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The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the Latin Alphabet and consists of 28 letters: A, a (a); Ă, ă (ă); Â, â (â din a); B, b (be), C, c (ce); D, d (de), E, e (e); F, f (fe / ef); G, g (ghe / ge); H, h (ha / haş); I, i (i); Î, î (î din i); J, j (je), K, k (ka de la kilogram), L, l (le / el); M, m (me / em); N, n (ne / en); O, o (o); P, p (pe); R, r, (re / er); S, s (se / es); , (); T, t (te); , (); U, u (u); V, v (ve); X, x (ics); Z, z (ze / zet). DIACRITICAL MARKS Five of the above letters have diacritical marks:
The letter ''â'' is used exclusively in the middle of words; its Majuscule version appears only in all-capitals inscriptions. The letters ''Q'', ''W'', and ''Y'' only occur in foreign words, such as '' Quasar '', '' Watt '', and '' Yacht ''. The letters î and '''â''' are both phonetically and functionally identical. The reason for using both î and '''â''' is historical, denoting the language's Latin origin. During the communist regime, the Romanian government largely eliminated the letter '''â''', replacing it with î everywhere except for the name of the country, which remained ''Rom'''â'''nia''. (initially the country name too was spelled with "î" - ''Romînia'' - but it was later reverted). For example, the Latin ''angelus'' ( Angel ) became the Romanian '''''â'''nger'', but today it is spelled ''înger''. After the fall of the Ceauşescu regime, the Romanian Academy decided to reintroduce â. However, most of the population had only learned '''î''' spellings, so the Academy proposed a new set of rules for it. The choice between '''î''' and â is currently based on a simple rule: the letter is always spelled as â, except at the beginning and the end of words where '''î''' is used instead. Exceptions:
Writing letters and with a cedilla instead of a comma is considered incorrect by the language academy. Actual Romanian writings, including books created to teach children to write, treat the comma and cedilla as a variation in font. Historically, computers have made no distinction between the cedilla and comma below; and were added to Unicode in September 1999 and hence still aren't in common use. In some of the fonts shipped with Windows t-cedilla was replaced by t-comma, but s-cedilla was kept in its place, so sometimes texts are even written s-cedilla and t-comma. (Note that not all computer systems can properly render these "comma-below" characters. However, they are included as Special Romanian Unicode Characters in the Unicode standard and in ISO 8859-16 .) OBSOLETE LETTERS Discarded diacritical marks (from the adoption of the Latin alphabet to the early 1900s; neither had a Majuscule version):
An additional letter, ḑ / Ḑ (''d'' with comma) was used to replace the sound ''z'' where it was derived from a Latin ''d'', such as in ''ḑi'' - "day" ( 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 Allophone s are not taken into account. When vowels , , , and are changed into their corresponding Semivowel s, 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. See also Romanian Phonology . PHONETIC ALPHABET There is a Romanian equivalent to the English-language NATO Phonetic Alphabet . Most code words are people's first names, with exceptions for K, J, Q, W, Y, and Z. Letters with diacritics (Ă, Â, Î, Ş, Ţ) are generally transmitted without diacritics (A, A, I, S, T). UNICODE AND HTML There is a lot of confusion about how to write the Romanian characters that denote the sounds and . Although the officially preferred forms are, respectively, "s with comma below" and "t with comma below", many texts printed use "s with cedilla" and "t with cedilla" and in practice it appears to be a font variation. This usage has been aggregated into all character encoding standards for Central and Eastern Europe (including ISO 8859-2 ), which include "s" and "t" with cedillas. In addition, most computer fonts have "s-cedilla" with a Cedilla (like the Turkish equivalent) and "t-cedilla" with a Comma below. ISO 8859-16 includes "s" and "t" with comma below on the same places "s" and "t" with cedilla were in ISO 8859-2 . The Unicode standard defines the "comma-below" characters in the Latin Extended-B section ( Hex range 0180-024F). Vowels with diactitics are coded as follows: SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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