Romanian alphabet

The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters: [ro icon "Dicţionarul explicativ al limbii române", 1998, [http://dexonline.ro/search.php?cuv=z Z is the thirty first letter of the Romanian alphabet] ]

|

The letters Q (read "kü" or "chiu"), W ("dublu ve"), and Y ("igrec" or "i grec") were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words, such as "quasar", "watt", and "yacht". The letters "K" and "X" are rarely used. The letter "K" is relatively older, used mainly for measure units "kilo", it is not used in Romanian words, and it is still perceived as foreign due to the fact that it appears only in borrowings, many of them still neologisms.

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", "Angoulême" etc., as opposed to the use of "Istanbul" over "İstanbul").

Letters and their pronunciation

Romanian spelling is mostly phonetic. 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 IPA|/i/, IPA|/u/, IPA|/e/, and IPA|/o/ 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 depends on the origin of the word they appear in.

Adobe/Linotype/Vista de-facto standard

Adobe decided [ [http://www.typophile.com/node/2764#comment-22015 comments of Canadian type designer John Hudson] ] that the Unicode glyphs "t with cedilla" U+0162/3 are not used in any language. 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 [Linotype's font finder allows users to test font rendering with their own sample texts. Tested with the sample text "ânit în an".http://www.linotype.com/featuresearch?cf [] =adobece&cf [] =euro&cf [] =latinext] .

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.

The free DejaVu and Linux Libertine fonts provide proper and consistent glyphs in both variants. Red Hat's Liberation fonts only support the comma below variants starting with version 1.04, scheduled for inclusion in Fedora 10.

OpenType ROM/locl feature

Some OpenType fonts from Adobe and all C-series implement the optional OpenType feature GSUB/latn/ROM/locl [ [http://www.microsoft.com/typography/otspec/features_ko.htm#locl locl glyph localization feature tag explained.] ] . 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 suite, only InDesign has support for it. [http://store.adobe.com/type/browser/pdfs/OTGuide.pdf p. 15]

The status of Romanian support in the free fonts that ship with Fedora is maintained [http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/L10N/Tasks/Ro_fonts#Font_status_matrix here] .

Combining characters

Unicode also allows diacritical marks to be represented as standalone combining characters. For Romanian characters this method is practically unsupported in commercial fonts. A few free fonts like Charis SIL, DejaVu or Linux Libertine support this method, but the typographical quality varies, thus it is preferable to use the single code points instead.

(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 extcommabelow LICR accent. This is unfortunately not supported by the utf8 input method.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 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 Type 1 fonts 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, dvipdfm 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

The current Romanian National Standard SR 13392:2004 establishes two layouts for Romanian keyboards: a “ [http://diacritice.sourceforge.net/imagini/ro.pngprimary] ” one and a “ [http://diacritice.sourceforge.net/imagini/ro_us.pngsecondary] ” one.

The “primary” layout is intended for more traditional users that learned long ago how to type with older, Microsoft-style implementations of the Romanian keyboard. The “secondary” layout is mainly used by programmers and it doesn’t contradict the physical arrangement of keys on a US-style keyboard. The „secondary” arrangement is used as the default one by the majority of GNU/Linux distributions.

There are four Romanian-specific characters that are incorrectly implemented in all Microsoft Windows versions before Vista:

- “S with comma below” (Unicode 0218) – incorrectly implemented as “S with cedilla below” (Unicode 015E)
- “s with comma below” (Unicode 0219) – incorrectly implemented as “s with cedilla below” (Unicode 015F)
- “T with comma below” (Unicode 021A) – incorrectly implemented as “T with cedilla below” (Unicode 0162)
- “t with comma below” (Unicode 021B) – incorrectly implemented as “t with cedilla below” (Unicode 0163)

The cedilla-versions of the characters don’t actually exist in Romanian language (it is purely a historic bug) – please see http://www.secarica.ro/html/s-uri_si_t-uri.html.

Since Romanian hardware keyboards are not widely available, Cristian Secară has created a driver that allows the Romanian characters to be generated with a US-style keyboard, in all Windows versions previous to Vista. It uses the right AltGr key modifier to generate the characters. The keyboard driver is available at http://www.secarica.ro/html/ro_keyboard.html (text is in Romanian).

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, Y, and Z. Letters with diacritics (Ă, Â, Î, Unicode|Ș, Unicode|Ț) are generally transmitted without diacritics (A, A, I, S, T).

References

Notes

Bibliography

* Mioara Avram, "Ortografie pentru toţi", Editura Litera Internaţional, 2002
*

ee also

* Romanian Cyrillic alphabet
* Moldovan alphabet

External links

* [http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0180.pdf Unicode Latin Extended-B characters]