Re: Diacritics in the Vietnamese name "Nguyen"

>>>>> "Andreas" == Andreas Prilop <nhtcapri@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

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

Aren't these considered as proper letters in the *Vietnamese
alphabet*? i.e. "e" vs. "e^" is treated like "o" vs. "u".


Andreas> The "second layer" consists of tone marks to vowels. If
Andreas> you combine all the tone marks with vowels, you get the
Andreas> multitude of letters found here:
Andreas> http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/180.pdf
Andreas> http://www.itscj.ipsj.or.jp/ISO-IR/overview.htm

And these marks are also essential to Vietnamese.


Andreas> The tone marks are (often?) omitted outside Vietnam.
Andreas> Compare Pinyin Chinese, which is mostly written without
Andreas> tones.

Why omitted? Because English speakers are afraid of any diacritical
marks, and they can't handle them properly. So, they pretend not to
see them and drop them during transcription.

The tone system is an important part of the phonology of both Chinese
and Vietnamese. Much like vowel quality is essential in English.
Omitting the tone marks is analoguous to omitting vowel letters (or
getting them wrong) when one writes English. It's still possible to
understand it by guesswork, but et wan't bi a plesore to reed such
taexts.


--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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