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:
“We agree fully that the mother and unborn child demand special consideration. But so does the soldier and the man maimed in industry. Industrial conditions that are suitable for a stalwart, young, unmarried woman are certainly not equally suitable to the pregnant woman or the mother of young children. Yet “welfare” laws apply to all women alike. Such blanket legislation is as absurd as fixing industrial conditions for men on a basis of their all being wounded soldiers would be.”
—National Woman’s Party, quoted in Everyone Was Brave. As, ch. 8, by William L. O’Neill (1969)
“... all my letters are read. I like that. I usually put something in there that I would like the staff to see. If some of the staff are lazy and choose not to read the mail, I usually write on the envelope “Legal Mail.” This way it will surely be read. It’s important that we educate everybody as we go along.”
—Jean Gump, U.S. pacifist. As quoted in The Great Divide, book 2, section 10, by Studs Terkel (1988)