"oaie"
Translation:sheep
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You can even make an entire sentence with only vowels, using that word!
Oaia aia e a ei; eu i-o iau. "That sheep is hers; I am taking it from her". :D
For the advanced french speakers: remember "ouailles", the veeeery old french term for sheep (now used for the people a priest preaches to).
2513
Interesting observation. Apparently, both ”oaie” and ”ouaille” come from the latin ”ovis.” How the French arrived at ”brebis (latin)/mouton (gaulish)” and the Italians to ”pecora” would be interesting stories. NOTE: Besides Romanian, the Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese stayed close to Latin as well.
regarding Italian "pecora" the origin is LATIN ' Pecus( nominative), pecoris (genitive). Pecus means Ganado in Spanish which in English is "cattle". The Latin word has given birth to French " pécuniaire" , Spanish "pecuniario", meaning " money" because at the beginning of the Roman Republic, the money was " pecus" i.e. cattle.
- 2513
Thank you for following up on this! To close the loop, it turns out that the French brebis seems to derive from the Latin berbēx from which the Romanian berbec = ram is derived!
Next time I play Scrabble, I’m playing this! “That’s not a word!” “Yes it is.” “In what language?” “Romanian. It means ‘sheep’.” “Get lost! We’re playing in English!” I can try. :)
Using y as a consonant in English, there are two six letter words that have no vowels : rhythm and syzygy. The latter is an astronomical term.
So all this talk about vowels got me thinking in English a "y" can be considered a vowel or a consonant. When we learned our vowels in school it was "a,e,i,o,u, and sometimes y" so I'm wondering does this happen in other languages where one letter is both a vowel and a consonant?
