Special Letters
Romanian does not use accents. In the sense of diacritics as being signs added to letters to alter their pronunciation or to make distinction between words, the Romanian alphabet does not have diacritics. There are, however, five special letters in the Romanian alphabet (associated with four different sounds), formed by modifying other Latin letters; strictly speaking they are not diacritics, but are generally referred to as such.
- Ă ă — a with breve – for the sound /ə/
- Â â — a with circumflex – for the sound /ɨ/
- Î î — i with circumflex – for the sound /ɨ/
- Ș ș — s with comma – for the sound /ʃ/
- Ț ț — t with comma – for the sound /t͡s/
The letter â is used exclusively in the middle of words; its majuscule version 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. See Unicode and HTML below.
Read more about this topic: Romanian Alphabet
Famous quotes containing the words special and/or letters:
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Most personal correspondence of today consists of letters the first half of which are given over to an indexed statement of why the writer hasn’t written before, followed by one paragraph of small talk, with the remainder devoted to reasons why it is imperative that the letter be brought to a close.”
—Robert Benchley (1889–1945)