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by oblio
1785 days ago
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They had a crazy vowel shift where vowels, which for example in Romanian are defined as sounds that "stand by themselves" [1] all became 2-sound things. To make it obvious, I'll use the Romanian spelling for vowels, which is practically Latin (except for "ă" which is pronounced "uh"). A became ei. E became i (ok, this one's the exception, but in practice it's still crazy, "Mercedes" manages to have 3 - three!!! - pronunciations for it). I became ai. O became ău. U became iu. So if you look at them, they're all 2 distinct sounds (ergo the 2 letters in the Romanian spelling, except for E, which is crazy enough anyway). I'm not counting W, Y and such because I think they weren't used in Latin. [1] I.e. they're need a single sound to be pronounced, don't need an additional supporting sound. |
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