5 ms·

The article points out that the name is pronounced "Foo Da Bic"

by clay_to_n 11y ago

hugh4 11y ago
Why, when romanising their alphabet, did the Vietnamese do it in a way that didn't line up with any European language?
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  It wasn't the Vietnamese who did it. It was the French.
- _delirium 11y ago
  You might be interested in the article, "The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet", https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824/document https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824/document The short version of it is, The missionaries who adapted the Latin alphabet to Vietnamese were Portuguese, Italian and French. The resulting spelling inherited some peculiarities from the spelling systems of Romance languages. For example, on the phonology of 'ch', Among prepalatals, the unvoiced stop CH is taken from the Portuguese and the Spanish, which themselves borrowed this notation from Old French, where it had been created to transcribe a new sound, not found in Latin.
- peteretep 11y ago
  They tried to reflect the actual letters used in the original script, and differentiation between them. Same reason the Thai place Phuket had a silent h after the P - romanisation of ภ to differentiate from พ, ผ, ป, and บ, albeit the last two are pb.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
  No romanisation system quite lines up with a specific European language. After all, no European language has the same phonology as the language you're romanising. You also might make apparently strange choices so that the romanisation reflects certain relationships between phonemes or within the language's native writing system. For example, the nihon-siki and kunrei-siki romanisations of Japanese render し and じ as 'si' and 'zi', even though they'd be pronounced more like 'shi' and 'ji', because し is usually grouped with さ ('sa'), す ('su'), せ ('se') and そ ('so'), and じ is grouped with ざ ('za'), ず ('zu'), ぜ ('ze'), and ぞ ('zo'). The Hepburn romanisation of Japanese, on the other hand, renders them as 'shi' and 'ji' for better pronunciation by English speakers, but this obscures the relationship to the other syllables. It also introduces an ambiguity when transliterating back into Japanese's own script, as there are actually two other symbols in the same family which can be used to write these same sounds, which Hepburn can't romanise differently as it needs to present clear pronunciation. Pinyin provides another example. It has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly, and they don't match any European language. But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative. It's providing useful information which is lost if you try to make it so it's pronounced correctly by English speakers - which is rather fruitless given there's some phonetic distinctions in there which don't exist in English.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    > [Hanyu Pinyin] has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly Well, almost. An English speaker is fairly likely to pronounce sh- correctly, and certain to pronounce s- correctly.
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    The ambiguous characters in Hepburn are zu (ず) and zu (du) (づ) and o(お) and o (wo) (を). They can be quite confusing to new learners. I think pinyin is hard to understand for a layman. Eg how many people said Guangzhou or Sichuan correctly on the first go?!
- throwaway3838e 11y ago
  Because the Vietnamese didn't romanise their language. The French did. There have been suggestions to evolve the way vietnamese is written. For example, "Y" and "I" are the same sound, and could be changed to just "I" to simplify. However "Thuy" is a common girl's name whereas "thui" is "smelly". There is resistance to change everything to "I" because it would change the name to something embarrassing.
  - bbgm 11y ago
    I used to live in Vietnam for several years. Both my dad and my brother have names starting with "J", which isn't quite around, so in all ID cards their names started with "I".
ethana 11y ago
This is not even close to the actual Vietnamese pronunciation. [Phúc] is pronounced close to Fook in American English. Without the heavy k-ending. [Đạt] is close to Dac without the heavy c-undertone ending. [Bích] is kind of close to Bic, but you have to say Bic really fast with very light c ending. pattern: Vietnamese pronunciation is generally neutral throughout a word. There's no need for emphasis unless emotion is included.
- vidarh 11y ago
  It sounds to me that "Foo Da Bic" is just someones quick and dirty description to avoid having to go into what "without the heavy k-ending" and "without the heavy c-undertone ending" and "with very light c-ending" means and that they got it reasonably close with that in mind. Reality is that nobody will pronounce it right just from those descriptions anyway - Vietnamese isn't exactly a trivial language to pronounce for people who don't know the sounds already -, so they're just going for illustrating that it isn't what every English speaker first think it'll sounds like.
- ars 11y ago
  Can you make a recording somewhere?

The article points out that the name is pronounced "Foo Da Bic"

hugh4 11y ago

Why, when romanising their alphabet, did the Vietnamese do it in a way that didn't line up with any European language?

Turing_Machine 11y ago
It wasn't the Vietnamese who did it. It was the French.
_delirium 11y ago
You might be interested in the article, "The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet", https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824/document https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824/document The short version of it is, The missionaries who adapted the Latin alphabet to Vietnamese were Portuguese, Italian and French. The resulting spelling inherited some peculiarities from the spelling systems of Romance languages. For example, on the phonology of 'ch', Among prepalatals, the unvoiced stop CH is taken from the Portuguese and the Spanish, which themselves borrowed this notation from Old French, where it had been created to transcribe a new sound, not found in Latin.
peteretep 11y ago
They tried to reflect the actual letters used in the original script, and differentiation between them. Same reason the Thai place Phuket had a silent h after the P - romanisation of ภ to differentiate from พ, ผ, ป, and บ, albeit the last two are pb.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
TazeTSchnitzel 11y ago
No romanisation system quite lines up with a specific European language. After all, no European language has the same phonology as the language you're romanising. You also might make apparently strange choices so that the romanisation reflects certain relationships between phonemes or within the language's native writing system. For example, the nihon-siki and kunrei-siki romanisations of Japanese render し and じ as 'si' and 'zi', even though they'd be pronounced more like 'shi' and 'ji', because し is usually grouped with さ ('sa'), す ('su'), せ ('se') and そ ('so'), and じ is grouped with ざ ('za'), ず ('zu'), ぜ ('ze'), and ぞ ('zo'). The Hepburn romanisation of Japanese, on the other hand, renders them as 'shi' and 'ji' for better pronunciation by English speakers, but this obscures the relationship to the other syllables. It also introduces an ambiguity when transliterating back into Japanese's own script, as there are actually two other symbols in the same family which can be used to write these same sounds, which Hepburn can't romanise differently as it needs to present clear pronunciation. Pinyin provides another example. It has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly, and they don't match any European language. But there's an internal consistency here within Pinyin: the first group are alveolar consonants, the second retroflex, the third alveo-palatal, and the first initial in each group is an unaspirated affricate, the second an aspirated affricate, the third a fricative. It's providing useful information which is lost if you try to make it so it's pronounced correctly by English speakers - which is rather fruitless given there's some phonetic distinctions in there which don't exist in English.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > [Hanyu Pinyin] has the three groups of initials (leading consonants) z-, c- and s-; zh-, ch- and sh-; and j-, q- and x-. An English speaker would pronounce none of these correctly Well, almost. An English speaker is fairly likely to pronounce sh- correctly, and certain to pronounce s- correctly.
- rangibaby 11y ago
  The ambiguous characters in Hepburn are zu (ず) and zu (du) (づ) and o(お) and o (wo) (を). They can be quite confusing to new learners. I think pinyin is hard to understand for a layman. Eg how many people said Guangzhou or Sichuan correctly on the first go?!
throwaway3838e 11y ago
Because the Vietnamese didn't romanise their language. The French did. There have been suggestions to evolve the way vietnamese is written. For example, "Y" and "I" are the same sound, and could be changed to just "I" to simplify. However "Thuy" is a common girl's name whereas "thui" is "smelly". There is resistance to change everything to "I" because it would change the name to something embarrassing.
- bbgm 11y ago
  I used to live in Vietnam for several years. Both my dad and my brother have names starting with "J", which isn't quite around, so in all ID cards their names started with "I".

ethana 11y ago

This is not even close to the actual Vietnamese pronunciation. [Phúc] is pronounced close to Fook in American English. Without the heavy k-ending. [Đạt] is close to Dac without the heavy c-undertone ending. [Bích] is kind of close to Bic, but you have to say Bic really fast with very light c ending. pattern: Vietnamese pronunciation is generally neutral throughout a word. There's no need for emphasis unless emotion is included.

vidarh 11y ago
It sounds to me that "Foo Da Bic" is just someones quick and dirty description to avoid having to go into what "without the heavy k-ending" and "without the heavy c-undertone ending" and "with very light c-ending" means and that they got it reasonably close with that in mind. Reality is that nobody will pronounce it right just from those descriptions anyway - Vietnamese isn't exactly a trivial language to pronounce for people who don't know the sounds already -, so they're just going for illustrating that it isn't what every English speaker first think it'll sounds like.
ars 11y ago
Can you make a recording somewhere?