Re: The romamization of a complex tone system

From: "Nik Taylor" <fortytwo@...>

| Christophe Grandsire wrote:
| > Well, the real problem is that the Roman alphabet is absolutely not suited
for
| > something more complicated than Spanish :))
|
| Even the Spanish had to add _ll_, _rr_ and _ñ_ (n-tilde) plus the
| acute.  :-)

It's an alphabet designed for Latin. And even that was an adaptation of a
western Greek alphabet, which was an adaptation of a northern variety of
Canaanite-Hebrew called Phoenician....

It's not even sufficient for a language like Hawaiian, which has such a small
inventory of phonemes but still lacks a real letter for a glottal stop.

Speaking of the mixed blessings of Romanization: In basic terms, how was
Vietnamese written before it adopted the Jesuit -- I mean Roman alphabet, with
all the wicked tone marks and vowel raisers and back unrounded vowel horns. Is
there a real effort to reform its writing, or even to revert to writing with
Chinese characters? I've come up with some rough attempts to "normalize"
Vietnamese, but since I don't even speak the language, I shouldn't be taken to
seriously. THIS is how much free time I got...


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