Re: Questions about Vietnamese pronunciation

Racsko Tamas wrote a very useful summary of Vietnamese orthography and
pronunciation....

>   The diacritical marks are rather logically used:
> (snips)
>   - 'dotless question mark ? above': high rising glottalized tone
It looks for all the world like the IPA "glottal stop"-- is that where IPA
got it from?? Just wondering.

(snips)
>   The not mentioned letters that differ from English are the following:
> C [k]*, ...
Looking thru my little Viet-Anh dictionary, it seems that "c" is [k] before
a,u,o in good Romance fashion; "k" is [k] before i,e.
"q" or should it be "qu"?, is [kw], as I recall from Qui Nhon, Quang Tri
etc.

Interestingly lots of us Americans pronounced "tr" correctly without
realizing it.  The very common name Nguyen, however, almost never came out
right.

>   Those marked with an *asterisk (c, ch, m, nh, p t) are pronounced
> without an audible release when they are in syllable-final position.
How do you mean "no audible release" for final m, nh?  There's also final n
and ng, which are certainly audible.

>
> > Portuguese?
>
>   It's a result of an international co-operation. Portuguese
> misionaries cretated the system but the French monk Alexandre de Rho^de
> codified in the 17th century.
I had been under the mistaken impression that A. de Rhodes was
Portuguese....I would guess that most Jesuit missionaries in SE Asia in the
17th C. would perforce have dealt with Spanish/Portuguese confraternals and
superiors headquartered in Macau IIRC.  I've seen some dictionaries of
Indonesian languages reduced to writing by Portuguese missionaries, though
much later-- 19th, early 20th C.  Considering how phonologically simple the
Indo. languages were compared with Vietnamese, I have to say, nonetheless,
they seem to have done a better job with VN.
>