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> The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing syste
by thanhhaimai 2y ago
> The orthography may be inconsistently phonetic, as is the case with English spelling, or highly consistent, such as the Korean Hangul system. No writing system is perfectly phonetic. But phonetic systems enable the native speaker, with just a few dozen symbols, to reliably write whatever they can speak, and read out loud anything they can read.
I'm not sure if the author has studied Vietnamese. I'm a native Vietnamese, and I believe the language is perfectly phonetic.
If I hear a word, I can write it. If I see a word, I can pronounce it, regardless of whether I understand the meaning.
It's interesting that among the 4 countries (China/Japan/Korea/Vietnam), it's the only one that completely reinvented the language into Latin based. I think that refactor addressed the phonetic issue well enough. When I was there, there was also no TV program for "spelling bees" or something like that. Even a third grader could read/write almost any word (even when they don't understand the text yet)
Edit: adding to this original post to reply a common theme people brought up in multiple posts.
I think bringing up dialects and provincial accents is not convincing. There is one official way "gia đình" should be pronounced. It's taught in school, even in the South. Pronouncing it as "da đình" can still be understood, and it doesn't retract from the point that the language is phonetic.
In other words, assuming I know nothing about the meaning of the word, if I hear "da đình" I can correctly write down it as so. I wouldn't know that in Saigon that also means "gia đình". But I definitely can write it down exactly.
I don't think using provincial speaking accent is a good line of argument here. Otherwise, no language in the world can satisfy the phonetic requirements. Any group of people can have different accents, different tones, different sound length and pauses.
- maianhvu 2y ago> If I hear a word, I can write it. Not if you account for variations of pronunciation in dialects. Not even the most phonetically accurate accent, the Hanoian Northern accent which I am a native speaker of, is perfect. For example, you could hear Northern Vietnamese people say "dổ", "dá" instead of "rổ", "rá". Morning dew is pronounced "xương" but is written as "sương". These characters are pronounced with greater clarity in the Central and Southern regions, but they have their own peculiarities too. Til' this day I still find it iffy they call someone named "Diễm" as "Yỉm". Unless you have seen the correct way to spell those words before, you can't say for sure. Even now as a working adult I find myself referring to the dictionary to make sure my accent doesn't embarrass me in official emails. In a perfect world, we can have one single Vietnamese accent that aims to pronoun all these words true to the intended way of the alphabet, but it isn't practical. That being said, one can get pretty far in Vietnamese when encountering new words.
- ncann 2y agoYeah, and because the "common" way of pronouncing these words/letters have become so entrenched in our minds, it often feels pretentious to hear people actively try to pronounce words in a way that they feel is "correct", for example trying to emphasize the "strength" of the tr/s/gi sounds as opposed to ch/x/d.
- ncann 2y agoThat's not quite true. There are many letters that sounds mostly/exactly the same, especially in everyday pronunciation. For example, "gia đình" vs "da đình", or "lý trí" vs "lí trí", or "xổ số" vs "sổ số", etc. If you don't know the word beforehand you wouldn't be able to write it down after hearing it.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- famouswaffles 2y agoKorea's writing system is not logographic anymore. They didn't go Latin but Hangul is absolutely an alphabet/syllabary