Vietnamese alphabet
| Vietnamese alphabet chữ quốc ngữ |
|
|---|---|
| Type |
alphabet
|
| Languages | Vietnamese |
| Creator | Alexandre de Rhodes |
|
Parent systems
|
Egyptian hieroglyphs
|
The Vietnamese alphabet (Vietnamese: chữ Quốc ngữ; literally national language script) is the modern writing system for the Vietnamese language. It uses the Latin script, based on its employment in the alphabets of Romance languages, in particular the Portuguese alphabet, with some digraphs and the addition of nine accent marks or diacritics – four of them to create additional sounds, and the other five to indicate the tone of each word. The many diacritics, often two on the same letter, make written Vietnamese easily recognizable.
Note: Naming b 'bê bò' and p 'bê phở' is to avoid confusion in some dialects or some contexts, the same for s 'xờ mạnh (nặng)' and x 'xờ nhẹ', i 'i ngắn' and y 'i dài'. Q, q is always followed by u in every word and phrase in Vietnamese, e.g. quang (light), quần (trousers), quyến rũ (to attract), etc.
The alphabet is largely derived from the Portuguese, although the usage of gh and gi was borrowed from Italian (cf. ghetto, Giuseppe), and that for c/k/qu from Greek and Latin (cf. canis, kinesis, quo vadis).
The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is somewhat complicated. In some cases, the same letter may represent several different sounds, and different letters may represent the same sound. This may be because the orthography was designed centuries ago and the spoken language has changed, or because the inventors were trying to spell the sounds of several dialects at once.
The letters y and i are mostly equivalent, and there is no concrete rule that says when to use one or the other, except in sequences like ay and uy (i.e. tay ("arm, hand") is read /tɐj/ while tai ("ear") is read /taːj/). There have been attempts since the late 20th century to standardize the orthography by replacing all the vowel uses of y with i, the latest being a decision from the Vietnamese Ministry of Education in 1984. These efforts seem to have had limited effect, in part because some people bristled at the thought of names such as Nguyễn becoming Nguiễn and Thúy (a common female name) becoming Thúi (stinky), even though the standardization does not apply to diphthongs and triphthongs and allowed exceptions to proper names. In textbooks published by Nhà Xuất bản Giáo dục ("Publishing House of Education"), y is used to represent /i/ only in Sino-Vietnamese words that are written with one letter y alone (diacritics can still be added, as in ý, ỷ), in words that start with the letter y (such as yếm, yết), and after u; therefore such forms as *lý and *kỹ are not "standard", though they are much preferred elsewhere. Most people and the popular media continue to use the spelling that they are most accustomed to.
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