Romanian phonology
Similarly, borrowings from languages such as French and German sometimes contain the close front rounded vowel /y/: ecru /eˈkry/, tul /tyl/, führer /ˈfyrer/, /ˈfyrər/.
One view considers that only /e̯a/ and /o̯a/ can follow an obstruent-liquid cluster such as in broască ('frog') and dreagă ('to mend')[5] and form real diphthongs, whereas the rest are merely vowel–glide sequences.
Borrowings from English have enlarged the set of ascending diphthongs to also include /jə/, /we/, /wi/, and /wo/, or have extended their previously limited use.
[15] Here stressed syllables are marked with underlining (a): This has since been morphologized and now shows up in verb conjugations[16] and nominal inflection: oaste — oști, 'army' — 'armies'.
Palatalized consonants appear mainly at the end of words,[21] and mark two grammatical categories: plural nouns and adjectives, and second person singular verbs.
However, /sʲ/, /tʲ/, and /dʲ/ become [ʃʲ], [t͡sʲ], and [zʲ], respectively,[22] with very few phonetically justified exceptions, included in the table below, which shows that this palatalization can occur for all consonants.
The non-syllabic /ʲ/ can be sometimes found inside compound words like câțiva /kɨt͡sʲˈva/ ('a few') and oricare /orʲˈkare/ ('whichever'), where the first morpheme happened to end in this /ʲ/.
In Old Romanian and still in some local pronunciations there is another example of such a non-syllabic, non-semivocalic phoneme, derived from /u/, which manifests itself as labialization of the preceding sound.
It is found at the end of some words after consonants and semivowels, as in un urs, pronounced /un ˈursʷ/ ('a bear'), or îmi spui /ɨmʲ spujʷ/ ('you tell me').
It is a trace of Latin endings containing /u(ː)/, /oː/ (-us, -ūs, -um, -ō), this phoneme is related to vowel /u/ used to connect the definite article "l" to the stem of a noun or adjective, as in domn — domnul /domn/ — /ˈdomnul/ ('lord — the lord', cf.
[23] Often, these interjections have multiple spellings or occasionally none at all, which accounts for the difficulty of finding the right approximation using existing letters.
Generally, stress falls on the last syllable of a stem (that is, the root and derivational affixes but excluding inflections).
[26] Stress is not normally marked in writing, except occasionally to distinguish between homographs, or in dictionaries for the headwords.
When it is marked, the main vowel of the stressed syllable receives an accent (usually acute, but sometimes grave), for example véselă 'jovial (fem.
In verb conjugation, noun declension, and other word formation processes, stress shifts can occur.
This contrasts with stress-timed languages such as English, Russian, and Arabic, in which syllables are pronounced at a lower or higher rate so as to achieve a roughly equal time interval between stressed syllables and with mora timing, exemplified by Classical Latin, Fijian, Finnish, Hawaiian, Japanese, and Old English.
In the case of Romanian, consonant clusters are often found both in the syllable onset and coda, which require physical time to be pronounced.
To a lesser extent, syllables are also lengthened by liquid and nasal consonants, and by semivowels in diphthongs and triphthongs, as in these examples: A simple way to evaluate the length of a word, and compare it to another, consists in pronouncing it repeatedly at a natural speech rate.
Most importantly, intonation is essential in questions since, unlike English and other languages, Romanian does not distinguish grammatically declarative and interrogative sentences.
