Posted on 06/04/2004 8:24:41 AM PDT by mcg1969
Go listen to the folks who speak that accent without the grammar. There is a ddifference.
I am keeping up with written Vietnamese pretty well because I write back and forth to a couple of nuns in Cam Duc. I also trade email with several other folks almost daily. That started out as quite a challenge because over there they only have INET access at INET cafes where none of the machines have Vietnamese fonts. So they write to me in Vietnamese with no marks. Each word can have a couple dozen different translations. I am getting the hang of it now and don't have to use my dictionaries so much. I write back in a proper font. One 15 y.o. girl that I email with is a fanatic about learning English so she can get rich when the VC lid shatters in a couple of years. She writes to me in English and I write back in Vietnamese.
It's my understanding that Vietnamese, though a Sino-Tibetan language, is written in the Roman alphabet (though even some languages using the Roman alphabet require specialized fonts, ie, Turkish etc.).
The language was Romanized by the Portuguese missionaries in the 1600s and effectively be the French missionaries in the 1800s and formally adopted by the emperor. As an invented written language it is highly consistent, it is pronounced as it is written. The Vietnamese are proud of their script and have the highest literacy rate in Asia. It is a tonal language and the tones are rendered by marks over the words. The old written language was written Chinese which is a separate language from the various spoken languages. The Chinese characters were rendered as "Vietnamese" by adding strokes to the Chinese ideograms. It was correspondingly more difficult to learn. Unfortunately the old literature does not work so well with the new script because it is a translation. The new script renders the spoken language. The old script was its own language with its own structure and tropes.
Agreed. There are quite capable communicators of the English language who nevertheless have distinct accents, or even take a regional license or two.
"Yeah? How many of your trusted physicians, lawyers, CPAs, financial advisors, therapists (if you have one), professors, military leaders, political leaders speak Gullah? Let me guess...none. But it probably is cute in an anthropological way to cruise through the sea islands and get the locals to say something."
Stalking?
?????
Also, I remember Thomas saying that he didn't learn English until he was 9 or 10 years old, but I can't track that down on the web right now (slow).
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