I've read that some people attribute it to influence from the Slavic languages. But it doesn't just appear in Slavic loans — it also shows up in obviously Latin-derived words like câine 'dog' (from CANEM). On the other hand, not all words with a in Latin have â in Romanian — e.g. FRATER went to frate rather than *frâte. So was this a sporadic sound change, or a regular change conditioned by some environment, or what?
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Turkish also has a similar sound in ı (dotless i) and Romania was part of the Ottoman Empire, so I wonder if this is also an influence. An important thing not to forget about Romanian though is that â/î contrasts with ă which is like a schwa in English and French. Its's particularly strange for an Indoeuropean language to have two contrasting central vowels. – hippietrail Nov 9 '11 at 12:35
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1And while we're counting, Albanian and Armenian also have phonemic schwa -- even in stressed syllables, not just as a result of vowel reduction. Seems like it cropped up in IE languages all through Eastern Europe and Central Asia. – Leah Velleman Nov 9 '11 at 18:21
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Those sounds are not abnormal in a Romance language. Similar ones can be found in Portuguese and many Italian dialects/languages. That doesn't exclude a possible Balkan connection, especially through Albanian. – cipricus Nov 19 '19 at 13:12
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In words of Latin origin, Romanian /ɨ/ arises from a few different places:
- Latin /a/ followed by /n/: cânt < canto, sfânt < sanctum. The diphthong in pâine, câine is due to assimilation to the following vowel.
- The Latin word /in/. This is not a regular sound change in that not all Latin instances of /i/ followed by /n/ are centralized, but all forms of the preposition "in" have /ɨ/.
- The vowel /i/ preceded by /rr/ or initial /r/: râu < rivum, urî < horrire.
Other instances of /ɨ/ are generally loans. Also, there are numerous words of Latin origin which appear to violate the rules above, but these are usually later reborrowings from Latin or sometimes French.
