Re: Vietnamese, was: beautiful scripts

At 2:51 PM -0400 10/12/01, Vasiliy Chernov wrote:
>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.
The standard reference for Vietnamese in English is the grammar
written by (Lawrence?) Thompson. He focuses on the Hanoi dialect, and
he uses the orthography throughout. Once upon a time I thought about
doing some work on Vietnamese (there are a lot of Vietnamese people
living in the Salt Lake Valley), but I found Shoshoni instead.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                              Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts."            - Thomas Carlyle