watt, and yoga. The Romanian alphabet is based on the Latin script with five additional letters , , , , . Formerly, there were as many as 12 additional letters, but some of them were abolished in subsequent reforms. Also, until the early 20th century, a breve marker was used, which survives only in ă. Today the Romanian alphabet is largely phonemic. However, the letters â and î both represent the same close central unrounded vowel . Â is used only inside words; î is used at the beginning or the end of non-compound words and in the middle of compound words. Another exception from a completely phonetic writing system is the fact that vowels and their respective semivowels are not distinguished in writing. In dictionaries the distinction is marked by separating the entry word into syllables for words containing a hiatus. Stressed vowels also are not marked in writing, except very rarely in cases where by misplacing the stress a word might change its meaning and if the meaning is not obvious from the context. For example, trei copíi means "three children" while trei cópii means "three copies". Pronunciation h is not silent like in other Romance languages such as Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Catalan and French, but represents the phoneme , except in the digraphs ch /k/ and gh /g/ (see below) j represents , as in French, Catalan or Portuguese (the sound spelled with s in the English words "vision, pleasure, treasure"). There are two letters with a comma below, Ș and Ț, which represent the sounds and . However, the allographs with a cedilla instead of a comma, Ş and Ţ, became widespread when pre-Unicode and early Unicode character sets did not include the standard form. A final orthographical i after a consonant often represents the palatalization of the consonant (e.g., lup "wolf" vs. lupi "wolves") – it is not pronounced like Italian lupi (which also means "wolves"), and is an example of the Slavic influence on Romanian . ă represents the schwa, . î and â both represent the sound . In rapid speech (for example in the name of the country) the â sound may sound similar to a casual listener to the short schwa sound ă (in fact, Aromanian does merge the two, writing them ã) but careful speakers will distinguish the sound. The nearest equivalent is the vowel in the last syllable of