Re: Diacritics in the Vietnamese name "Nguyen"

On Fri, 27 May 2005, Jukka K. Korpela wrote:

> The Vietnamese name that is commonly written as "Nguyen" in English
> texts apparently needs to have a circumflex on the "e" in the correct
> spelling. But is this all?

I can't help you with this specific name. But I can tell you that
Vietnamese has "two layers" of diacritical signs. The "first layer"
consists of "umlauted" letters; these are letters from Latin-1,
Latin-2, and "o, u with horn". You can find all of them here:
http://www.unicode.org/Public/MAPPINGS/VENDORS/MICSFT/WINDOWS/CP1258.TXT
http://www.unics.uni-hannover.de/nhtcapri/multilingual1.html
These letters are essential to Vietnamese.

The "second layer" consists of tone marks to vowels. If you combine
all the tone marks with vowels, you get the multitude of letters
found here:
http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/180.pdf
http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/overview.htm
The tone marks are (often?) omitted outside Vietnam.
Compare Pinyin Chinese, which is mostly written without tones.

--
Everybody expects the German Inquisition.

.

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