Re: Questions about Vietnamese pronunciation

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.