by I’ve strayed a bit lately from the whole point of this blog, and for that I apologise. I don’t want to be criticising my own mother, who is fundamentally a good person, or anybody else on here. This blog is supposed to have an optimistic slant to it (which I know is hard to achieve sometimes; after the Paris attacks it feels like the world is going to the dogs). From now on I’ll be talking about things I’ve done and dream of doing, places I’ve been to and dream of going to, and stuff that interests me. Like language.
When you learn a new language, you learn more about your own language, and I’m certainly learning more about English as I try to get a handle on Romanian.
Here are a few miscellaneous features of Romanian that I’ve picked up:
Romanian is a syllable-timed language, like French but unlike English which is a stress-timed language. To show you what I mean, consider this English sentence: I ran into my brother’s bedroom and hid in the wardrobe.
When I say the sentence above, I split it into two sections, a bit like bars of music: I ran into my brother’s bedroom / and hid in the wardrobe. The first section contains nine syllables, the second only six, but I take about the same length of time to say each section.
Furthermore, there are “important” syllables which receive extra stress, like a drum beat: I ran into my brother’s bedroom / and hid in the wardrobe. The time I take between those stressed syllables is (roughly) the same, no matter how many intervening syllables there are. I say the “into my brother’s” bit quickly so I can get to the next drum beat in time. Also at play here is that running into the bedroom is a short period of frenetic activity, whereas hiding in the wardrobe involves waiting. The speed at which we talk takes account of this difference in pace. Romanian doesn’t really do this and neither does French; in both languages you take about the same time over each syllable regardless of its importance in the sentence.
Romanian does have word stress, just like English but unlike French. Romanian stress isn’t always predictable, however. In English we stress the word elephant on the first syllable but in Romanian it’s the last syllable of elefant that is stressed. (Romanians write f where we write ph; good for them.) In French, all three syllables of éléphant receive more or less equal emphasis.
Romanian has schwas, just like English, French, German and Welsh, but not Spanish or Italian, or Maori for that matter. If you don’t know what a schwa is, you probably should because it’s the most common vowel sound in English. It’s represented by ǝ (an upside-down e) in the IPA, and it’s the “neutral” vowel found in the last syllable of normal, happen, pencil, bacon and album. The fact that English uses any of five letters to represent that same sound (actually make that six: zephyr) is one reason why so many of us struggle with spelling. Throw unpredictable double letters into the mix, and it’s no wonder people don’t know how to spell occurrence. (Is it an a or an e? One r or two?)
In French the schwa is represented by e; in Romanian it’s ă (and it’s great that it’s always the same letter). Unlike in English, schwas can occur in stressed syllables in Romanian, as in fără (stress on the first syllable) which means “without”.
