Re: Diacritics in the Vietnamese name "Nguyen"

Andreas Prilop <nhtcapri@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 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".

And it seems to me that the diacritics indicate qualities (e.g. "open"
vs. "closed") of vowels.

> These letters are essential to Vietnamese.

Undoubtedly, but aren't the tone marks, too?

> The "second layer" consists of tone marks to vowels.
- -
> The tone marks are (often?) omitted outside Vietnam.
> Compare Pinyin Chinese, which is mostly written without tones.

I can see practical reasons to that all too well, but since the
languages are tonal, I would expect that the tone marks would be
regarded as important.

Of course we can often use Vietnamese (or French or Italian or ...)
names without diacritic marks, since we usually deal with a fairly
limited number of such names, so clashes are not probable, and we need
not know the correct pronunciation. But still... _our_ names could be
written without vowels (drs prlp & jkk krpl would be quite
understandable in some contexts), but that just wouldn't be right.

--
Yucca, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
.

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