Romanian: palatalization/assibilation

["Alfred W. Tüting"]

 > (Corey) My Romanian paper is basically the seed of my master's
thesis.  In
looking at Romanian 'palatalization' (the addition of an off-glide [j] to
form plurals and second person singular verbs) I found both palatalization
and assibilation effects.  This is not really surprising, considering both
processes tend to be caused by high front vocoids.  In my paper, I take the
radical position that the coronalization of Romanian velars is due to
assibilation... <<


 From my point of view as a (linguistically aware) speaker for about 40
years this thesis seems very convincing to me. (BTW, palatalization
seems to affect different consonants in different ways, e.g. with  [z]
in _vezi_ , palatalization is hardly perceivable.)

The title of an old movie (1965?), back in Bukarest, is coming on my
mind, which was "Un cartof - doi cartofi" :-)


Alfred