pronunciation

kman1
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pronunciation

Postby kman1 » 2009-04-24, 10:01

me reading Romanian:

http://readingproficiency.mypodcast.com ... chive.html

tips, rules that I'm missing?

AdiJapan
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Re: pronunciation

Postby AdiJapan » 2009-04-24, 10:15

kman1 wrote:me reading Romanian:
http://readingproficiency.mypodcast.com ... chive.html
tips, rules that I'm missing?

Sorry, you're missing just about everything. It's even much worse than your attempt on the Japanese text, which I've already dissected for you on another thread. It would take me a lot of time to list every single mistake in your Romanian pronunciation, so I just give up. Again, sorry.
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Re: pronunciation

Postby kman1 » 2009-05-09, 1:47

Hi adijapan, i apologize for responding so late my computer went dead about 2 weeks ago and I just received it back today and I am immediately going through all my old messages and responding to them. Sorry about the delay.

Well, regarding my Romanian pronunciation, I'd be grateful if you could list a few tips or something in general that I'm messing up on. That would be better than nothing but it's up to you. I already appreciate the tips you gave me regarding my Japanese pronunciation so... :)

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Re: pronunciation

Postby AdiJapan » 2009-05-09, 2:35

kman1 wrote:Well, regarding my Romanian pronunciation, I'd be grateful if you could list a few tips or something in general that I'm messing up on. That would be better than nothing but it's up to you. I already appreciate the tips you gave me regarding my Japanese pronunciation so...

First off, you chose a text that was written incorrectly, that is, without proper diacritics, and you read it as if it were correct. By doing that, you mispronounced all the sounds written ă î â ş ţ. Here is the same text with proper spellings:

Banii de la FMI se duc pe salarii. Bătălia între bugetari abia acum începe.

Principiile noii legi a salarizarii pun frâna salariilor exotice şi dau liber la creşterea celor mici. În discursul premierului şi în cel al ministrului Muncii nu s-a scos o vorbă despre relansarea sau stimularea economică. De aici şi concluzia: banii de la FMI intră în salariile bugetarilor şi a pensiilor, iar actuala campanie electorală devine cea mai costisitoare.

(Except for the diacritics and one period, I left the text unchanged, although there would be more to correct, for instance "şi a pensiilor" should have been "şi în pensii".)

Then you missed all the diphthongs, by pronouncing them as hiatuses. In particular the text contains several instances of ea, which should be pronounced with a semivocalic [e] (there are exceptions though).

Then you missed all the final i's that should be muted and reduced to a simple palatalization of the preceding consonant, in words such as: bugetari, legi, mici, aici.

Your [r] is trilled whereas Romanian /r/ is usually flapped, except in word-initial positions. Your [u] is a little Japanese-like, not fully rounded. Otherwise the sounds are generally well pronounced.

I'm not sure if you tried to get the stress position right. In some words you did stress the right vowel, but in many you didn't.

There are also a few local mistakes: FMI shouldn't be pronounced the English way, but [fe.me.i] (in English it would be IMF, for the International Monetary Fund); the x in the word exotice should be pronounced [gz].

The reading rithm, the total lack of intonation and the many hesitations show that in fact you don't understand what you're saying. From this point of view a text-to-speech program would do a better job.
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Re: pronunciation

Postby kman1 » 2009-05-09, 2:47

First off, you chose a text that was written incorrectly, that is, without proper diacritics, and you read it as if it were correct.
i didn't realize that. I guess reading the proper text would have helped me at least a little bit. thanks, i'll keep that in mind next time. any particular newspaper websites that you recommend I check out that are written correctly?

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Re: pronunciation

Postby AdiJapan » 2009-05-09, 4:45

kman1 wrote:any particular newspaper websites that you recommend I check out that are written correctly?

Adevărul: http://www.adevarul.ro/
Capital: http://www.capital.ro/
Cotidianul: http://www.cotidianul.ro/
Evenimentul zilei: http://www.evz.ro/
Gândul: http://www.gandul.info/
Jurnalul Naţional: http://www.jurnalul.ro/
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Re: pronunciation

Postby Balaur » 2009-05-09, 21:58

kman1 wrote:any particular newspaper websites that you recommend I check out that are written correctly?

Well, if you see an entire text completely void of diacritics, which are very common, you should know something's up. Unfortunately, most (seriously, most) Romanian texts you'll find online won't contain diacritics.
Vă rog să mă corectați dacă fac o greșeală în orice limbă. // Вэ рог сэ мэ коректаць дакэ фак о грешялэ ын орьче лимбэ. // Please correct me if I make a mistake in any language. // Bitte korrigiert mich, wenn ich einen Fehler in irgendeiner Sprache mache. // 請改正我任何語言中的錯誤。 // 请改正我任何语言中的错误。 // Παρακαλώ να με διορθώνουν αν κάνω ένα λάθο σε οποιηδήποτε γλώσσα.

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Re: pronunciation

Postby Cisza » 2009-05-11, 17:51

By the way, why diacritics is such a problem in Romania? It's the only country I know where most of web-sites owners think that this signs are redundant! OK, in the Internet it can be explained by possible problems of encoding (once I found a site where a user had an option to chose if he/she wants version with or without diacritics), but when I see a paper ticket on which something like "valabil pana la 20.08.2008 2 calatorii" is written, it drives me mad.

They always use diacritics in writing,but on some forums many prefer to write without diacritics (maybe because they're lazy). In some cases,there is a problem understanding a word ,because there are cases of 2 different words writen without diacritics to look the same . Other prefer to use : sh,ts and so on,even k instead of chi(ki),che(ke) and so on,but again that just ruins the aspect of the language.
I always write with diacritics and always use î inside the word( but this is a form of protest, and half of the newspapers and many published books also use this to protest against the dumb spelling reform)
Różnica między wielbłądem i człowiekiem – wielbłąd może pracować przez tydzień nie pijąc; człowiek może przez tydzień pić nie pracując.

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Re: pronunciation

Postby AdiJapan » 2009-05-12, 3:20

Cisza wrote:By the way, why diacritics is such a problem in Romania? It's the only country I know where most of web-sites owners think that this signs are redundant! OK, in the Internet it can be explained by possible problems of encoding (once I found a site where a user had an option to chose if he/she wants version with or without diacritics), but when I see a paper ticket on which something like "valabil pana la 20.08.2008 2 calatorii" is written, it drives me mad.

Your question is totally justified.

The problems started in a period when it was difficult to write with diacritics on the computer. About 15 years ago I had to draw my own font by hand, letter by letter, pixel by pixel, bold and italic and capital and whatnot, because there was no Romanian font around. Later on several fonts appeared, but there were still problems with encoding texts, porting those texts to other machines, making them display correctly and automatically, and sending them over the internet. It is barely 2-3 years ago that you could finally use Romanian diacritics with Yahoo mail. Before Wikipedia switched to Unicode, you had to use HTML codes, which was just too much of an effort. Older operating systems needed to be manually set up for displaying Romanian texts correctly. Even today, when I write comments in Matlab, I have to write them without diacritics, because when the code is saved some of the diacritics disappear. And these are just a few examples.

People's reluctance to use diacritics comes also from the fact that with rare exceptions a text can be understood without diacritics too. I find it somewhat harder to read, but people often think more about the ease of writing, and less about the ease of reading.

To make things worse, the diacritics used at first for Ş and Ţ are wrong and we need to change to the correct ones, Ș and Ț (which many computers still can't display). This means that there will be a transition period when text searching and other kinds of text processing will be impaired. Some people give it as an argument for not using diacritics at all.

It may also be considered rather cool among young people to write without diacritics, because they saw that even experienced programmers do so. They can claim that writing with diacritics means being pedantic, or caring too much about form as opposed to content.

On discussion forums people often say they don't have the administrative rights for the computers they use, so thay can't set up the keyboard. Some of them insist that, although they are in Romania (where just about any computer should be set to the Romanian keyboard by default), they work for foreign companies and only use some foreign language, so they cannot justify setting the keyboard to Romanian. I'm pretty sure a part of these people are just lying.

Then there is this vicious circle: users got used to not using diacritics -> software producers don't provide support for using diacritics -> new users get used to not using diacritics, and so on. We owe it largely to Unicode, which provides simultaneous support for a lot of languages, that the problem of Romanian diacritics was solved. If Romanian were the only language on earth using diacritics, I believe we would still have the same problems now as we had in the 90's.

Normally the problem appears only in the digital medium. In handwriting nobody forgets to use the proper diacritics. But, as you noticed, sometimes printed materials also lack them, most probably because of using bad software or because of misusing good software.
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Re: pronunciation

Postby Lietmotiv » 2009-05-14, 22:23

They always use diacritics in writing,but on some forums many prefer to write without diacritics (maybe because they're lazy). In some cases,there is a problem understanding a word ,because there are cases of 2 different words writen without diacritics to look the same;of course,for a Romanian is easy to understand even without diacritics,but for a foreigner it's a bad thing. . Other prefer to use : sh,ts and so on,even k instead of chi(ki),che(ke) and so on,but again that just ruins the aspect of the language.
I always write with diacritics and always use î inside the word( but this is a form of protest, and half of the newspapers and many published books also use this to protest against the dumb spelling reform)

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Re: pronunciation

Postby Cisza » 2009-05-15, 15:47

By the way, when was the previous reform when Romanian got rid of bulk of letters stood for â sound in favour of î (with the only exception for România, of course)?
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Re: pronunciation

Postby AdiJapan » 2009-05-15, 16:41

Cisza wrote:By the way, when was the previous reform when Romanian got rid of bulk of letters stood for â sound in favour of î (with the only exception for România, of course)?

In 1953 it was decided oficially to completely remove the letter â from the alphabet. That is, even words like România and român were written Romînia and romîn. Then in 1964 they thought they went too far, and allowed the letter â in words related to român. But even before 1953 (as early as in the 20's) there were publications not using â.

Prior to that, around the end of the 19th century, the letter û started to fall out of use. It had the same phonetic value as î and was used in words that etymologically hat a u in that position, such as adûnc and sûnt. Soon after that, the letter ê (same phonetic value) disappeared; it used to appear in words like mormênt. Probably a fifth leter with the same value was ô, in words like gônd, but I've never seen it in old writings.

Anyway, at the 1904 reform it was formally decided to keep only two letters for this sound: î and â. The proposed rule for using them was initially very different: â after c and g, and î elsewhere, except in român & co. But the rule never got to be applied and was replaced by one similar to that of today: î at the word ends and â inside, with some exceptions.
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Re: pronunciation

Postby ravinescu » 2009-05-21, 9:12

Cisza wrote:By the way, why diacritics is such a problem in Romania? It's the only country I know where most of web-sites owners think that this signs are redundant!


Dacă vrei să înţelegi cauzele pentru care nu se folosesc diacritice pe internetul românesc citeşte discuţia de mai jos:

http://forum.softpedia.com/index.php?sh ... &p=3917945

Cisza wrote:They always use diacritics in writing,but on some forums many prefer to write without diacritics (maybe because they're lazy).


Nu, nu e vorba de preferinţă, ci de obişnuinţă, care se întinde pe ani de zile. Cei care scriu fără diacritice nu vor să scrie cu diacritice, pentru că în acest fel ar avea o viteză de scriere de 5-10 ori mai mică. Bineînţeles că ar putea să depună un efort şi să se obişnuiască să scrie cu diacritice, dar tocmai pentru că scrisul fără ele este tolerat (permis) pe internet, ei nu doresc să depună acest efort care i-ar face să scrie după cîteva luni aproape la fel de repede ca şi fără diacritice. Din păcate în categoria de "leneşi" se încadrează şi profesori de română sau scriitori, cei care ar trebui să dea un exemplu de scriere corectă.

Cisza wrote:I always write with diacritics and always use î inside the word( but this is a form of protest, and half of the newspapers and many published books also use this to protest against the dumb spelling reform)


Procedezi foarte bine. Limba română adevărată se scrie cu Î din I şi Sînt. În acest fel nu numai că se respectă logica limbii (1 sunet = 1 literă), dar se dovedeşte şi spirit practic, adică se scrie cu "sînt", aşa cum vorbesc românii în marea lor majoritate ("sunt" e greu de pronunţat în vorbirea obişnuită, rapidă). De altfel "sînt" este cuvîntul românesc adevărat, prezent şi în cărţile vechi de sute de ani, "sunt" a fost băgat în limbă în secolul 19, el este un cuvînt latinesc, nu românesc.
Last edited by ravinescu on 2009-05-21, 9:29, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: pronunciation

Postby ravinescu » 2009-05-21, 9:25

Cisza wrote:By the way, when was the previous reform when Romanian got rid of bulk of letters stood for â sound in favour of î (with the only exception for România, of course)?


Litera  este folosită pentru acelaşi sunet ca şi Î. Sunetul respectiv este înrudit cu I şi nu cu A, asta se vede şi din semnul pentru el în fonetică ( ɨ ). Deci scrisul cu Î este cel corect, scrisul cu  este doar o măsură ce ţine de estetică (de aspectul cuvintelor în scris, pentru că în vorbire nu există nici o diferenţă între Î şi Â).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_cent ... nded_vowel

De ce s-a făcut greşeala de a-l reintroduce pe  în 1993 ? Ai răpunsurile în discuţia de mai jos:

http://forum.softpedia.com/index.php?showtopic=454379

Din păcate România e probabil singura ţară unde s-a făcut o reformă ortografică care a complicat scrisul. Şi asta doar din motive de lăudăroşenie, pentru a le băga în ochi străinilor originea latină a limbii române. În România există impresia că înrudirea cu latina aduce automat un plus de respect pentru limbă. Asta nu ştiu cît de adevărat este, însă în momentul de faţă românilor înşişi nu le mai pasă de asta, o mare parte dintre ei iubesc mai mult engleza (o limbă de origine germanică) decît româna.

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Romanian spelling

Postby 0stsee » 2009-06-24, 10:25

Honestly when I type Romanian, I usually replace ă with ä (I live in Germany), ţ with ts, ş with sh. I also prefer î to â (except in român and related words) and sînt. If I'm very lazy I even use y instead of î. But this last one rarely happens.
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