Читать книгу Tuttle English-Vietnamese Dictionary - Phan Van Giuong - Страница 6

Introduction

Vietnamese, the national language of Vietnam, is spoken by over 80 million people in Vietnam and by about three million Vietnamese living in other parts of the world, notably Europe, North America, Britain, Australia and Japan.

The language belongs to the Mon-Khmer language in the Austro-Asiatic family of languages. Vietnamese has three main dialects: northern, central and southern, which correspond to the three main regions of Vietnam. Some differences in pronunciation and vocabulary exist among the dialectal groups. However Vietnamese do understand each other despite the dialectal differences.

The current vocabulary writing system reflects elements of Chinese, Thai and French influences. In the early centuries China exerted dominion over Vietnam and hence many loanwords from Chinese still exist in current Vietnamese, especially for cultural and economic terms. Buddhist literature and classical scholarly works were written in Classical Chinese with the Han characters in use. The later part of the 11th century saw an attempt by the Vietnamese to create a script of their own with the Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation. The French Jesuit missionaries in the 17th century further developed the language with the introduction of a Roman script to facilitate their efforts to evangelize the Vietnamese to Catholicism. Hence the current script has much of Sino-Vietnamese words (influence from Chinese), Thai and Khmer words (influence from the neighboring countries) and French/Latin/Portuguese (influence from the Jesuit missionaries). Further refinement of the language in the 18th and 19th centuries as well as historical events (the re-unification of North and South Vietnam in 1976) manifest in the Vietnamese becoming proud of their language, so much so that Vietnamese is now the national language, known as quốc ngữ or tiếng Việt.

Vietnamese Pronunciation

Like Chinese and Thai, Vietnamese is a tonal language where no word is conjugated. The Vietnamese alphabet has 29 letters:

a, ă, â, b, c, d, đ, e, ê, g, h, i, k, l, m, n, o, ô, ơ, p, q, r, s, t, u, ư, v, x, y.

The Vietnamese consonants are written as single letters or a cluster of two or three letters, as follows:

b, c, ch, d, đ, g, gh, gi, h, k, kh, l, m, n, ng, ngh, nh, p, ph, qu, r, s, t, th, tr, v, x.

The vowels in Vietnamese are the following: a, ă, â, e, ê, i/y, o, ô, ơ, u, ư. Vowels can also be grouped together to form a cluster or a word.

The following tables show the vowels and consonants in Vietnamese pronunciation with their English equivalents.

Vowels

Consonants

Tones

The standard Vietnamese language has six tones. Each tone is a meaningful and integral part of the syllable. Every syllable must have a tone. The tones are indicated in conventional Vietnamese spelling by diacritic marks placed over (á, à, ả, ã) or under (ạ) single vowels or the vowel in a cluster that bears the main stress (v).

Tone Symbols

The six tones just described are summarized in the following chart to illustrate the differences between them as they are associated with individual words.

The Vietnamese language has its national standard syntax, morphology and the tone system, although there are some regional variations in pronunciation and accents. Significant differences in pronunciation and accents between the Northern and Southern people (represented by Hanoi and Saigon respectively) are as follows:

1. There is no difference in the single vowels between Hanoi and Saigon.

2. There are two vowel clusters /ưu/ and /ươu/ which are pronounced /iu/ and /iêu/ by Hanoi, and /ưu/ and /ươu/ by Saigon.

3. Differences in the pronunciation of consonants:

4. Saigonese do not differentiate between the two tones /?/ and /~/; these are pronounced alike.