Consonants Standard Romanian has twenty phonemic consonants, as listed in the table below. Besides the consonants in this table, a few consonants can have allophones: Palatalized consonants occur when preceding an underlying word-final , which is then deleted. becomes the velar before , and ; becomes the velar in word-final positions (duh 'spirit') and before consonants (hrean 'horseradish'); it becomes the palatal before , , like in the word human in English, and as a realization for an underlying sequence in word-final positions (cehi 'Czech people' is pronounced , though usually transcribed ) . The consonant inventory of Romanian is similar to Italian. Romanian, however, lacks the palatal consonants , which merged with by lenition, and the affricate changed to by spirantization. Romanian has the fricative and the glottal fricative , which do not occur in Italian. Palatalized consonants Palatalized consonants appear mainly at the end of words, and mark two grammatical categories: plural nouns and adjectives, and second person singular verbs. The interpretation commonly taken is that an underlying morpheme palatalizes the consonant and is subsequently deleted. However, , , and become , , and , respectively, with very few phonetically justified exceptions, included in the table below, which shows that this palatalization can occur for all consonants. In certain morphological processes is replaced by the full vowel , for example in noun plural genitive formation: școli — școlilor ('schools — of the schools'), when appending the definite article to some plural nouns: brazi — brazii ('fir trees — the fir trees') in verb + pronoun combinations: dați — dați-ne ('give — give us'). This may explain why is perceived as a separate sound by native speakers and written with the same letter as the vowel . The non-syllabic can be sometimes found inside compound words like câțiva ('a few') and oricare ('whichever'), where the first morpheme happened to end in this . A word that contains this twice is cincizeci ('fifty'). In old Romanian and still in some local pronunciations there is another example of such a non-syllabic, non-semivocalic phoneme, derived from , which manifests itself as labialization of the preceding sound. The usual IPA notation is . It is found at the end of some words after consonants and semivowels, as in un urs, pronounced ('a bear'), or îmi spui ('you tell me'). The disappearance of this phoneme might be attributed to the fact that, unlike ,