Romanian Alpha bet

For historical Cyrillic Alpha bet used for the Romanian language, seeRomanian Cyrillic Alpha bet.

Romanian Alpha bet
Script type	Alphabet
Time period	1860s – present
Languages	Romanian
Related scripts
Parent systems	Egyptian hieroglyphs Proto-Sinaitic Phoenician Alpha bet Greek Alpha bet Latin Alpha bet Italian Alpha bet Romanian Alpha bet
Unicode
Unicode range	subset ofLatin (U+0000...U+024F)

TheRomanian Alpha betis a variant of theLatin Alpha betused for writing theRomanian language.It is a modification of theclassical Latin Alpha betand consists of 31 letters,five of which (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, and Ț) have been modified from their Latin originals for the phonetic requirements of the language:

Letter	Name
Aa	a
Ăă	ă
Ââ	î din a
Bb	be / bî
Cc	ce / cî
Dd	de / dî
Ee	e
Ff	ef / fe / fî
Gg	ge / ghe / gî
Hh	haș / ha / hî
Ii	i
Îî	î din i
Jj	je / jî
Kk	ca / capa
Ll	el / le / lî
Mm	em / me / mî
Nn	en / ne / nî
Oo	o
Pp	pe / pî
Qq	chiu (/ky/)
Rr	er / re / rî
Ss	es / se / sî
Șș	șe / șî
Tt	te / tî
Țț	țe / țî
Uu	u
Vv	ve / vî
Ww	dublu ve / dublu vî
Xx	ics
Yy	i grec
Zz	ze / zet / zed / zî

The letters Q (chiu), W (dublu v), and Y (igrecori grec,meaning "Greek i" ) were formally introduced in the Romanian Alpha bet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such asquasar,watt,andyacht.The letterK,although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such askilogram,broker,karate.These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their usage for stylistic purposes in words such asnomenklatură(normallynomenclatură,meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled withkinstead ofcif referring to members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, asnomenklaturais used in English).

In cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above Alpha bet, official spelling tends to favor their use (München,Angoulêmeetc., as opposed to the use ofIstanbuloverİstanbul).

Letters and their pronunciation

See also:Romanian phonology

Romanian spelling is mostly phonemic withoutsilent letters(but seei). The table below gives the correspondence between letters and sounds. Some of the letters have several possible readings, even ifallophonesare not taken into account. When vowels/i/,/u/,/e/,and/o/are changed into their correspondingsemivowels,this is not marked in writing. Letters K, Q, W, and Y appear only in foreign borrowings; the pronunciation of W and Y and of the combination QU depends on the origin of the word they appear in.

Letter	Phoneme	Approximate pronunciation
A a	/a/	ain "father"
Ăă(a withbreve)	/ə/	ain "above"
Ââ(a withcircumflex)	/ɨ/	theclose central unrounded vowelas heard, for example, in the last syllable of the wordrosesfor some English speakers
B b	/b/	bin "ball"
C c	/k/	cin "scan"
	/tʃ/	chin "chimpanzee" — ifcappears before letterseori(but notî); in this case,eandiare usually not pronounced in the combinations:cea(ciain some loanwords),cio,ciuand in word-finalciif not accented
D d	/d/	din "dancing"
E e	/e/	ein "merry"
	/e̯/,/ɛ̯/	beforeaoro— semivocalic/e/;if not preceded by a consonant becomes/j/
	/je/,/jɛ/	yein "yes" — in a few old words with initiale:este,eletc.
F f	/f/	fin "flag"
G g	/ɡ/	gin "goat"
	/d͡ʒ/	gin "general" — ifgappears before letterseori(but notî); in this case,eandiare usually not pronounced in the combinations:gea(giain some loanwords),gio(geoin some loanwords),giuand in word-finalgiif not accented
H h	/h/([h],[ç],[x])	chin Scottish "loch" orhin English "ha!" or more usually a subtle mix of the two (that is, not so guttural as the Scottishloch.)
	(mute)	no pronunciation ifhappears between letterscorgandeori(che, chi, ghe, ghi);candgare palatalized
I i	/i/	iin "machine"
	/j/	yin "yes"
	/ʲ/	Indicatespalatalizationof the preceding consonant (when word-final and unstressed, in some compounds likeoricum,and in the combinationschia, chio, chiu, ghia, ghio, ghiu)
Îî(i withcircumflex)	/ɨ/	Identical to Â, see above, used at the beginning and at the end of the word for etymological reasons, ex. "to learn" = "a învăța"; "to kill" = "a omorî"
J j	/ʒ/	sin "treasure"
K k	/k/	cin "scan" (palatalized beforeeandi)
L l	/l/	lin "limp"
M m	/m/	min "mouth"
N n	/n/	nin "north"
O o	/o/	oin "floor"
	/o̯/,/ɔ̯/	beforea— semivocalic/o/;if not preceded by a consonant becomes/w/
P p	/p/	pin "spot"
Q q	/k/	cin "scan" (quis pronounced/kw/,/kv/,or/kʲ/)
R r	/r/	alveolar trillortap
S s	/s/	sin "song"
Ș ș(s withcomma)*	/ʃ/	shin "shopping"
T t	/t/	tin "stone"
Ț ț(t withcomma)*	/t͡s/	tsin "cats"
U u	/u/	uin "group"
	/w/	win "cow"
	/y/	Frenchuor Germanü(close front rounded vowel) — in some loanwords from French:ecru, tul
V v	/v/	vin "vision"
W w	/v/	vin "vision"
	/w/	win "west"
	/u/	ooin "spoon"
X x	/ks/	xin "six"
	/ɡz/	xin "example"
Y y	/j/	yin "yes"
	/i/	iin "machine"
Z z	/z/	zin "zipper"

^*SeeComma-below (ș and ț) versus cedilla (ş and ţ).

Special letters

Pre-(top) and post-1993 (bottom) street signs inBucharest,showing the two different spellings of the same name

Romanianorthographydoes not use accents ordiacritics– these are secondary symbols added to letters (i.e. basicglyphs) to alter their pronunciation or to distinguish between words. There are, however, five special letters in the Romanian Alpha bet (associated with four different sounds) which are formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking these letters function as basic glyphs in their own right rather than letters with diacritical marks, but they are often referred to as the latter.

• Ă ă—awithbreve– for the sound/ə/
• Â â—awithcircumflex– for the sound/ɨ/
• Î î—iwithcircumflex– for the sound/ɨ/
• Ș ș—swithcomma– for the sound/ʃ/
• Ț ț—twithcomma– for the sound/ts/

The letterâis used exclusively in the middle of words; itsmajusculeversion appears only in all-capitals inscriptions.

Writing letters ș and ț with a cedilla instead of a comma is considered incorrect by the Romanian Academy. Romanian writings, including books created to teach children to write, treat the comma and cedilla as a variation in font. SeeUnicode and HTMLbelow.

Î versus Â

The lettersîandâare phonetically andfunctionallyidentical. The reason for using both of them is historical, denoting the language'sLatinorigin.

For a few decades until aspelling reformin 1904, as many as four or five letters had been used for the same phoneme (â,ê,î,û,and occasionallyô,seeRemoved Letters), according to an etymological rule.All were used to represent the vowel/ɨ/,toward which the original Latin vowels written with circumflexes had converged. The 1904 reform saw only two letters remaining,âandî,the choice of which followed rules that changed several times during the 20th century.

During the first half of the century the rule was to useîin word-initial and word-final positions, andâeverywhere else. There were exceptions, imposing the use ofîin internal positions when words were combined or derived with prefixes or suffixes. For example, the adjectiveurît"ugly" was written withîbecause it derives from the verba urî"to hate".

In 1953, during theCommunist era,theRomanian Academyeliminated the letterâ,replacing it withîeverywhere, including the name of the country, which was to be spelledRomînia.The first stipulation coincided with the official designation of the country as aPeople's Republic,which meant that its full title wasRepublica Populară Romînă.A minor spelling reform in 1964 brought back the letterâ,but only in the spelling ofromân"Romanian" and all its derivatives, including the name of the country. As such, theSocialist Republicproclaimed in 1965 is associated with the spellingRepublica Socialistă România.

Soon after the fall of theCeaușescugovernment, theRomanian Academydecided to reintroduceâfrom 1993 onward, by canceling the effects of the 1953 spelling reform and essentially reverting to the 1904 rules (with some differences). The move was publicly justified as the rectification either of a Communist assault on tradition, or of a Soviet influence on the Romanian culture, and as a return to a traditional spelling that bears the mark of the language's Latin origin.The political context at the time, however, was that the Romanian Academy was largely regarded as a Communist and corrupt institution —Nicolae Ceaușescuand his wifeElenahad been its honored members, and membership had been controlled by the Communist Party.As such, the 1993 spelling reform was seen as an attempt of the Academy to break with its Communist past.The Academy invited the national community of linguists as well as foreign linguists specialized in Romanian to discuss the problem;when these overwhelmingly opposed the spelling reform in vehement terms, their position was explicitly dismissed as being too scientific.

According to the 1993 reform, the choice betweenîandâis thus again based on a rule that is neither strictly etymological nor phonological, but positional and morphological. The sound is always spelled asâ,except at the beginning and the end of words, whereîis to be used instead. Exceptions includeproper nounswhere the usage of the letters is frozen, whichever it may be, and compound words, whose components are each separately subjected to the rule (e.g.ne-+îndemânatic→neîndemânatic"clumsy", not *neândemânatic). However, the exception no longer applies to words derived with suffixes, in contrast with the 1904 norm; for instance what was spelledurîtafter 1904 becameurâtafter 1993.

Although the reform was promoted as a means to show the Latin origin of Romanian, statistically only few of the words written withâaccording to the 1993 reform actually derive from Latin words having anain the corresponding position.In fact, this includes a large number of words that contained aniin the original Latin and are similarly written withiin their Italian or Spanish counterparts. Examples includerîu"river", from the Latinrivus(compareSpanishrío), now writtenrâu;along withrîde<ridere,sîn<sinus,strînge<stringere,lumînare<luminaria,etc.

While the 1993 spelling norm is compulsory inRomanian educationand official publications, and gradually most other publications came to use it, there are still individuals, publications and publishing houses preferring the previous spelling norm or a mixed hybrid system of their own; among them are the weekly cultural magazineDilema Vecheand the dailyGazeta Sporturilor.Some publications allow authors to choose either spelling norm; these includeRomânia literară,the magazine of theWriters' Union of Romania,and publishing houses such asPolirom.Dictionaries, grammars and other linguistic works have also been published using theîandsîntlong after the 1993 reform.

Ultimately, the conflict results from two different linguistically-based reasonings as to how to spell/ɨ/.The choice ofâderives fromabeing the most average or central of the five vowels (the officialBulgarian romanizationuses the same logic, choosingafor ъ, resulting in the country's name being spelledBalgariya;and also the European Portuguese vowel/ɐ/foramentioned above), whereasîis an attempt to choose the Latin letter that most intuitively writes the sound/ɨ/(similarly to howPolishuses the lettery).

Comma-below (șandț) versus cedilla (şandţ)

Although the Romanian Academy standard mandates the comma-below variants for the sounds/ʃ/and/ts/,the cedilla variants are still widely used. Many printed and online texts still incorrectly use "s with cedilla"and"t with cedilla".This state of affairs is due to an initial lack of glyph standardization, compounded by the lack of computer font support for the comma-below variants (see theUnicodesection for details).

The lack of support for the comma diacritics has been corrected in current versions of major operating systems: Windows Vista or newer, Linux distributions after 2005 and currently supported macOS versions. As mandated by the European Union, Microsoft released afont updateto correct this deficiency in Windows XP (also applicable to 2000/Server 2003) in early 2007, soon after Romania joined the European Union.

Obsolete letters

Old Bucharestmanhole coverinscribed according to the etymologically prone spelling at the time, which readsBUCURESCI CANALISARE(meaningBucharest, sewers). Compare to today'sBUCUREȘTI CANALIZARE.

Before the spelling reform of 1904, there were several additional letters with diacritical marks.

• Vowels:
  • ĭ—iwithbreveindicatedsemivowelias part of Romaniandiphthongsandtriphthongsia,ei,ieietc., or a final, "whispered" sound of the precedingpalatalizedconsonant, in words such asBucurești(/bu.kuˈreʃtʲ/),lupi(/lupʲ/– "wolves" ), andgreci(/ɡret͡ʃʲ/– "Greeks" ) —Bucurescĭ(the proper spelling at the time usedcinstead oft,see-ești),lupĭ,grecĭ,like the Slavonicsoft sign.TheMoldovan CyrillicAlpha bet kept the Cyrillic equivalents of this letter, namely й and ь, but it was abolished in the Romanian Latin Alpha bet for unknown reasons. By replacing this letter with a simpleiwithout making any additional changes, the phonetic value of the letteribecame ambiguous; even native speakers can sometimes mispronounce words such as the toponymPecica(which has two syllables, but is often mistakenly pronounced with three) or the nameMavrogheni(which has four syllables, not three).Additionally, in a number of words such assubiect"subject"andziar"newspaper",the pronunciation ofias a vowel or as a semivowel is different among speakers.
  • ŭ—uwithbrevewas used only in the ending of a word. It was essentially a Latin equivalent of the Slavonicback yerfound in languages like Russian. Unpronounced in most cases, it served to indicate that the previous consonant was not palatalized, or that the precedingiwas the vowel[i]and not a mere marker of palatalization. Whenŭwas pronounced, it would follow a stressed vowel and stand in for semivowelu,as in wordseŭ,aŭ,andmeŭ,all spelled today without the breve. Once frequent, it survives today in authorMateiu Caragiale's name – originally spelledMateiŭ(it is not specified whether the pronunciation should adopt a version that he himself probably never used, while in many editions he is still credited asMatei). In other names, only the breve was dropped, while preserving the pronunciation of a semivowelu,as is the case ofB.P. Hasdeŭ.
  • ĕ—ewithbreve.This letter is now replaced withă.The existence of two letters for one sound, the schwa, had an etymological purpose, showing from which vowel ( "a" or "e" ) it originally derived. For exampleîmpĕrat– "emperor" (<Imperator),vĕd– "I see" (<vedo),umĕr– "shoulder" (<humerus),păsĕri– "birds" (< cf.passer).
  • é / É— Latin small/capital letterewithacute accentindicated a sound that corresponds either to today's Romaniandiphthongea,or in some words, to today's Romanian lettere.It would originally indicate the sound of Romanian letterewhen it was pronounced as diphthongeain certain Romanian regions, e.g.acéste(today spelledaceste) andcéle(today spelledcele). This letter would sometimes indicate a derived word from a Romanian root word containing Latin lettere,as is the case ofmirésă(today spelledmireasă) derived frommire.For other words it would underlie a relationship between a Romanian word and a Latin word containing lettere,where the Romanian word would useé,such asgréle(today spelledgrele) derived from Latin wordgrevis.Lastly, this letter was used to accommodate the sound that corresponds to today's Romanian diphthongia,as in the wordér(iartoday).
  • ó / Ó— Latin small/capital letterowithacute accentindicated a sound that corresponds to today's Romanian diphthongoa.This letter would sometimes indicate a derived word from a Romanian root word containing Latin lettero,as is the case ofpopóre(today spelledpopoare) derived frompopor.For other words it would underlie a relationship between a Romanian word and a Latin word containing lettero,where the Romanian word would useó,such asfórte(today spelledfoarte) derived from Latin wordforte.Lastly, this letter was used to accommodate the sound that corresponds to today's Romanian diphthongoa,as in the wordfóme(foametoday).
  • ê,ûandô— seeÎ vs Â
• Consonants
  • d̦ / D̦— Latin small/capital letterdwith comma below was used to indicate the sound that corresponds today to Romanian letterz.It would denote that the word it belonged to derived from Latin and that its corresponding Latin letter wasd.Examples of words containing this letter are:d̦ece( "ten" ),d̦i( "day" ) – reflecting its derivationfrom the Latin worddies,Dumned̦eu( "God" ) – reflectingthe Latin phraseDomineDeus,d̦ână( "fairy" )– to be derived from the Latin wordDiana.In today's Romanian language this letter is no longer present and Latin letterzis used in its stead. A parallel development has occurred inPolish,which turneddbefore a front vowel (iore) intodz;Romanian then removed thedto leave thez.

In addition, the acute accent (á,í) was used in verb infinitives and 3rd-person imperfect forms stressed on the last syllable:lăudá( "to praise" ),aud̦í( "to hear" ), 3rd-person imperfectlăudá,aud̦iá.The grave accent (à,ì,ù) was used in 3rd-person perfect forms stressed on the last syllable:lăudà,aud̦ì.

Use of these letters was not fully adopted even before 1904, as some publications (e.g.TimpulandUniversul) chose to use a simplified approach that resembled today's Romanian language writing.

Other diacritics

As with other languages, theacute accentis sometimes used in Romanian texts to indicate thestressed vowelin some words. This use is regular in dictionary headwords, but also occasionally found in carefully edited texts to disambiguate betweenhomographsthat are not alsohomophones,such as to differentiate betweencópii( "copies" ) andcopíi( "children" ),éra( "the era" ) anderá( "was" ),ácele( "the needles" ) andacéle( "those" ), etc. The accent also distinguishes between homographic verb forms, such asîncúieandîncuié( "he locks" and "he has locked" ).

Diacritics in some borrowings are kept:bourrée,pietà.Foreign names are also usually spelled with their original diacritics:Bâle,Molière,even when an acute accent might be wrongly interpreted as a stress, as inIstvánorGérard.However, frequently used foreign names, such as names of cities or countries, are often spelled without diacritics:Bogota,Panama,Peru.

Digital typography

ISO 8859

Widespread incorrect usage of Romanian diacritics with examples

The character encoding standardISO 8859initially defined a single code page for the entire Central and Eastern Europe —ISO 8859-2.This code page includes only "s" and "t" with cedillas. The South-Eastern EuropeanISO 8859-16includes "s" and "t" with comma below on the same places "s" and "t" with cedilla were in ISO 8859-2. The ISO 8859-16 code page became a standard after Unicode became widespread, however, so it was largely ignored by software vendors.

Unicode and HTML

The circumflex and breve accented Romanian letters were part of theUnicodestandard since its inception, as well as the cedilla variants of s and t. Ș and ț (comma-below variants) were added to Unicode version 3.0.From Unicode version 3.0 to version 5.1, the cedilla-using characters were specified by the Unicode Standard to be "used in both Turkish and Romanian data" and that "a glyph variant with comma below is preferred for Romanian"; On the newly encoded comma-using characters, it said that they should be used "when distinct comma below form is required".Unicode 5.2 explicitly states that "the form with the cedilla is preferred in Turkish, and the form with the comma below is preferred in Romanian", while mentioning (possibly for historical reasons) that "in Turkish and Romanian, a cedilla and a comma below sometimes replace one another".

Widespread adoption was hampered for some years by the lack of fonts providing the new glyphs. In May 2007, four months after Romania (and Bulgaria) joined theEU,Microsoft released updated fonts that include all official glyphs of the Romanian (andBulgarian) Alpha bet.This font update targeted Windows 2000, XP and Server 2003. The subset of Unicode most widely supported on Microsoft Windows systems,Windows Glyph List 4,still does not include the comma-below variants of S and T.

Phoneme	With comma (official)			With cedilla
	Character	Unicode position (hex)	HTML entity	Character	Unicode position (hex)	HTML entity
/ʃ/	Ș	0218	Ș or Ș	Ş	015E	Ş or Ş or Ş
	ș	0219	ș or ș	ş	015F	ş or ş or ş
/t͡s/	Ț	021A	Ț or Ț	Ţ	0162	Ţ or Ţ or Ţ
	ț	021B	ț or ț	ţ	0163	ţ or ţ or ţ

Vowels with diacritics are coded as follows:

Phoneme	Character	Unicode position (hex)	HTML entity
/ə/	Ă	0102	Ă or Ă or Ă
	ă	0103	ă or ă or ă
/ɨ/	Â	00C2	 or  or Â
	â	00E2	â or â or â
	Î	00CE	Î or Î or Î
	î	00EE	î or î or î

Adobe/Linotype de facto standard

Inconsistent cedilla glyphs in Adobe Caslon (left). The correct Romanian rendering (right) can be obtained by activating theOpenTypeGSUB/latn/ROM/loclfeature, which remaps the s with cedilla glyph to comma-below. The rendering on the right is visually indistinguishable from the rendering produced by comma-below code points for this font.

Adobe Systemsdecidedthat the Unicode glyphs "t with cedilla" U+0162/3 are not used in any language. (It is in fact used, but in very few languages. T with Cedilla exists as part of theGeneral Alphabet of Cameroon Languages,in some Gagauz orthographies, in theKabyle dialectof theBerber language,and possibly elsewhere.) 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 ş and ţ) are rendered in Adobe fonts in a visually inconsistent way using "s with cedilla", but "t with comma" (see figure).Linotypefonts that support Romanian glyphs mostly follow this convention.

The fonts used by Microsoft before Windows Vista also implement this de facto Adobe standard. Few Microsoft fonts provide a consistent look when cedilla variants are used; notable ones areTahoma,Verdana,Trebuchet MS,Microsoft Sans SerifandSegoe UI.

The freeDejaVuandLinux Libertinefonts provide proper and consistent glyphs in both variants.Red Hat'sLiberation fontsonly support the comma below variants starting with version 1.04, scheduled for inclusion inFedora10.

OpenTypeROM/loclfeature

SomeOpenTypefonts from Adobe and all C-seriesVista fontsimplement the optional OpenType featureGSUB/latn/ROM/locl.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 (Arialetc.) do not implement theROM/loclfeature, 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.VerdanaandTrebuchet 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 whenROM/loclis activated. The free DejaVu and Linux Libertine fonts do not yet offer this feature in their current releases, but development versions do.

Pangosupports thelocltagsince version 1.17.XeTeXsupportsloclsince version 0.995. As of July 2008, very few Windows applications support theloclfeature tag. From the AdobeCS3suite, onlyInDesignhas support for it.

The status of Romanian support in the free fonts that ship withFedorais maintained atFedoraproject.org.

Combining characters

Unicode also allows diacritical marks to be represented as separatecombining diacritical marks.The relevant combining accents are U+0326 COMBINING COMMA BELOW and U+0327 COMBINING CEDILLA. Support for applying a combining Comma Below to letters S and T may have been poorly supported in commercial fonts in the past, but nearly all modern fonts can successfully handle both the Cedilla and Comma Below marks for S and T. As with all fonts, typographical quality can vary, and so it is preferable to use the single code points instead. Whenever a combining diacritical mark is used in a document, the font in use should be tested to confirm that it is rendered acceptably.

(La)TeX

LaTeXallows typesetting in Romanian using the cedilla Ş and Ţ using theCork encoding.The comma-below variants are not completely supported in the standard 8-bit TeX font encodings. The lack of a standardLICR(LaTeX Internal Character Representations) for comma-below Ș and Ț is part of the problem. Thelatin10input method attempts to remedy the problem by defining the \textcommabelow LICR accent. This is unfortunately not supported by theutf8input method.

The problem may partially worked around in a LaTeX document using these settings, which would allow use of ș, ț or their cedilla variants directly in the LaTeX source:

\usepackage[latin10,utf8]{inputenc}

% transliterates utf8 chars with çedila at their comma-below representation
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{015F}{\textcommabelow s} % ş
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{015E}{\textcommabelow S} % Ş
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0163}{\textcommabelow t} % ţ
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0162}{\textcommabelow T} % Ţ

% transliterates utf8 comma-below characters to the comma-below representation
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0219}{\textcommabelow s} % ș
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0218}{\textcommabelow S} % Ș
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{021B}{\textcommabelow t} % ț
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{021A}{\textcommabelow T} % Ț

Thelatin10package composes the comma-below glyphs by superimposing a comma and the letters S and T. This method is suitable only for printing. InPDFdocuments 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 theLatin ModernType 1 fontsthe 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, likedvips,dvipdfmorpdfTeX's internal PDF driver, access the glyphs byAGLname. 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 engineXeTeX,which can use Unicode OpenType fonts, and does not bypass the font's Unicode map.

Keyboard layout

Modern computer operating systems can be configured to implement a standard Romanian keyboard layout, to permit typing on any keyboard as if it were a Romanian keyboard.

Main article:Romanian keyboard layout

In systems such as Linux which employ the XCompose system, Romanian letters may be typed from a non-Romanian keyboard layout using acompose-key. The system's keyboard layout must be set up to use a compose-key. (Exactly how this is accomplished depends on the distribution.) For instance, the 'left Alt' key is often used as a compose-key.

To type a letter with a diacritical mark, the compose-key is held down while another key is typed indicate the mark to be applied, then the base letter is typed. For instance, when using an English (US) keyboard layout, to produce ț, hold the compose-key down while typing semicolon ';', then release the compose-key and type 't'. Other marks may be similarly applied as follows:

letter	mark key	base letter	note
ț	;	t
ă	U	a	shift-u for U
î	^	i	shift-6 for ^

Spelling Alpha bet

There is a Romanian equivalent to the English-languagespelling Alpha bets.Most of the code words are people's first names, with the exception of K, J, Q, W and Y. Letters with diacritics (Ă, Â, Î, Ș, Ț) are generally transmitted without diacritics (A, A, I, S, T).

	Word	IPA(unofficial)
A	Ana	/ˈa.na/
B	Barbu	/ˈbar.bu/
C	Constantin	/kon.stanˈtin/
D	Dumitru	/duˈmi.tru/
E	Elena	/eˈle.na/
F	Florea	/ˈflo.re̯a/
G	Gheorghe	/ˈɡe̯or.ɡe/
H	Haralambie	/ha.raˈlam.bi.e/
I	Ion	/iˈon/
J	Jiu	/ʒiw/
K	kilogram	/ki.loˈɡram/
L	Lazăr	/ˈla.zər/
M	Maria	/maˈri.a/

	Word	IPA(unofficial)
N	Nicolae	/ni.koˈla.e/
O	Olga	/ˈol.ɡa/
P	Petre	/ˈpe.tre/
Q	Q	/ˈkju/
R	Radu	/ˈra.du/
S	Sandu	/ˈsan.du/
T	Tudor	/ˈtu.dor/
U	Udrea	/ˈu.dre̯a/
V	Vasile	/vaˈsi.le/
W	dublu V	/du.bluˈve/
X	Xenia	/ˈkse.ni.a/
Y	I grec	/ˈi.ɡrek/
Z	Zamfir	/zamˈfir/

See also

• Aromanian Alpha bet
• Istro-Romanian Alpha bet
• Megleno-Romanian Alpha bet
• Romanian transitional Alpha bet
• Romanian Cyrillic Alpha bet
• Romanian Braille

References

Bibliography

• (in Romanian)Mioara Avram,Ortografie pentru toți,Editura Litera Internațional, 2002
• The Unicode Consortium (2000).The Unicode Standard, Version 3.0.Boston: Addison-Wesley.ISBN0-201-61633-5.

External links

• Unicode Latin Extended-B characters,unicode.org
• Sounds of the Romanian Language,etc.tuiasi.ro