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Seach for language with many diacritics | ||
Tags: Alphabets | Writing System | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6141 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 33 of 39 26 June 2010 at 11:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I feel Vietnamese is being harshly treated in this thread. As Splog pointed out, the
issue is that the numerous vowels are all differentiated by diacritics and then you have the tone marks on top of (quite literally in some cases) the vowel diacritics. However, it's surely better that Vietnamese is explicit in marking it's 10 distinct vowels rather than English which just kinds of shrugs its shoulders and expresses its numerous vowels through 5.5 vowel symbols? (How many foreigners would bother with the crazy English spelling system if it wasn't the global lingua franca?) The common way nowadays to express tones is by adding a letter at the end of the syllable, like in Hmong, probably because it's a lot easier to input on a standard keyboard
Pet Peeve and off topic: Engish is (sadly) the only worthwhile European lingua franca in South-East Asia. There are far more Thai speakers scattered throughout the region than French speakers but no-one suggests that Thai is useful for getting around. There are some loanwords in Khmer and Vietnamese but many concepts already existed when the French arrived and had Sanskrit or Chinese equivalents while English is now the more popular source of loanwords for these two. Lao has always borrowed from Thai. It does seem that over-estimating the usefulness of European languages in Asia is a common theme in this forum. My language map suggests that Laos and Cambodia have 25% French speakers which is just plain wrong. (Although not as bizarre as the fact that Pakistan has 40% English speakers and only 8% Urdu speakers!?! - taking second language speakers the figures would be about 40% English; 100% Urdu while for first language speakers it would be about 10% Urdu and 0.5-1% English.) 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5454 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 34 of 39 26 June 2010 at 11:43am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Orthography is not a beauty contest. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5568 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian | Message 35 of 39 27 June 2010 at 3:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I thought the Vietnamese alphabet was based originally off a Portuguese Romanization anyhow...
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5328 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 36 of 39 27 June 2010 at 5:55am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6143 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 37 of 39 27 June 2010 at 6:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't think it was their intention to make it look ugly and intimidating. Anyways, I suppose it's probably still easier to learn this way than using Chinese characters... As long as it is a good system for the language, that's all that matters. This system is good because it is completely phonetic. The only downside is it might look a bit (well, very) intimidating at first. An example of an orthography that does not work well is the one I am using to write this post. English spelling is a disaster--when you hear a word for the first time you will not know definitively how to spell it and when you see a new word written, you will have a difficult time knowing how to pronounce it. In Vietnamese, once you get used to the sounds of the language which are tricky, this would be very simple. Another example of an orthography that not longer fits the language is Modern Greek. The alphabet was good for the ancient language, but now a lot of the letters sound the same and there are way too many diphthongs. It's still better than English because if you see a written word you know immediately how to pronounce it, but in order to write a word you have to generally memorize the spelling (for example, the following letters/diphthongs all make the sound "ee," like in "feet": ι, η, υ, ει, οι). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| johntm93 Senior Member United States Joined 5328 days ago 587 posts - 746 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish | Message 38 of 39 27 June 2010 at 7:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
And I guess as long as an alphabet works, you might as well use it. Edited by johntm93 on 27 June 2010 at 7:04am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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