Vietnamese, was: beautiful scripts

On Tue, 9 Oct 2001 21:08:24 -0700, Frank George Valoczy <valoczy@...>
wrote:

>Not necessarily beautiful, but can anyone direct me to an explanation of
>the Vietnamese orthography?
I can't find anything good on the net. And I'm afraid a resource for
beginners will have it oversimplified. There are indeed some tricky
pieces in it. And at any rate one should examine the pronunciation
of the North and of the South separately.

Not so long ago, I read a good book on Vietnamese phone*ics (in Russian)
that accounts for main urban dialects:

M. V. Gordina, I. S. Bystrov, Foneticheskij stroj v'etnamskogo jazyka
(M., "Nauka", 1984, 244 pp.)

I still have it handy, so if you want any details to be clarified, I think
I can help. But I don't have anything on spelling rules proper, so I can't
comment on a few purely orthographical issues (e. g. when exactly the
medial [-w-] is rendered with {u} and when with {o}).

I think I could also compress main facts into several messages, but it'll
take some time.


Basilius

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