User talk:Acct001

fiii formerly spelled as fii
Hi, and thanks for working on the Romanian alphabet.

In a recent edit you seemed to say that before the spelling reform of 1904, the word fiii was spelled as fii. I don't think this is true, and here's why. The letter ĭ was simply the equivalent of the previously used Cyrillic letter й. When the transition to the Latin alphabet took place, every й was just transformed into a ĭ, without any further changes. Now the Bucharest Bible of 1688 contains the word fiii spelled as фи́їй (it appears for example a couple of times at the beginning of Facerea, Cap VI). If I'm not mistaken, фи́їй must have become fiiĭ in Latin script.

One more reason to think that fiii was never spelled fii is that the word contains exactly four phonemes: /'fi.ij/, so it needs four letters. Only recently has this word started to be pronounced ['fi.i] by a part of the speakers, namely those who regularly pronounce the diphthong [ij] as the vowel [i] in certain phonetic contexts.

But you may have a source that says otherwise. Could you please give me a reference?

Thanks. — Adi  Japan  11:06, 19 January 2009 (UTC)


 * You are correct, thanks for pointing this out and making the necessary corrections. I suppose the right way to go about it is to say that it used to be written as fiiĭ, as you have also said. I did a search for double-i ending words during the pre-1900 period and could only come up with a few isolated cases where for example copii stood in for today's copiii or former copiiĭ (see this link). I must have been mislead by words yielding the same phonemes but due to an offset stress are written with a double-i, e.g. sfii and înmii. This mistake I made goes to prove the underlying issue of the paragraph in question, in that one letter i cannot accommodate the numerous Romanian vowel/semivowel combinations.Acct001 (talk) 20:12, 28 January 2009 (UTC)