The Vietnamese Writing System. Modern Vietnamese is written with the Latin alphabet, known as quoc ngu ( quốc ngữ) in Vietnamese. Quoc ngu consists of 29 letters. These are: The 26 letters of the English alphabet minus f, j, w , and z. ̣ (These letters are, however, found in foreign loanwords.)
HISTORY. From 207 BC to 939 AD, the rule of several Chinese dynasties had a profound influence on the Vietnamese culture and literature. As a result, the official Vietnamese language was written in Classical Chinese ( chữ Nho) before the development of native Vietnamese script ( chữ Nôm) and the adoption of the Latin alphabet ( Quốc ...
Vietnamese (Vietnamese: tiếng Việt) is an Austroasiatic language originating from Vietnam where it is the national and official language.Vietnamese is spoken natively by over 70 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of the Vietnamese (Kinh) people, as well as a second language or first language for …
Presently, the written language uses the Vietnamese alphabet (quốc ngữ or "national script," literally "national language," from Chinese 國語 / guoyu), based on the Latin alphabet. Originally a Romanization of Vietnamese, it was codified in the 17th century by a French Jesuit missionary named Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660), based on works of earlier Portuguese missionaries …
Vietnamese alphabet chữ Quốc ngữ | |
---|---|
Script type | Alphabet |
Creator | Portuguese Jesuits, Alexandre de Rhodes |
Languages | Vietnamese, other indigenous languages of Vietnam |
Vietnamese Alphabet | English Sound | Pronunciation Example |
---|---|---|
r | z, ɹ | 'z' as in zoo (north), 'r' as in ring (south) |
Following Vietnam’s independence from the French, Vietnamese Government officially recognized quoc ngu as the nation’s official writing system. Uncle Ho also advocated movement to Vietnamese words and founded the Bình Dân Học Vụ (Department for Popularizing Culture) to launch a campaign to eliminate illiteracy.
Instead, the Viets adapted Chinese characters into their own script, chữ nôm, a half-phonetic and half-ideographic writing system . According to the annals, Han Thuyen became the first poet to write in chữ nôm at the end of the 13th century.
Today, many of these “loan-words” have been Vietnamized to such an extent that few people are aware of their Chinese origins. Examples include Tiền (money), Hàng (goods/merchandise), chợ (market), and Mùa (season).
French, Portuguese and Spanish Catholic missionaries, aided by Vietnamese preachers, developed a new writing system as a means of spreading the gospel to a broader audience.
About 60 percent of modern Vietnamese words are of Chinese origin. Many basic words, like geographical terms, were adopted from monotonal Mon-Khmer languages, while tonality came from Tai. In Vietnamese, each syllable has one of six tones, which completely alters the meaning of the word, and one, two or three of 11 distinct vowel sounds.
In Vietnamese, each syllable has one of six tones, which completely alters the meaning of the word, and one, two or three of 11 distinct vowel sounds. This is a complicated language, which, not surprisingly, has a complicated past.
In a bid to assimilate the lowland Viets, they introduced a Chinese-style administrative system headed by Chinese governors and opened schools to teach Chinese characters. During the 1,000 years of Chinese rule, while Han (classical Chinese) was the official written language, the spoken language continued to develop.
Learn more about Vietnamese Alphabet. Vietnamese Language is a tonal language: its words are written with diacritics, or accent marks. The same underlying letters with different diacritics produce different words: different in both pronuncation and meaning.
Learn more about Vietnamese Alphabet. Vietnamese Language is a tonal language: its words are written with diacritics, or accent marks.
Vietnamese has 6 tones. Vietnamese Language is monosyllabic, i.e., having only one syllable (vowel) per word, like many other Southeast Asian Languages. Contrast this with English when words have many syllables. For example, the word beautiful has 3 syllables.
the Southern Dialect (represented by Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), the most dynamic city in Vietnam) There is one very important note: these 3 dialects are mutually intelligible by all Vietnamese. They differ mainly in pronunciation of certain alphabet letters and in a few word usages.
Despite the overwhelming prestige of Chinese writing, the Vietnamese managed along the way to develop a system to write their own language. CHU NOM ( chữ Nôm) The chu nom was a system developed to write Vietnamese. The actual date is not agreed but chu nom was already in existence by the mid-13th century.
The story of Vietnamese writing does not end with Classical Chinese. Despite the overwhelming prestige of Chinese writing, the Vietnamese managed along the way to develop a system to write their own language. CHU NOM ( chữ Nôm) The chu nom was a system developed to write Vietnamese.
In addition, diacritics are used to indicate the tones of Vietnamese. Tone markings are: a (no mark), à, á, ả, ã, and ạ . When letters are combined with tone markings, some complex diacritics can result, such as: ắ, ở, ẫ, and ể.
The earliest extant dictionary using quoc ngu was the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum , published by Alexandre de Rhodes in 1651 . Rhodes, who was French, relied heavily on earlier Portuguese dictionaries in compiling his work.
1. Diacritics are used to represent sound distinctions not covered by the Roman or Latin alphabet. This is not unusual. Although it is used around the world, the Roman alphabet is actually inadequate to represent even the languages of Europe. Some diacritics in Vietnamese:
Partly as a result, Vietnamese speakers tend to believe that their language is made up entirely of monosyllabic words. To be sure, the monosyllable is an important entity in Vietnamese.
However, the Vietnamese monosyllable is not automatically a 'word' -- or at least, not a word as we would define it in English. Often, two syllables go together to form a single word, which can be identified by the way it functions grammatically in a sentence. For instance, take the sentence:
My goal for the first edition was to enrich Vietnamese typography. Published in November 2015 as my final thesis for a master of arts in graphic design from the School of Art at George Mason University, this book had quickly become an essential guide for designing Vietnamese diacritics.
From 207 BC to 939 AD, the rule of several Chinese dynasties had a profound influence on the Vietnamese culture and literature. As a result, the official Vietnamese language was written in Classical Chinese ( chữ Nho) before the development of native Vietnamese script ( chữ Nôm) and the adoption of the Latin alphabet ( Quốc ngữ) 2.
Under the control of the Chinese in the ninth century, Vietnam’s governmental documents were written in Chinese ideographs called chữ Nho ( scholars’ script ), also referred to as chữ Hán ( Han script ).
The writing system used for Vietnamese is based closely on the system developed by Alexandre de Rhodes for his 1651 Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum. It reflects the pronunciation of the Vietnamese of Hanoi at that time, a stage commonly termed Middle Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt trung đại ). The pronunciation of the "rime" of the syllable, i.e. all parts other than the initial consonant (optional /w/ glide, vowel nucleus, tone and final consonant), appears nearly identical between Middle Vietnamese and modern Hanoi pronunciation. On the other hand, the Middle Vietnamese pronunciation of the initial consonant differs greatly from all modern dialects, and in fact is significantly closer to the modern Saigon dialect than the modern Hanoi dialect.
When France invaded Vietnam in the late 19th century, French gradually replaced Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm (dame, from madame ), ga (train station, from gare ), sơ mi (shirt, from chemise ), and búp bê (doll, from poupée ).
Vietnamese (Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt or Tiếng Kinh) is an Austroasiatic language that originated in Vietnam, where it is the national and official language.
Classification. Early linguistic work some 150 years ago classified Vietnamese as belonging to the Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family (which also includes the Khmer language spoken in Cambodia, as well as various smaller and/or regional languages, such as the Munda and Khasi languages spoken in eastern India, and others in Laos, ...
Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm (dame, from madame ), ga (train station, from gare ), sơ mi (shirt, from chemise ), and búp bê (doll, from poupée ). Henri Maspero described six periods of the Vietnamese language:
Proto-Vietnamese, the oldest reconstructable version of Vietnamese, dated to just before the entry of massive amounts of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into the language, c. 7th to 9th century AD. At this state, the language had three tones.
De Rhodes's orthography also made use of an apex diacritic to indicate a final labial-velar nasal /ŋ͡m/, an allophone of /ŋ/ that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. This diacritic is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing.
Prior to French rule, the first two Vietnamese writing systems were based on Chinese script: The authentic Chinese writing, chữ nho, was in more common usage, whereas chữ nôm was used by members of the educated elite (one needs to be able to read chữ nho in order to read chữ nôm ).
Presently, the written language uses the Vietnamese alphabet ( quốc ngữ or "national script," literally "national language," from Chinese 國語 / guoyu), based on the Latin alphabet. Originally a Romanization of Vietnamese, it was codified in the 17th century by a French Jesuit missionary named Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660), ...
It is a language of the native origin. This language came into being in the agricultural civilization in the north of Red River and Ma River (Vietnam). According to the explanation of A. G. Haudricourt in 1954, Viet – Muong in early AD included languages and local language without diacritics.
Popularity of Vietnamese language. Vietnamese language is the national language of Vietnam with over 80 percent of population speaking the language as mother tongue.
Viet – Muong is the subdivisions of Vietic languages group, sub-branch of Austroasiatic language family. In Vietic languages group, apart from Viet – Muong language which are spoken in Son La, Thanh Hoa, and Nghe An, Nguon language is also seen as the closest language to Vietnamese language.
The formation of present-day Vietnamese alphabet was related to the mission of Western missionaries. Vietnamese alphabet is a type of language formed in accordance with recording by Latin alphabets which was used in Europe for a long time ago. By the 17th century, it was the phase of the medieval Vietnamese language.
Based on the relations between languages, the history of Vietnamese language is divided into six periods: Proto-Vietic language, pre-ancient Vietnamese, ancient Vietnamese, medieval Vietnamese, pre-modern Vietnamese, and modern Vietnamese.
The language can be different from one region to another region across the country. The difference is also called regional dialects of Vietnamese language including North, Central and South. Vietnamese grammar and writing system.
So far, through communicating with Chinese languages, especially the language belonging to Tai-Kadai, which has the high development of tones system, the system of tones in Vietnamese language appeared and had identifications as today.