by As I’ve said before, Romanian has some complex sound changes. When you go from one person of a verb to another, it’s often not as simple as changing the ending. You’ll quite often get changes, or mutations, in the stem as well. This sounds a bit like genetics, doesn’t it? To show you what I mean, here’s the present tense of the verb a juca (to play):
eu joc – I play
tu joci – you play (singular)
el/ea joacă – he/she plays
noi jucăm – we play
voi jucați – you play (plural)
ei/ele joacă – they play
The vowel in the stem bounces around between o, oa and u, with the added bonus that because the stem ends in a c, you also get a consonant sound change in the second person singular (c before e or i is the English ch sound). This doesn’t just happen with verbs; you see it with the different forms of nouns and adjectives too.
You also come across sound changes when you form a longer word from a shorter one. When you lengthen the word, one of the vowels from the original word will often change, and a syllable that was originally stressed will become unstressed.
Examples:
țară (country) → țăran (peasant)
casă (house) → căsătorie (marriage)
Yep, the Romanian word for “marriage” comes from the word for “house”, and why shouldn’t it? What you see in both cases is the a sound being reduced to ă, which is a schwa. A side-effect of this vowel reduction is that the stress moves from the first syllable to later in the word. In țăran it shifts to the second syllable (there isn’t anywhere else for it to go) whereas in căsătorie it moves all the way down to the fourth syllable.
On the face of it, this seems crazy. What’s going on in Romania that makes their language so unnecessarily complicated? And then I thought about it for a minute…
In English this happens, and worse, all the time. Take the noun equator. It’s got three syllables, and therefore three vowel sounds. Some small points before I go further:
(a) yes it’s got four vowel letters, but that’s not what I’m talking about;
(b) the second of these vowel sounds, represented by the a, is what’s known as a diphthong;
(c) there exist such things as syllabic consonants which mean that not every syllable has to contain a vowel sound, although the vast majority do.
Anyway, equator is a noun which has three syllables and three vowel sounds. The stress is clearly on the second syllable. Simple. But look what happens when you form the five-syllable adjective equatorial. Precisely none of the original vowel sounds in equator remains the same. All three of them change! And what’s more, the stress shifts to the third syllable, with a hint of stress also on the first. The second syllable, which previously had the stress, is now entirely stressless.
While I’d be all for simplifying English spelling in principle, this shows one of the problems with fully phonetic spelling, in English at least. It’s quite handy that the word equatorial is just equator with some letters tacked on the end, even though the two words are pronounced quite differently. Under fully phonetic spelling, the words would be spelt something like ikwáytuhr and ekwuhtóriuhl, which look nothing like each other. One would be listed under I, the other under E! Another problem is that people pronounce things differently: do you go for skédyool or shédyool? Who would decide? The question is academic I suppose: English isn’t a geographically contained language like Romanian, which last went through a formal spelling reform in 1993, not long after the downfall of Communism. I couldn’t see any proposal to formally change English spelling ever getting off the ground.
With English pronunciation being all over the place, it’s a wonder anyone learns to speak it as a second language at all. That so many people do learn to speak English is, of course, because it’s all over the place. All over the TV, film, the radio, music, billboards, the internet, social media, and so on. You can’t avoid it. It makes me wonder what the future holds for less widely spoken languages, even languages like Romanian which currently has 20-odd million speakers.
