4 ms·

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

by hugh4 11y ago

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?!
  - _delirium 11y ago
    I don't think pinyin is that hard to understand as a layman, at least no harder than a typical Latin-alphabet language other than your own. It's not great if your goal were a phonetic transliteration into English, but even most European languages would fail that test. For example Polish has quite unintuitive spelling for an English speaker. Same with Portuguese and Danish for that matter. If you put pinyin alongside those languages as just another Latin-script-using-language, I don't find it especially weird, basically in the normal range of variation. An English speaker has to learn specific rules to pronounce it (approximately) correctly, but not an unusually large number of them.
    - rangibaby 11y ago
      Good point, like "Ypres" or "Orleans". Thanks
  - glandium 11y ago
    You forgot zi/ji (じ, si/shi with a dakuten diacritic) and zi/di (ぢ, ti/chi with a dakuten diacritic) O and wo are not ambiguous in Hepburn, as they are being explicitly differentiated. Another thing that Hepburn doesn't help with is は, transliterated as "wa" in the case it's the enclitic particle, instead of "ha".
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".

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

by 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?!
- _delirium 11y ago
  I don't think pinyin is that hard to understand as a layman, at least no harder than a typical Latin-alphabet language other than your own. It's not great if your goal were a phonetic transliteration into English, but even most European languages would fail that test. For example Polish has quite unintuitive spelling for an English speaker. Same with Portuguese and Danish for that matter. If you put pinyin alongside those languages as just another Latin-script-using-language, I don't find it especially weird, basically in the normal range of variation. An English speaker has to learn specific rules to pronounce it (approximately) correctly, but not an unusually large number of them.
  - rangibaby 11y ago
    Good point, like "Ypres" or "Orleans". Thanks
- glandium 11y ago
  You forgot zi/ji (じ, si/shi with a dakuten diacritic) and zi/di (ぢ, ti/chi with a dakuten diacritic) O and wo are not ambiguous in Hepburn, as they are being explicitly differentiated. Another thing that Hepburn doesn't help with is は, transliterated as "wa" in the case it's the enclitic particle, instead of "ha".

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".