Modern Vietnamese is written with the Latin alphabet, known as quoc
ngu
(
) in Vietnamese. Quoc
ngu consists of 29 letters. These are:
- The 26
letters of the English alphabet minus f, j, w,
and z.
- Seven modified letters using diacritics:
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
,
and 
.
These modified letters are all considered separate letters of the
alphabet. Vietnamese dictionaries follow the order 
- - - 
- 
- 
- 
- 
- ...
etc.
The combinations 
, 
, 
, 
, 
, 
,
and 
have
also traditionally been considered separate letters with their own
section in the dictionary, but this is less common nowadays.
In addition, diacritics are used to indicate the tones of Vietnamese.
Tone markings are:
(no mark), 
,
, 
,
, and 
.
When letters are combined with tone markings, some complex diacritics
can result, such as: 
,
, 
,
and 
.
The following is a sample of Vietnamese in quoc
ngu, a rather unexciting
story about the increase in tourism to Laos in 2004. There are many
words in this passage that are derived from Chinese, but because
they are not written in Chinese characters there origin is not immediately apparent.
Note that Laos has its own name in Vietnamese, unlike the names of
many countries (outside of Europe and some Asian neighbours) which are
normally simply written in English.
Background of Quoc ngu
Considering that Vietnam has been an independent nation for a thousand
years, quoc
ngu has a surprisingly brief history. The system was developed
by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century. The earliest
extant dictionary using
quoc ngu was the Dictionarium Annamiticum
Lusitanum et Latinum,
published by Alexandre de Rhodes in 1651. Rhodes, who was French,
relied heavily on earlier Portuguese dictionaries in compiling his
work.
Quoc ngu was largely neglected until the 19th century when
it was taken up by the French colonial government as a means of breaking
the grip of Chinese culture and fostering Western
ways of thinking. Despite its colonial background, the simplicity
and ease of use of quoc
ngu resulted in its gradual spread until it was finally chosen
as the official Vietnamese script in the 20th century.
Features of quoc ngu
1. Diacritics are used to represent sound distinctions
not covered by the Roman or Latin alphabet. This is not unusual. Although
it is used around the world, the Roman alphabet is actually inadequate to
represent even the languages of Europe.
Some diacritics in Vietnamese:
The letter (not
strictly speaking a diacritic) represents an ingressive 'd' sound, which means that the breath is not exploded outwards, it is held inwards, so to speak. (The Vietnamese /b/ sound is also ingressive, which gives it a peculiar auditory impression quite different from English /b/).
, and are
the unrounded versions of 
and 
respectively. These unrounded vowel sounds are not found in most European languages.
For short vowels, represents
short while represents
short .
The letters and represent
the distinction between [
]
and [] in
IPA symbols (mid-open and mid-close front unrounded vowels respectively).
Similarly, and represent
the difference between [
]
and [] (mid-open
and mid-close back rounded vowels respectively). The result is a
neat and regular distinction, better than that in some European
languages (See this
article for French
and this
article for German).
Since European languages do not have tones, diacritics were introduced
to represent these (, , , , ,
and ).
While helping achieve a regular and predictable spelling, diacritics
are cumbersome to write and cause problems on
computers and browsers. International
Roman-letter character sets (such as ASCII) are unable to accommodate
all the Vietnamese forms, so special encodings have had to be devised.
At present there are several mutually incompatible systems of encoding,
causing confusion and technical difficulties on the Internet.
Recently, Unicode is becoming more common.
2. The quoc ngu has a very obvious Western
heritage, which is apparent
in several ways.
The Portuguese
lineage shows through in spellings such as (initially
pronounced /ny/ as in Portuguese).
This heritage is less benign in some other cases. For instance,
the sound /k/ is represented by the letters , 
,
and 
,
depending on the environment. The letter is
used before and
,
and before
the vowels , ,
and 
. This
practice dates back to Portuguese, which, like English,
pronounces as
/k/ before 'a' and 'o' but /s/ before 'i', and 'e'.
Portuguese is also followed in
the combination 
.
These complications could have been avoided by using in
all these positions.
A different quirk is seen in words like 
and 
.
The letters and are
pronounced slightly differently under the influence of the
following vowel. This difference in
sound was picked up by Europeans
learning Vietnamese and reflected in the quoc
ngu.
For a Vietnamese native speaker, however, the difference is
trivial -- imperceptible even -- and should not really be shown
in the spelling.
3. In spite of its shortcomings, the system that the missionaries
created was remarkably suited to the Vietnamese language. Of particular
usefulness is its ability to bridge dialects. The writing
system tries to show not only distinctions in sound that are found in
the standard Hanoi dialect but also those in other dialects. Two
different letters may be pronounced identically in Hanoi but differently
in other dialects. For instance:
Letter |
Hanoi pronunciation |
Saigon pronunciation |
|
/s/ |
/sh/ |
|
/s/ |
Letter |
Hanoi pronunciation |
Saigon pronunciation |
|
/ch/ |
/tr/ |
|
/ch/ |
Letter |
Hanoi pronunciation |
Saigon pronunciation |
|
/v/ |
/y/ |
|
/z/ |
|
|
/r/ |
Please note: Although I have used slashes (/) to enclose
sounds, the symbols are not standard phonetic or phonemic symbols
used by linguists.
4. One very noticeable feature of quoc ngu is its monosyllabic nature.
Every syllable is written as though it were a separate word, with a
space before and after. This is a throwback to the use of Chinese characters
in Vietnamese (see below). Partly as a result, Vietnamese speakers
tend to believe that their language is made up of monosyllabic words.
To be sure, the monosyllable
is an important entity in Vietnamese. Each syllable tends to have its
own meaning and thus a strong identity. However, the Vietnamese
monosyllable is not automatically a 'word' -- or at least, not a word as we would define it in English.
Often, two syllables
go together to form a single word, which can be identified by the way it functions grammatically in a sentence. For instance, take the
sentence:
What time does the plane arrive at Tokyo airport?
It is clear that 
does
not mean 'machine flies'; it is a single word meaning 'aeroplane' and
functions as the subject of the sentence. 
does
not mean 'come-down wing' (which is the literal meaning of the two
monosyllables); it is a single word that means 'to land' and functions
as the verb of the sentence.
is a
'compound word' made up of two native Vietnamese elements. Similarly,
is a compound
word made up of Sino-Vietnamese forms that have their ultimate origin
in Chinese.
Vietnamese also has native polysyllabic words like 
'pelican'
that cannot be broken up into anything meaningful. More recently, Vietnamese
has borrowed polysyllabic words from foreign languages like French,
e.g., 
or 
('valise'
or 'suitcase').
In an earlier era many compound words
were hyphenated but this practice has now been abandoned.
Quoc ngu was not the first system of writing used to represent the
Vietnamese language. Before quoc ngu came along, two scripts existed
and were in use. The first was Chinese characters, known as chu nho
in Vietnamese. The second was a native adaptation of the Chinese characters
known as chu nom.
CHU NHO (
)
For much of Vietnam's history the official written language was Classical
Chinese, using, of course, Chinese characters. Chinese became established
as the dominant cultural medium during the millennium (111 B.C. - 938 A.D.)
when Vietnam was under direct Chinese rule. Even after Vietnam gained its
independence, Classical Chinese continued in use among the literati. In fact,
the characters were in official use right up until the 20th century. It was
only the abolition of the Chinese-style official exams in 1918, following on from China's own abolition of the exams, that finally
sounded their death knell.
During the time it was the official language, Chinese had a massive influence
on the Vietnamese language and literature. Even today, a huge proportion of
the modern vocabulary has its origins in Chinese.
As in the case of Japanese, the original Chinese pronunciations were modified
to suit local habits. In many cases the pronunciation of Chinese words appears
closer to the dialects of southern China. Similarities can often be found
with Cantonese, the language of nearby Guangdong province, rather than Mandarin.
As a random example, the word 
'superior, high-class' is gao1
ji2
in Mandarin and gou3
kap7
in
Cantonese. In Vietnamese, the equivalent is 
.
(It is interesting to speculate whether such similarities are due to closer
contact with Guangdong than with the mainstream northern Chinese dialects,
or whether Vietnamese simply retains older features of Chinese pronunciation,
as do Korean and Japanese).
The story of Vietnamese writing does not end with Classical Chinese.
Despite the overwhelming prestige of Chinese writing, the Vietnamese
managed along the way to develop a system to write their own language.
CHU NOM (
)
The chu nom was a system developed to write Vietnamese. The actual date is not agreed but chu
nom was already in existence by the mid-13th century.
Chu nom was not a completely new system of writing. It consisted
of orthodox Chinese characters supplemented by a set of new characters specifically
created to write Vietnamese words. Modelled on Chinese characters, these characters
used many of the same principles in their construction -- for instance, the
practice of combining a meaning element and a sound element to create a new
character. The new characters were considerably more unwieldy and complex
than the originals. They were all but incomprehensible to people from China
itself and have never been accepted as part of the greater family of Chinese
characters, unlike characters that were created by the Japanese.
As in the case of Japanese, the Vietnamese script had to deal with both native
words and imported vocabulary from China. Constant close contact with the
Chinese meant that some Chinese words were borrowed more than once, resulting
in layers of Chinese vocabulary in varying degrees of naturalisation. The
most highly naturalised words were accepted as Vietnamese words, as much an
integral part of the Vietnamese language as the native Vietnamese vocabulary.
Less naturalised words retained a stiff and bookish feel.
The main methods of representing Vietnamese in chu nom are shown below.
(Note that the chu nom system was never completely standardised. There
were innumerable cases where several different characters were used to write
the same word, as well as cases where the same character was used to write
different words.)
1. Chinese loanwords (Sino-Vietnamese): For Vietnamese words borrowed
from Chinese, chu nom used the original Chinese character without
change. For example:
- The word
meaning
'mountain' was written 
(modern Chinese shan1).
- The word
meaning
'fire' was written 
(modern Chinese huo3).
- The word
meaning
'flavour' was written 
(modern Chinese wei4).
2. Naturalised Chinese words: Some very old borrowings from Chinese
came to be considered naturalised Vietnamese words. These words were generally
represented by the original Chinese character, but in order to distinguish
them from newer Chinese loanwords sometimes a mark was added.
- The word for 'smell, flavour',
,
was borrowed earlier than
and had come to be regarded as a naturalised Vietnamese word. It was written
or 
.
(The mark on the top right indicated that this was a 'naturalised' word
to be read , not .)
3. Native Vietnamese words: For native Vietnamese words, there were
essentially two methods of representation:
(i) Chinese characters were used without change to represent the
pronunciation only (emptied of meaning).
| Native Vietnamese Word |
Chu Nom Character |
Function |
'one' |
 |
Sound:
is pronounced mut6
in modern Cantonese and mo4
in modern Mandarin. |
There is no connection between
'one' and the meaning of ,
which is 'to sink' or 'not have' in modern Chinese.
(ii) New characters were created, either by putting
two Chinese characters together on the basis of meaning and/or sound,
or by modifying existing Chinese characters. (Sometimes this meant
putting together two chu nom characters.) Some chu
nom characters
are:
Combination of two meanings:
| Native Vietnamese Word |
Chu Nom Character |
Components |
Function |
'sky, heaven' |
 |
 |
Meaning ('heaven') |
 |
Meaning ('above') |
Combination of two characters, one chosen for its meaning, one for its
sound:
| Native Vietnamese Word |
Chu Nom Character |
Components |
Function |
'mountain' |
 |
|
Meaning ('mountain') |
 |
Sound (nei4
in modern Chinese) |
'fire' |
 |
|
Meaning ('fire') |
 |
Sound (lü3
in modern Chinese) |
'strange' |
 |
 |
Sound (luo2
in modern Chinese) |
 |
Meaning ('strange') |
Modification of existing character chosen for its sound:
| Native Vietnamese Word |
Chu Nom Character |
Components |
Function |
'that' |
 |
'clothing' minus top part |
Sound only (yi1
in modern Chinese); original meaning is irrelevant |
The chu nom system of writing could only be mastered by someone who
already knew Chinese characters. Its use was thus confined to the educated
elite and it was regarded as secondary to Chinese characters. Although chu
nom was the medium for some of Vietnam's vernacular literature, most
notably the Story of Kieu, a classic 18th century work, it was
unable to match the prestige of orthodox Chinese writing. It was only fleetingly
successful in gaining official acceptance as Vietnam's writing system. In
the end, the Vietnamese abandoned both Chinese characters and the chu nom.
Although Chinese characters have been swept into the dustbin of history,
it's remarkable how much their spirit lives on, both in the Vietnamese vocabulary
and, ironically, in the writing system.
In fact, the practice of representing each syllable as one 'word', which
is the common practice in modern Vietnamese, is actually a throwback to the
old concept that each Chinese character is equivalent to one word. For instance,
'Hanoi', which linguistically speaking is one word, is written in Vietnamese
as two: 
. This follows
the Chinese script, which writes 'Hanoi' with two characters: 
(literally, 'river' + 'inside').
Treatment of foreign words
Being written in the Roman alphabet, it is now quite easy for Vietnamese
to adopt foreign words (from English, French, etc.) outright. There is
no need to transform words into katakana as in Japanese, or try
to find suitable-sounding characters, as in Chinese.
Neverthless, Vietnamese has a long tradition of transforming foreign words
into an acceptable Vietnamese form. This can be seen in naturalised words
like:
| frein 'brake' |
 |
| film |
 |
| café 'coffee' |
 |
| carotte 'carrot' |
 |
And there are also cases where foreign words have entered via Chinese. The word 
is
the Vietnamese pronunciation of the Chinese word 
ju4-le4-bu4,
which is the English word 'club'!
For more modern borrowings, conflicting tendencies can be seen. For instance,
it is possible to find the loanword 'guitar' written 
, 
, 
,
or 
. The loanword
'video' may be written 
, 
,
or 
.
It is reasonable to expect that this tendency to directly use the foreign
spelling will continue.
****************************
For more information, see Links.
See also the Chinese Writing System and the Japanese
Writing System.
