Re: OT: Historical Linguistics Question
| From: | R A Brown <ray@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Wednesday, September 21, 2005, 18:35 |
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Carsten Becker wrote:
[snip]
> a language -> unique writing system relation. I mean,
> as if I could understand, say, Vietnamese only because it's
> *one* of the *many* languages written in the Latin alphabet
> (although it's an Asian lang?! Is that due to the French?).
>
> </rant>
No - otherwise the Cambodians & Laotians would also be using the Roman
alphabet, I guess.
It is due to Catholic missionaries of the 16th & 17th centuries. The
earliest missionaries based their orthography in fact on _Portuguese_
usage. But it was French Jesuit priest, Alexandre de Rhodes, who during
the years 1624 to 1644 built on the efforts of the earlier missionaries
and more or less fixed the Vietnamese orthography. Using previous
Portuguese-Vietnamese dictionaries, he wrote a
Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, which was printed in Rome in
1651, using his spelling system.
This BTW explains why the Vietnamese orthography is not a one-to-one
phonemic mapping - it reflects the pronunciation of the language about 4
centuries ago. Still not as bad as English or French whose orthographies
reflect their languages as spoken some 7 or 8 centuries ago ;-)
--
Ray
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