The Romanian alphabet is a modification of the classical Latin alphabet and consists of 31 letters:
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The letters Q (read kü or chiu), W (dublu ve), and Y (igrec or i grec) were officially introduced in the Romanian alphabet in 1982, although they had been used earlier. They occur only in foreign words and their Romanian derivatives, such as quasar, watt, and yacht. The letter K, although relatively older, is also rarely used and appears only in proper names and international neologisms such as kilogram, broker, karate. These four letters are still perceived as foreign, which explains their use for stylistic purposes in words such as nomenklatură (normally nomenclatură, meaning "nomenclature", but sometimes spelled with a k to mean the members of the Communist leadership in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc countries, as Nomenklatura is used in English).
In cases where the word is a direct borrowing having diacritical marks not present in the above alphabet, official spelling tends to favor their use (München, Angoulême etc., as opposed to the use of Istanbul over İstanbul).
Read more about Romanian Alphabet: Letters and Their Pronunciation, Special Letters, Phonetic Alphabet
Famous quotes containing the word alphabet:
“I believe the alphabet is no longer considered an essential piece of equipment for traveling through life. In my day it was the keystone to knowledge. You learned the alphabet as you learned to count to ten, as you learned “Now I lay me” and the Lord’s Prayer and your father’s and mother’s name and address and telephone number, all in case you were lost.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)