Re: Metrical Stress, Feet, etc.

Trebor Jung scripsit:

> In some transliteration schemes, like the one for Vietnamese,
> all syllables are written separately. I read somewhere that this is
> because in old times, Vietnamese was written in the Chinese script,
> and so I guess the idea just carried over into the new system.
The Vietnamese orthography can no longer be called a transliteration:
it's simply how Vietnamese people and others write Vietnamese for
the last century or so.  It began as a romanization scheme for
quoc ngu, which indeed applied the Chinese writing system (making up
new characters as needed) to Vietnamese, but is now entirely autonomous.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  jcowan@reutershealth.com
All "isms" should be "wasms".   --Abbie