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Re: Questions about Vietnamese pronunciation

From:Racsko Tamas <tracsko@...>
Date:Friday, April 30, 2004, 21:57
On 30 Apr 2004 <Roger Mills <rfmilly@...> wrote:

> It looks for all the world like the IPA "glottal stop"-- is that where > IPA got it from?? Just wondering.
I find it possible. I call IPA as APhI until now, it was originally a French institution and I think the were aware of the activities of de Rho^des
> it seems that "c" is [k] before a,u,o in good Romance fashion; "k" is > [k] before i,e.
Yes. As you see G and Ng are also "protected" by a "h" before "i", "e", "e^" despite of the fact that there "palatal" vowels do not affect the quality of the preceeding consonant. It's a clue to the nationality of the designers of the alphabet.
> "q" or should it be "qu"?, is [kw], as I recall from Qui Nhon, Quang > Tri etc.
Q is definitely /k/ due to the orthographic bias of de Rho^des. But otherwise it is misleading: the U is not an approximant /w/ but part of the core of the syllable, or expressing this in IE terms: the "ui" of Qui and the "ua" of Quang is a diphtongue. The same core is in the name Xuan (Xua^n) The rule is simple: just replace C before U with Q.
> How do you mean "no audible release" for final m, nh? There's also > final n and ng, which are certainly audible.
N and Ng are pronounced as regular nasals, but during the articulation of the syllable endings I mentioned there's no exspriratory current only articulation takes place. This feature has the X-SAMPA diacritic _}. The same happens in Korean.