Romanian phonology
In the phonology of the Romanian language, the phoneme inventory consists of seven vowels, two or four semivowels (different views exist), and twenty consonants. In addition, as with all languages, other phonemes can occur occasionally in interjections or recent borrowings. Notable features of Romanian include two unusual diphthongs and and the central vowel . Vowels. There are seven monophthongs in Romanian: The table below gives a series of word examples for each vowel. Although most of these vowels are relatively straightforward and similar or identical to those in many other languages, the close central unrounded vowel is uncommon as  a phoneme and especially uncommon amongst Indo-European languages. According to , is phonetically open-mid somewhat retracted central , rather than mid central. Less frequent vowels. ö. In addition to the seven core vowels, in a number of words of foreign origin (predominantly French, but also German) the mid front rounded vowel (rounded Romanian ; example word: "bleu" 'light blue') and the mid central rounded vowel (rounded Romanian ; example word: "chemin de fer" 'Chemin de Fer') have been preserved, without replacing them with any of the existing phonemes. The borrowed words have become part of the Romanian vocabulary and follow the usual  inflexion rules, so that the new vowels, though less common, could be considered as part of the Romanian phoneme set. Many Romanian dictionaries use in their phonetic descriptions to represent both vowels. Because they are not native phonemes, their pronunciation may fluctuate or they may even be replaced by the diphthong . In older French borrowings it has often been replaced by , , or , as in "șofer" ('driver', from French "chauffeur"), "masor" ('masseur', from "masseur"), and "sufleor" ('theater prompter', from "souffleur"). ü. Similarly, borrowings from languages such as French and German sometimes contain the close front rounded vowel : "ecru" , "tul" , "führer" . The  symbol used for it in phonetic notations in Romanian dictionaries is . Educated speakers usually pronounce it , but other realizations such as also occur. Older words that originally had this sound have had it replaced with , , or . For instance, Turkish "kül" became "ghiul" ('large ring'), Turkish "tütün" became "tutun" ('tobacco'), but "tiutiun" in the Moldavian subdialect, German "Düse" gave "duză" ('nozzle') and French "bureau" became "birou" ('desk', 'office'). Diphthongs and triphthongs. According to Ioana Chițoran, Romanian has two diphthongs: and . As a result of their origin (diphthongization of mid vowels under stress), they appear normally in stressed syllables and make morphological  alternations with the mid vowels and . In addition to these, the semivowels and can be combined (either before, after, or both) with most vowels. One view considers that only and can follow an obstruent-liquid cluster such as in "broască" ('frog') and "dreagă" ('to mend') and form real diphthongs, whereas the rest are merely vowel–glide sequences. The traditional view (taught in schools) considers all of the above as diphthongs. As can be seen from the examples above, the diphthongs and contrast with and respectively, though there are no minimal pairs to contrast and . Impressionistically, the two pairs sound very  similar to native speakers. Because doesn't appear in the final syllable of a prosodic word, there are no monosyllabic words with ; exceptions might include "voal" ('veil') and "doar" ('only, just'), though Ioana Chițoran argues that these are best treated as containing glide-vowel sequences rather than diphthongs. In some regional pronunciations, the diphthong tends to be pronounced as a single vowel . Other triphthongs such as and occur sporadically in interjections and uncommon words. Diphthongs in borrowings. Borrowings from English have enlarged the set of ascending diphthongs to also include , , , and , or have extended their previously limited use. Generally, these  borrowings have retained their original spellings, but their pronunciation has been adapted to Romanian phonology. The table below gives some examples. Borrowings such as "whisky" and "week-end" are listed in some dictionaries as starting with the ascending diphthong , which corresponds to the original English pronunciation, but in others they appear with the descending diphthong . Vowel alternations. Romanian has vowel alternation or apophony triggered by stress. A stressed syllable has a low vowel, or a diphthong ending in a low vowel, and an unstressed syllable has a mid vowel. Thus alternates with , with , and with . This alternation developed from Romanian  vowel breaking (diphthongization) and reduction (weakening). The Eastern Romance mid vowels were broken in stressed syllables, giving the Romanian diphthongs , and the low vowel was reduced in unstressed syllables, giving the Romanian central vowel . These sound changes created the stress-triggered vowel alternations in the table below. Here stressed syllables are marked with underlining ("a"): This has since been morphologized and now shows up in verb conjugations and nominal inflection: "oaste" — "oști", 'army' — 'armies'. Consonants. Standard Romanian has twenty phonemic consonants, as listed in the table below. Where symbols for consonants occur in pairs, the left represents a voiceless consonant  and the right represents a voiced consonant. ⟨c⟩+⟨e/i⟩ means ⟨c⟩ is pronounced as . ⟨ch⟩+⟨e/i⟩ means ⟨ch⟩ is pronounced as . ⟨k⟩ is used in loan words. ⟨g⟩+⟨e/i⟩ means ⟨g⟩ is pronounced as . ⟨gh⟩+⟨e/i⟩ means ⟨gh⟩ is pronounced as . Besides the consonants in this table, a few consonants can have allophones: The consonant inventory of Romanian is similar to Italian. Romanian, however, lacks the palatal consonants , which merged with by lenition, and the affricate changed to by spirantization. Romanian has the fricative and the glottal fricative , which do not occur in Italian. Palatalized consonants. Palatalized consonants appear mainly  at the end of words, and mark two grammatical categories: plural nouns and adjectives, and second person singular verbs. The interpretation commonly taken is that an underlying morpheme palatalizes the consonant and is subsequently deleted. However, , , and become , , and , respectively, with very few phonetically justified exceptions, included in the table below, which shows that this palatalization can occur for all consonants. In certain morphological processes is replaced by the full vowel , for example This may explain why is perceived as a separate sound by native speakers and written with the same letter as the vowel . The non-syllabic can be  sometimes found inside compound words like "câțiva" ('a few') and "oriunde" ('wherever'), where the first morpheme happened to end in this . A word that contains this twice is "cincizeci" ('fifty'). In old Romanian and still in some local pronunciations there is another example of such a non-syllabic, non-semivocalic phoneme, derived from , which manifests itself as labialization of the preceding sound. The usual IPA notation is . It is found at the end of some words after consonants and semivowels, as in "un urs", pronounced ('a bear'), or "îmi spui" ('you tell me'). The disappearance of this phoneme might be  attributed to the fact that, unlike , it didn't play any morphological role. It is a trace of Latin endings containing ("-us", -ūs, "-um", "-ō"), this phoneme is related to vowel used to connect the definite article "l" to the stem of a noun or adjective, as in "domn — domnul" ('lord — the lord', cf. Latin "dominus"). Other consonants. As with other languages, Romanian interjections often use sounds beyond the normal phoneme inventory or disobey the normal phonotactical rules, by containing unusual phoneme sequences, by allowing words to be made up of only consonants, or by consisting of repetitions. Such exceptional  mechanisms are needed to obtain an increased level of expressivity. Often, these interjections have multiple spellings or occasionally none at all, which accounts for the difficulty of finding the right approximation using existing letters. The following is a list of examples. Stress. Romanian has a stress accent, like almost all other Romance languages (with the notable exception of French). Generally, stress falls on the last syllable of a stem (that is, the root and derivational material but excluding inflections and final inflectional vowels). Although a lexically marked stress pattern with penultimate stress exists, any morphologically derived forms will continue to  follow the unmarked pattern. Stress is not normally marked in writing, except occasionally to distinguish between homographs, or in dictionaries for the entry words. When it is marked, the main vowel of the stressed syllable receives an accent (usually acute, but sometimes grave), for example "véselă — vesélă" ('jovial', fem. sg. — 'tableware'). In verb conjugation, noun declension, and other word formation processes, stress shifts can occur. Verbs can have homographic forms only distinguished by stress, such as in "el suflă" which can mean 'he blows' ("el súflă") or 'he blew' ("el suflắ") depending on whether the stress is on the first  or the second syllable, respectively. Changing the grammatical category of a word can lead to similar word pairs, such as the verb "a albí" ('to whiten') compared to the adjective "álbi" ('white', masc. pl.). Stress in Romanian verbs can normally be predicted by comparing tenses with similar verbs in Spanish, which does indicate stress in writing. Secondary stress occurs according to a predictable pattern, falling on every other syllable, starting with the first, as long as it does not fall adjacent to the primary stress. Prosody. Rhythm. Languages such as English, Russian, and Arabic are called stress-timed, meaning that  syllables are pronounced at a lower or higher rate so as to achieve a roughly equal time interval between stressed syllables. Another category of languages are syllable-timed, which means that each syllable takes about the same amount of time, regardless of the position of the stresses in the sentence. Romanian is one of the syllable-timed languages, along with other Romance languages (French, Spanish, etc.), Telugu, Yoruba, and many others. (A third timing system is mora timing, exemplified by Classical Latin, Fijian, Finnish, Hawaiian, Japanese, and Old English.) The distinction between these timing categories may sometimes seem unclear, and  definitions vary. In addition, the time intervals between stresses/syllables/morae are in reality only approximately equal, with many exceptions and large deviations having been reported. However, whereas the actual time may be only approximately equal, the differences are perceptually identical. In the case of Romanian, consonant clusters are often found both in the syllable onset and coda, which require physical time to be pronounced. The syllable timing rule is then overridden by slowing down the rhythm. Thus, it is seen that stress and syllable timing interact. The sample sentences below, each consisting of six syllables, are illustrative: The total  time length taken by each of these sentences is obviously different, and attempting to pronounce one of them with the same rhythm as the other results in unnatural utterances. To a lesser extent, but still perceivably, the syllables are extended in time also on one hand by the presence of liquid and nasal consonants, and on the other by that of semivowels in diphthongs and triphthongs, such as shown in the examples below. A simple way to evaluate the length of a word, and compare it to another, consists in pronouncing it repeatedly at a natural speech rate. Intonation. A  detailed description of the intonation patterns must consider a wide range of elements, such as the focus of the sentence, the theme and the rheme, emotional aspects, etc. In this section only a few general traits of the Romanian intonation are discussed. Most importantly, intonation is essential in questions, especially because, unlike English and other languages, Romanian does not distinguish grammatically declarative and interrogative sentences. In non-emphatic yes/no questions the pitch rises at the end of the sentence until the last stressed syllable. If unstressed syllables follow, they often have a falling intonation, but this is not a  rule. In Transylvanian speech these yes/no questions have a very different intonation pattern, usually with a pitch peak at the beginning of the question: [ai ↗stins lumi↘na] In selection questions the tone rises at the first element of the selection, and falls at the second. Wh-questions start with a high pitch on the first word and then the pitch falls gradually toward the end of the sentence. Repeat questions have a rising intonation. Tag questions are uttered with a rising intonation. Unfinished utterances have a rising intonation similar to that of yes/no questions, but  the pitch rise is smaller. Various other intonation patterns are used to express: requests, commands, surprise, suggestion, advice, and so on. Example text. Orthographic transcription: Radu se joacă în curte. El aleargă până la gard, și apoi se-ntoarce spre casă. Phonetic transcription: