus, номенклату́ра, p=nəmʲɪnklɐˈturə, a=ru-номенклатура.ogg; from la, nomenclatura) were a category of people within the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries who held various key admi ...
'' is used in English). In cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use (''
München Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Ha ...
'', ''
Angoulême Angoulême (; Poitevin-Saintongeais: ''Engoulaeme''; oc, Engoleime) is a communes of France, commune, the Prefectures of France, prefecture of the Charente Departments of France, department, in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region of southwestern Franc ...
'' etc., as opposed to the use of '' Istanbul'' over ''İstanbul'').


Letters and their pronunciation

Romanian spelling is mostly phonemic without ''silent letters'' (but see ''i''). The table below gives the correspondence between letters and sounds. Some of the letters have several possible readings, even if allophones are not taken into account. When vowels , , , and are changed into their corresponding semivowels, this is not marked in writing. Letters K, Q, W, and Y appear only in foreign borrowings; the pronunciation of W and Y and of the combination QU depends on the origin of the word they appear in. * See Comma-below (ș and ț) versus cedilla (ş and ţ).


Special letters

Romanian orthography does not use accents or
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
s – these are secondary symbols added to letters (i.e. basic
glyph A glyph () is any kind of purposeful mark. In typography, a glyph is "the specific shape, design, or representation of a character". It is a particular graphical representation, in a particular typeface, of an element of written language. A g ...
s) to alter their pronunciation or to distinguish between words. There are, however, five special letters in the Romanian alphabet (associated with four different sounds) which are formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking these letters function as basic glyphs in their own right rather than letters with diacritical marks, but they are often referred to as the latter. * Ă ă — ''a'' with breve – for the sound * Â â — ''a'' with
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
– for the sound * Î î — ''i'' with
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
– for the sound * Ș ș — ''s'' with
comma The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline ...
– for the sound * Ț ț — ''t'' with
comma The comma is a punctuation mark that appears in several variants in different languages. It has the same shape as an apostrophe or single closing quotation mark () in many typefaces, but it differs from them in being placed on the baseline ...
– for the sound The letter ''â'' is used exclusively in the middle of words; its
majuscule Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals (or more formally ''majuscule'') and smaller lowercase (or more formally ''minuscule'') in the written representation of certain languages. The writing ...
version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions. Writing letters ș and ț with a cedilla instead of a comma is considered incorrect by the Romanian Academy. Romanian writings, including books created to teach children to write, treat the comma and cedilla as a variation in font. See Unicode and HTML below.


Î versus Â

The letters ''î'' and ''â'' are phonetically and functionally identical. The reason for using both of them is historical, denoting the language's Latin origin. For a few decades until a spelling reform in 1904, as many as four or five letters had been used for the same phoneme (''â'', ''ê'', ''î'', ''û'', and occasionally ''ô''), according to an etymological rule. All were used to represent the vowel , toward which the original Latin vowels written with circumflexes had converged. The 1904 reform saw only two letters remaining, ''â'' and ''î'', the choice of which followed rules that changed several times during the 20th century. During the first half of the century the rule was to use ''î'' in word-initial and word-final positions, and ''â'' everywhere else. There were exceptions, imposing the use of ''î'' in internal positions when words were combined or derived with prefixes or suffixes. For example, the adjective "ugly" was written with ''î'' because it derives from the verb "to hate". In 1953, during the Communist era, the Romanian Academy eliminated the letter ''â'', replacing it with ''î'' everywhere, including the name of the country, which was to be spelled . The first stipulation coincided with the official designation of the country as a People's Republic, which meant that its full title was . A minor spelling reform in 1964 brought back the letter ''â'', but only in the spelling of "Romanian" and all its derivatives, including the name of the country. As such, the Socialist Republic proclaimed in 1965 is associated with the spelling . Soon after the fall of the Ceaușescu government, the Romanian Academy decided to reintroduce ''â'' from 1993 onward, by canceling the effects of the 1953 spelling reform and essentially reverting to the 1904 rules (with some differences). The move was publicly justified as the rectification either of a Communist assault on tradition, or of a Soviet influence on the Romanian culture, and as a return to a traditional spelling that bears the mark of the language's Latin origin. The political context at the time, however, was that the Romanian Academy was largely regarded as a Communist and corrupt institution — Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife Elena had been its honored members, and membership had been controlled by the Communist Party. As such, the 1993 spelling reform was seen as an attempt of the Academy to break with its Communist past. The Academy invited the national community of linguists as well as foreign linguists specialized in Romanian to discuss the problem; when these overwhelmingly opposed the spelling reform in vehement terms, their position was explicitly dismissed as being too scientific. According to the 1993 reform, the choice between ''î'' and ''â'' is thus again based on a rule that is neither strictly etymological nor phonological, but positional and morphological. The sound is always spelled as ''â'', except at the beginning and the end of words, where ''î'' is to be used instead. Exceptions include proper nouns where the usage of the letters is frozen, whichever it may be, and compound words, whose components are each separately subjected to the rule (e.g. + → "clumsy", not *). However, the exception no longer applies to words derived with suffixes, in contrast with the 1904 norm; for instance what was spelled after 1904 became after 1993. Although the reform was promoted as a means to show the Latin origin of Romanian, statistically only few of the words written with ''â'' according to the 1993 reform actually derive from Latin words having an ''a'' in the corresponding position. In fact, this includes a large number of words that contained an ''i'' in the original Latin and are similarly written with ''i'' in their Italian or Spanish counterparts. Examples include "river", from the Latin (compare Spanish ), now written ; along with < , < , < , < , etc. While the 1993 spelling norm is compulsory in Romanian education and official publications, and gradually most other publications came to use it, there are still individuals, publications and publishing houses preferring the previous spelling norm or a mixed hybrid system of their own. Among them are the weekly cultural magazine and the daily , whereas some publications allow authors to choose either spelling norm; these include , magazine of the
Writers' Union of Romania The Writers' Union of Romania (), founded in March 1949, is a professional association of writers in Romania. It also has a subsidiary in Chișinău, Republic of Moldova. The Writers' Union of Romania was created by the communist regime by taking ...
, and publishing houses such as . Dictionaries, grammars and other linguistic works have also been published using the and long after the 1993 reform. Ultimately, the conflict results from two different linguistically-based reasonings as to how to spell . The choice of ''â'' derives from ''a'' being the most average or central of the five vowels (the official Bulgarian romanization uses the same logic, choosing ''a'' for ъ, resulting in the country's name being spelled ''Balgariya''; and also the European Portuguese vowel for ''a'' mentioned above), whereas ''î'' is an attempt to choose the Latin letter that most intuitively writes the sound (similarly to how
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
uses the letter ''y'').


Comma-below ( ș and ț) versus cedilla ( ş and ţ)

Although the Romanian Academy standard mandates the comma-below variants for the sounds and , the cedilla variants are still widely used. Many printed and online texts still incorrectly use " s with cedilla" and " t with cedilla". This state of affairs is due to an initial lack of glyph standardization, compounded by the lack of computer font support for the comma-below variants (see the Unicode section for details). The lack of support for the comma diacritics has been corrected in current versions of major operating systems: Windows Vista or newer, Linux distributions after 2005, and currently supported macOS versions. As mandated by the European Union, Microsoft released
font update
to correct this deficiency in Windows XP in early 2007, soon after Romania joined the European Union.


Obsolete letters

Before the spelling reform of 1904, there were several additional letters with diacritical marks. * Vowels: ** ĭ — ''i'' with breve indicated semivowel ''i'' as part of Romanian
diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
s and triphthongs ''ia'', ''ei'', ''iei'' etc., or a final, "whispered" sound of the preceding palatalized consonant, in words such as ''
București Bucharest ( , ; ro, București ) is the capital and largest city of Romania, as well as its cultural, industrial, and financial centre. It is located in the southeast of the country, on the banks of the Dâmbovița River, less than north of ...
'' (), ''lupi'' ( – "wolves"), and ''greci'' ( – "Greeks") — ''Bucurescĭ'' (the proper spelling at the time used ''c'' instead of ''t'', ''see
-ești The suffix ''-ești'' (pronounced , sometimes changed to ''-ăști'' ) is widespread in Romanian placenames. It is the plural of the possessive suffix '' -escu'', formerly used for patronyms and currently widespread in family names. Obsolete spell ...
''), ''lupĭ'', ''grecĭ'', like the Slavonic soft sign. The
Moldovan Cyrillic The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet is a Cyrillic alphabet designed for the Romanian language spoken in the Soviet Union ( Moldovan) and was in official use from 1924 to 1932 and 1938 to 1989 (and still in use today in the breakaway Moldovan regio ...
alphabet kept the Cyrillic equivalents of this letter, namely й and ь, but it was abolished in the Romanian Latin alphabet for unknown reasons. By replacing this letter with a simple ''i'' without making any additional changes, the phonetic value of the letter ''i'' became ambiguous; even native speakers can sometimes mispronounce words such as the toponym '' Pecica'' (which has two syllables, but is often mistakenly pronounced with three) or the name '' Mavrogheni'' (which has four syllables, not three). Additionally, in a number of words such as ''subiect'' "subject" and ''ziar'' "newspaper", the pronunciation of ''i'' as a vowel or as a semivowel is different among speakers. ** ŭ — ''u'' with breve was used only in the ending of a word. It was essentially a Latin equivalent of the Slavonic back yer found in languages like Russian. Unpronounced in most cases, it served to indicate that the previous consonant was not palatalized, or that the preceding ''i'' was the vowel and not a mere marker of palatalization. When ''ŭ'' was pronounced, it would follow a stressed vowel and stand in for semivowel ''u'', as in words ''eŭ'', ''aŭ'', and ''meŭ'', all spelled today without the breve. Once frequent, it survives today in author
Mateiu Caragiale Mateiu Ion Caragiale (; – January 17, 1936), also credited as Matei or Matheiu, or in the antiquated version Mateiŭ,Sorin Antohi"Romania and the Balkans. From Geocultural Bovarism to Ethnic Ontology" in ''Tr@nsit online'', Institut für die ...
's name – originally spelled ''Mateiŭ'' (it is not specified whether the pronunciation should adopt a version that he himself probably never used, while in many editions he is still credited as ''Matei''). In other names, only the breve was dropped, while preserving the pronunciation of a semivowel ''u'', as is the case of B.P. Hasdeŭ. ** ĕ — ''e'' with breve. This letter is now replaced with ''ă''. The existence of two letters for one sound, the schwa, had an etymological purpose, showing from which vowel ("a" or "e") it originally derived. For example ''împĕrat'' – "emperor" (<
Imperator The Latin word ''imperator'' derives from the stem of the verb la, imperare, label=none, meaning 'to order, to command'. It was originally employed as a title roughly equivalent to ''commander'' under the Roman Republic. Later it became a part o ...
), ''vĕd'' – "I see" (humerus The humerus (; ) is a long bone in the arm that runs from the shoulder to the elbow. It connects the scapula and the two bones of the lower arm, the radius and ulna, and consists of three sections. The humeral upper extremity consists of a roun ...
), ''păsĕri'' – "birds" (< cf. passer). ** é / É — Latin small/capital letter '' e'' with
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...
indicated a sound that corresponds either to today's Romanian
diphthong A diphthong ( ; , ), also known as a gliding vowel, is a combination of two adjacent vowel sounds within the same syllable. Technically, a diphthong is a vowel with two different targets: that is, the tongue (and/or other parts of the speech o ...
''ea'', or in some words, to today's Romanian letter ''e''. It would originally indicate the sound of Romanian letter ''e'' when it was pronounced as diphthong ''ea'' in certain Romanian regions, e.g. ''acéste'' (today spelled ''aceste'') and ''céle'' (today spelled ''cele''). This letter would sometimes indicate a derived word from a Romanian root word containing Latin letter ''e'', as is the case of ''mirésă'' (today spelled ''mireasă'') derived from ''mire''. For other words it would underlie a relationship between a Romanian word and a Latin word containing letter ''e'', where the Romanian word would use ''é'', such as ''gréle'' (today spelled ''grele'') derived from Latin word grevis. Lastly, this letter was used to accommodate the sound that corresponds to today's Romanian diphthong ''ia'', as in the word ''ér'' (''iar'' today). ** ó / Ó — Latin small/capital letter '' o'' with
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...
indicated a sound that corresponds to today's Romanian diphthong ''oa''. This letter would sometimes indicate a derived word from a Romanian root word containing Latin letter ''o'', as is the case of ''popóre'' (today spelled ''popoare'') derived from ''popor''. For other words it would underlie a relationship between a Romanian word and a Latin word containing letter ''o'', where the Romanian word would use ''ó'', such as ''fórte'' (today spelled ''foarte'') derived from Latin word forte. Lastly, this letter was used to accommodate the sound that corresponds to today's Romanian diphthong ''oa'', as in the word ''fóme'' (''foame'' today). ** ê, û and ô — see ''Î versus Â'' section above. * Consonants ** d̦ / D̦ — Latin small/capital letter ''d'' with comma below was used to indicate the sound that corresponds today to Romanian letter '' z''. It would denote that the word it belonged to derived from Latin and that its corresponding Latin letter was '' d''. Examples of words containing this letter are: ''d̦ece'' ("ten"), ''d̦i'' ("day") – reflecting its derivation from the Latin word
dies Dies may refer to: * Dies (deity), the Roman counterpart of the Greek goddess Hemera, the personification of day, daughter of Nox (Night) and Erebus (Darkness). * Albert Christoph Dies (1755–1822), German painter, composer, and biographer * Jos ...
, ''Dumned̦eu'' ("God") – reflecting the Latin phrase Domine
Deus ''Deus'' (, ) is the Latin word for "god" or "deity". Latin ''deus'' and ''dīvus'' ("divine") are in turn descended from Proto-Indo-European *'' deiwos'', "celestial" or "shining", from the same root as '' *Dyēus'', the reconstructed chief g ...
, ''d̦ână'' ("fairy") – to be derived from the Latin word Diana. In today's Romanian language this letter is no longer present and Latin letter '' z'' is used in its stead. A parallel development has occurred in
Polish Polish may refer to: * Anything from or related to Poland, a country in Europe * Polish language * Poles, people from Poland or of Polish descent * Polish chicken *Polish brothers (Mark Polish and Michael Polish, born 1970), American twin screenwr ...
, which turned ''d'' before a front vowel (''i'' or ''e'') into ''dz''; Romanian then removed the ''d'' to leave the ''z''. In addition, the acute accent ( á, í) was used in verb infinitives and 3rd-person imperfect forms stressed on the last syllable: ''lăudá'' ("to praise"), ''aud̦í'' ("to hear"), 3rd-person imperfect ''lăudá'', ''aud̦iá''. The grave accent ( à, ì, ù) was used in 3rd-person perfect forms stressed on the last syllable: ''lăudà'', ''aud̦ì''. Use of these letters was not fully adopted even before 1904, as some publications (e.g. ''
Timpul ''Timpul'' (Romanian for "The Time") is a literary magazine published in Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine t ...
'' and '' Universul'') chose to use a simplified approach that resembled today's Romanian language writing.


Other diacritics

As with other languages, the
acute accent The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...
is sometimes used in Romanian texts to indicate the stressed vowel in some words. This use is regular in dictionary headwords, but also occasionally found in carefully edited texts to disambiguate between homographs that are not also
homophone A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...
s, such as to differentiate between ''cópii'' ("copies") and ''copíi'' ("children"), ''éra'' ("the era") and ''erá'' ("was"), ''ácele'' ("the needles") and ''acéle'' ("those"), etc. The accent also distinguishes between homographic verb forms, such as ''încúie'' and ''încuié'' ("he locks" and "he has locked"). Diacritics in some borrowings are kept: ''bourrée'', ''pietà''. Foreign names are also usually spelled with their original diacritics: ''Bâle'', ''Molière'', even when an acute accent might be wrongly interpreted as a stress, as in ''István'' or ''Gérard''. However, frequently used foreign names, such as names of cities or countries, are often spelled without diacritics: ''Bogota'', ''Panama'', ''Peru''.


Digital typography


ISO 8859

The character encoding standard ISO 8859 initially defined a single code page for the entire Central and Eastern Europe — ISO 8859-2. This code page includes only "s" and "t" with cedillas. The South-Eastern European ISO 8859-16 includes "s" and "t" with comma below on the same places "s" and "t" with cedilla were in ISO 8859-2. The ISO 8859-16 code page became a standard after Unicode became widespread, however, so it was largely ignored by software vendors.


Unicode and HTML

The circumflex and breve accented Romanian letters were part of the Unicode standard since its inception, as well as the cedilla variants of s and t. Ș and ț (comma-below variants) were added to Unicode version 3.0. From Unicode version 3.0 to version 5.1, the cedilla-using characters were specified by the Unicode Standard to be "used in both Turkish and Romanian data" and that "a glyph variant with comma below is preferred for Romanian"; On the newly encoded comma-using characters, it said that they should be used "when distinct comma below form is required". Unicode 5.2 explicitly states that "the form with the cedilla is preferred in Turkish, and the form with the comma below is preferred in Romanian", while mentioning (possibly for historical reasons) that "in Turkish and Romanian, a cedilla and a comma below sometimes replace one another". Widespread adoption was hampered for some years by the lack of fonts providing the new glyphs. In May 2007, five months after Romania (and Bulgaria) joined the EU, Microsoft released updated fonts that include all official glyphs of the Romanian (and
Bulgarian Bulgarian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Bulgaria * Bulgarians, a South Slavic ethnic group * Bulgarian language, a Slavic language * Bulgarian alphabet * A citizen of Bulgaria, see Demographics of Bulgaria * Bul ...
) alphabet.European Union Expansion Font Update
microsoft.com
This font update targeted Windows XP SP2, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Vista. The subset of Unicode most widely supported on Microsoft Windows systems,
Windows Glyph List 4 Windows Glyph List 4, or more commonly WGL4 for short, also known as the ''Pan-European character set'', is a character repertoire on Microsoft operating systems comprising 657 Unicode characters, two of them private use. Its purpose is to provide ...
, still does not include the comma-below variants of S and T. Vowels with diacritics are coded as follows:


Adobe/Linotype/Vista de facto standard

Adobe Systems Adobe Inc. ( ), originally called Adobe Systems Incorporated, is an American multinational computer software company incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in San Jose, California. It has historically specialized in software for the crea ...
decided that the Unicode glyphs "t with cedilla" U+0162/3 are not used in any language. (It is in fact used, but in very few languages. T with Cedilla exists as part of the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages, in some Gagauz orthographies, in the
Kabyle dialect * Kabyle people, an ethnic group in Algeria * Kabyle language ** Kabyle alphabet, also known as Berber Latin alphabet ** Kabyle grammar * Kabylie, the Kabyle ethnic homeland * Kabyles du Pacifique, a group of Algerians deported to New Caledonia ...
of the Berber language, and possibly elsewhere.) Adobe has therefore substituted the glyphs with "t with comma below" (U+021A/B) in all the fonts they ship. The unfortunate consequence of this decision is that Romanian documents using the (unofficial) Unicode points U+015E/F and U+0162/3 (for ș and ț) are rendered in Adobe fonts in a visually inconsistent way using "s with cedilla", but "t with comma" (see figure). Linotype fonts that support Romanian glyphs mostly follow this convention. The fonts introduced by Microsoft in Windows Vista also implement this de facto Adobe standard. Few Microsoft fonts provide a consistent look when cedilla variants are used; notable ones are Tahoma, Verdana, Trebuchet MS, Microsoft Sans Serif and
Segoe UI Segoe ( ) is a typeface, or family of fonts, that is best known for its use by Microsoft. The company uses Segoe in its online and printed marketing materials, including recent logos for a number of products. Additionally, the Segoe UI font su ...
. The free
DejaVu The DejaVu fonts are a superfamily of fonts designed for broad coverage of the Unicode Universal Character Set. The fonts are derived from Bitstream Vera (sans-serif) and Bitstream Charter (serif), two fonts released by Bitstream under a fre ...
and
Linux Libertine Linux Libertine is a digital typeface created by the Libertine Open Fonts Project, which aims to create free and open alternatives to proprietary typefaces such as Times New Roman. It is developed with the free font editor FontForge and is licen ...
fonts provide proper and consistent glyphs in both variants.
Red Hat Red Hat, Inc. is an American software company that provides open source software products to enterprises. Founded in 1993, Red Hat has its corporate headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina, with other offices worldwide. Red Hat has become ass ...
's Liberation fonts only support the comma below variants starting with version 1.04, scheduled for inclusion in
Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...
10.


OpenType ROM/locl feature

Some OpenType fonts from Adobe and all C-series Vista fonts implement the optional OpenType feature GSUB/latn/ROM/locl. This feature forces "s with cedilla" to be rendered using the same glyph as "s with comma below". When this second (but optional) remapping takes place, Romanian Unicode text is rendered with comma-below glyphs regardless of code point variants. Unfortunately, most Microsoft pre-Vista OpenType fonts ( Arial etc.) do not implement the ROM/locl feature, even after the European Union Expansion Font Update, so old documents will look inconsistent as in the left side of the above figure. Select few fonts, e.g. Verdana and Trebuchet MS, not only have a consistent look for cedilla variants (after the EU update), but also do a simultaneous remapping of cedilla s and t to comma-below variants when ROM/locl is activated. The free DejaVu and Linux Libertine fonts do not yet offer this feature in their current releases, but development versions do. Pango supports the locl tag since version 1.17. XeTeX supports locl since version 0.995. As of July 2008, very few Windows applications support the locl feature tag. From the Adobe
CS3 Adobe Creative Suite (CS) is a discontinued software suite of graphic design, video editing, and web development applications developed by Adobe Systems. The last of the Creative Suite versions, Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6), was launched at a ...
suite, only InDesign has support for it.p. 15
store.adobe.com
The status of Romanian support in the free fonts that ship with
Fedora A fedora () is a hat with a soft brim and indented crown.Kilgour, Ruth Edwards (1958). ''A Pageant of Hats Ancient and Modern''. R. M. McBride Company. It is typically creased lengthwise down the crown and "pinched" near the front on both sides ...
is maintained a
Fedoraproject.org


Combining characters

Unicode also allows diacritical marks to be represented as separate
combining diacritical marks Combining Diacritical Marks is a Unicode block containing the most common combining characters. It also contains the character "Combining Grapheme Joiner", which prevents canonical reordering of combining characters, and despite the name, actual ...
. The relevant combining accents are U+0326 COMBINING COMMA BELOW and U+0327 COMBINING CEDILLA. Support for applying a combining Comma Below to letters S and T may have been poorly supported in commercial fonts in the past, but nearly all modern fonts can successfully handle both the Cedilla and Comma Below marks for S and T. As with all fonts, typographical quality can vary, and so it is preferable to use the single code points instead. Whenever a combining diacritical mark is used in a document, the font in use should be tested to confirm that it is rendered acceptably.


(La)TeX

LaTeX allows typesetting in Romanian using the cedilla Ş and Ţ using the Cork encoding. The comma-below variants are not completely supported in the standard 8-bit TeX font encodings. The lack of a standard LICR (LaTeX Internal Character Representations) for comma-below Ș and Ț is part of the problem. The latin10 input method attempts to remedy the problem by defining the \textcommabelow LICR accent. This is unfortunately not supported by the utf8 input method. The problem may partially worked around in a LaTeX document using these settings, which would allow use of ș, ț or their cedilla variants directly in the LaTeX source:
\usepackage atin10,utf8
% transliterates  utf8 chars with çedila at their comma-below representation
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % ş
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % Ş
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % ţ
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % Ţ

% transliterates utf8 comma-below characters to the comma-below representation
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % ș
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % Ș
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % ț
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter % Ț
The latin10 package composes the comma-below glyphs by superimposing a comma and the letters S and T. This method is suitable only for printing. In
PDF Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...
documents produced this way searching or copying text does not work properly. The Polish QX encoding has some support for comma-below glyphs, which are improperly mapped to cedilla LICRs, but also lacks A breve (Ă), which must always be composite, thus unsearchable. In the
Latin Modern Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern, or variants of it, remains very widely us ...
Type 1 fonts PostScript fonts are font files encoded in outline font specifications developed by Adobe Systems for professional digital typesetting. This system uses PostScript file format to encode font information. "PostScript fonts" may also separately be ...
the T with comma below is found under the AGL name /Tcommaaccent. This is in contradiction with Adobe's decision discussed above, which puts a T with comma-below at /Tcedilla. In consequence, no fixed mapping can work across all Type 1 fonts; each font must come with its own mapping. Unfortunately, TeX output drivers, like
dvips dvips is a computer program that converts the Device Independent file format (DVI) output of TeX typography into a printable or otherwise presentable form. was written by Tomas Rokicki to produce printable PostScript files from DVI input, and ...
,
dvipdfm The device independent file format (DVI) is the output file format of the TeX typesetting program, designed by David R. Fuchs and implemented by Donald E. Knuth in 1982. Unlike the TeX markup files used to generate them, DVI files are not inten ...
or pdfTeX's internal PDF driver, access the glyphs by AGL name. Since all of the output drivers mentioned are unaware of this peculiarity, the problem is essentially intractable across all fonts. In consequence, one needs to use fonts that include a mapping which is not bypassed by TeX. This is the case with newer TeX engine XeTeX, which can use Unicode OpenType fonts, and does not bypass the font's Unicode map.


Keyboard layout

Modern computer operating systems can be configured to implement a standard Romanian keyboard layout, to permit typing on any keyboard as if it were a Romanian keyboard. In systems such as Linux which employ the XCompose system, Romanian letters may be typed from a non-Romanian keyboard layout using a compose-key. The system's keyboard layout must be set up to use a compose-key. (Exactly how this is accomplished depends on the distribution.) For instance, the 'left Alt' key is often used as a compose-key. To type a letter with a diacritical mark, the compose-key is held down while another key is typed indicate the mark to be applied, then the base letter is typed. For instance, when using an English (US) keyboard layout, to produce ț, hold the compose-key down while typing semicolon ';', then release the compose-key and type 't'. Other marks may be similarly applied as follows:


Phonetic alphabet

There is a Romanian equivalent to the English-language NATO phonetic alphabet. Most code words are people's first names, with the exception of K, J, Q, W and Y. Letters with diacritics (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, Ț) are generally transmitted without diacritics (A, A, I, S, T).


See also

*
Aromanian alphabet The Aromanian alphabet ( rup, Alfabetu rrãmãnescu/armãnescu) is a variant of the Latin script used for writing the Aromanian language. The current version of the alphabet was suggested in 1997 at the ''Symposium for Standardisation of the Aroma ...
*
Istro-Romanian alphabet The Istro-Romanian alphabet is a variant of the Latin alphabet used by the Istro-Romanian language. The language is not standardized and therefore there are several writing systems for it. Up to three can be distinguished; one based on the Romania ...
*
Megleno-Romanian alphabet Megleno-Romanian may refer to: *Megleno-Romanians The Megleno-Romanians, also known as Meglenites ( ruq, Miglinits), Moglenite Vlachs or simply Vlachs ( ruq, Vlaș), are a small Eastern Romance people, originally inhabiting seven villages in ...
*
Romanian transitional alphabet The Romanian transitional alphabet ( ro, Alfabetul român de tranziție), also known as the civil alphabet ( ro, alfabetul civil), was a series of alphabets containing a mix of Cyrillic and Latin script, Latin characters used for the Romanian la ...
* Romanian Cyrillic alphabet * Romanian Braille


References


Notes


Bibliography

* Mioara Avram, ''Ortografie pentru toți'', Editura Litera Internațional, 2002 *


External links


Unicode Latin Extended-B characters
unicode.org

etc.tuiasi.ro {{DEFAULTSORT:Romanian Alphabet Latin alphabets Alphabet