루마니아어 음운 현상에 관한 통시적 연구

A Diachronic Study on the Romanian Phonology

This article aims at a diachronic study on the phonological phenomena of Romanian, which is derived directly from Latin, therefore regarded as a Eastern Romance Language. However, some scholars once claimed that Romanian would have been reffered to as a mixed language, in consideration of the quantitative and qualitative relation between the Latin and non-Latin elements in the language. Modern Romanian is written in a wholly Romanised alphabet system with three diacritics. As we can see from this research on the evolution of the Romanian phonology, Romanian more or less maintains the basic phonological system of Latin, except for some characteristics derived from Balkan Latin, which had a different evolution from the normal Westernstream. For example only in Romanian exist two special vowel symbols, namely ă/ǝ/ and â=î/ɨ/, which did not exist in Latin. We do not know the time of their formation or the route of their derivation exactly. Above all, regarding phonem /ǝ/, we can only speculate that it would have been derived from the substratum of in south eastern part of Europe, that is, Thraco-Dakish. The reason for this speculation is that the vowel phoneme also exists in the so called Balkan Sprachbund, namely, Albanian and Bulgarian. Thus we can consider it as a heritage from the common language spoken by the ancestors of the peoples who speak these languages at present. The phoneme ă/ǝ/ usually appears as a non-stressed variant of the Latin a/a/(ex.: Lat. casa > Rm. casă) but also appears in stressed syllables in case the syllables are closed by nasals(ex.: Lat. juramĕntum > Rm. jurământ). As far as the consonantal system is concerned, the symbol k is a comparative rarity, which is not a regular letter in Romanian It is used only for international terms such as kilogram, kilometru etc. The voiceless velar plosive is represented by c(ex.: casă/kasǝ/). However this phoneme changes to the post alveolar affricate /ʧ/ before the front vowels(ex.: cer/ʧer/). The voiceless velar plosive is represented by the diagraph ch before the front vowels(ex.: ochi/oki/). The voiced velar plosive g/ɡ/ shows similar distributions. Among the consonant symbols, ş/ʃ/ and ţ/ʦ/ exist only in Romanian, which are in general derived from the Latin s and t before the front vowels. In addition it will be worthy to mention the glottal fricative h/ɦ/, which was originally aspirate in Clasic Latin and began to disappear in the intervocalic position (ex.: ne homo > nehemo > nemo) and then lost completely in the initial position in Vulgar Latin(ex.: habeo > abeo). It is usually agreed that the glottal fricative in Romanian was reintroduced by the influence of the neighboring languages, especially the slavonic languages. Notice that this symbol appears generally in Slavonic-based words(ex.: duh, hrană etc.). In a word as already mentioned above, Romanian maintains the basic phonological evolution from Latin to Romance languages, except for some characteristics due to the geographical circumstance of Balkan Latin