A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a script , as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language . The earliest writing was invented during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each writing system invented without prior knowledge of writing gradually evolved from a system of proto-writing that included a small number of ideographs , which were not fully capable of encoding spoken language, and lacked the ability to express a broad range of ideas.
83-491: Langdi was a script commonly used by traders used to write Haryanvi , Punjabi , or Saraiki in the Indian subcontinent . Bookkeepers , known as munīm ( Hindi : मुनीम , Urdu : مُنیم ), would also keep records in this script. Some scholars have claimed that Langdi is a form of Mahajani for writing in parts of Haryana . Its proper connection must be more thoroughly explored. This writing system –related article
166-465: A featural system uses symbols representing sub-phonetic elements—e.g. those traits that can be used to distinguish between and analyse a language's phonemes, such as their voicing or place of articulation . The only prominent example of a featural system is the hangul script used to write Korean, where featural symbols are combined into letters, which are in turn joined into syllabic blocks. Many scholars, including John DeFrancis (1911–2009), reject
249-636: A minor syllable occurred). These fricatives were not present in Proto-Viet–Muong, as indicated by their absence in Mường , but were evidently present in the later Proto-Vietnamese stage. Subsequent loss of the minor-syllable prefixes phonemicized the fricatives. Ferlus 1992 proposes that originally there were both voiced and voiceless fricatives, corresponding to original voiced or voiceless stops, but Ferlus 2009 appears to have abandoned that hypothesis, suggesting that stops were softened and voiced at approximately
332-576: A characterization of hangul as a featural system—with arguments including that Korean writers do not themselves think in these terms when writing—or question the viability of Sampson's category altogether. As hangul was consciously created by literate experts, Daniels characterizes it as a "sophisticated grammatogeny " —a writing system intentionally designed for a specific purpose, as opposed to having evolved gradually over time. Other grammatogenies include shorthands developed by professionals and constructed scripts created by hobbyists and creatives, like
415-416: A component related to the character's meaning, and a component that gives a hint for its pronunciation. A syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent either syllables or moras —a unit of prosody that is often but not always a syllable in length. The graphemes used in syllabaries are called syllabograms . Syllabaries are best suited to languages with relatively simple syllable structure, since
498-481: A different symbol is needed for every syllable. Japanese, for example, contains about 100 moras, which are represented by moraic hiragana . By contrast, English features complex syllable structures with a relatively large inventory of vowels and complex consonant clusters —making for a total of 15–16,000 distinct syllables. Some syllabaries have larger inventories: the Yi script contains 756 different symbols. An alphabet
581-418: A five-fold classification of writing systems, comprising pictographic scripts, ideographic scripts, analytic transitional scripts, phonetic scripts, and alphabetic scripts. In practice, writing systems are classified according to the primary type of symbols used, and typically include exceptional cases where symbols function differently. For example, logographs found within phonetic systems like English include
664-447: A main vowel component followed by a shorter semivowel offglide /j/ or /w/ . There are restrictions on the high offglides: /j/ cannot occur after a front vowel (i, ê, e) nucleus and /w/ cannot occur after a back vowel (u, ô, o) nucleus. The correspondence between the orthography and pronunciation is complicated. For example, the offglide /j/ is usually written as i ; however, it may also be represented with y . In addition, in
747-448: A paper published in 1856. Later, in 1920, French-Polish linguist Jean Przyluski found that Mường is more closely related to Vietnamese than other Mon–Khmer languages, and a Viet–Muong subgrouping was established, also including Thavung , Chut , Cuoi , etc. The term "Vietic" was proposed by Hayes (1992), who proposed to redefine Viet–Muong as referring to a subbranch of Vietic containing only Vietnamese and Mường . The term " Vietic "
830-546: A process of tonogenesis , in which distinctions formerly expressed by final consonants became phonemic tonal distinctions when those consonants disappeared. These characteristics have become part of many of the genetically unrelated languages of Southeast Asia; for example, Tsat (a member of the Malayo-Polynesian group within Austronesian ), and Vietnamese each developed tones as a phonemic feature. After
913-642: A representative on the Government Council for Nationalities, an advisory body of the Czech Government for matters of policy towards national minorities and their members. It also grants the community the right to use Vietnamese with public authorities and in courts anywhere in the country. Vietnamese is taught in schools and institutions outside of Vietnam, a large part contributed by its diaspora . In countries with Vietnamese-speaking communities Vietnamese language education largely serves as
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#1732791028942996-540: A role to link descendants of Vietnamese immigrants to their ancestral culture. In neighboring countries and vicinities near Vietnam such as Southern China, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, Vietnamese as a foreign language is largely due to trade, as well as recovery and growth of the Vietnamese economy. Since the 1980s, Vietnamese language schools ( trường Việt ngữ/ trường ngôn ngữ Tiếng Việt ) have been established for youth in many Vietnamese-speaking communities around
1079-408: A set of defined graphemes, collectively called a script . The concept of the grapheme is similar to that of the phoneme used in the study of spoken languages. Likewise, as many sonically distinct phones may function as the same phoneme depending on speaker, dialect, and context, many visually distinct glyphs (or graphs ) may be identified as the same grapheme. These variant glyphs are known as
1162-542: A spoken language, this functions as literacy in a second, acquired language. A single language (e.g. Hindustani ) can be written using multiple writing systems, and a writing system can also represent multiple languages. For example, Chinese characters have been used to write multiple languages throughout the Sinosphere —including the Vietnamese language from at least the 13th century, until their replacement with
1245-519: A stage commonly termed Middle Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt trung đại ). The pronunciation of the "rime" of the syllable, i.e. all parts other than the initial consonant (optional /w/ glide, vowel nucleus, tone and final consonant), appears nearly identical between Middle Vietnamese and modern Hanoi pronunciation. On the other hand, the Middle Vietnamese pronunciation of the initial consonant differs greatly from all modern dialects, and in fact
1328-552: A third of the Vietnamese lexicon in all realms, and may account for as much as 60% of the vocabulary used in formal texts. Vietic languages were confined to the northern third of modern Vietnam until the "southward advance" ( Nam tiến ) from the late 15th century. The conquest of the ancient nation of Champa and the conquest of the Mekong Delta led to an expansion of the Vietnamese people and language, with distinctive local variations emerging. After France invaded Vietnam in
1411-927: Is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Writing system Writing systems are generally classified according to how its symbols, called graphemes , generally relate to units of language. Phonetic writing systems, which include alphabets and syllabaries , use graphemes that correspond to sounds in the corresponding spoken language . Alphabets use graphemes called letters that generally correspond to spoken phonemes , and are typically classified into three categories. In general, pure alphabets use letters to represent both consonant and vowel sounds, while abjads only have letters representing consonants, and abugidas use characters corresponding to consonant–vowel pairs. Syllabaries use graphemes called syllabograms that represent entire syllables or moras . By contrast, logographic (alternatively morphographic ) writing systems use graphemes that represent
1494-493: Is a set of letters , each of which generally represent one of the segmental phonemes in a spoken language. However, these correspondences are rarely uncomplicated, and spelling is often mediated by other factors than just which sounds are used by a speaker. The word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta , the names for the first two letters in the Greek alphabet . An abjad is an alphabet whose letters only represent
1577-438: Is a visual and tactile notation representing language . The symbols used in writing correspond systematically to functional units of either a spoken or signed language . This definition excludes a broader class of symbolic markings, such as drawings and maps. A text is any instance of written material, including transcriptions of spoken material. The act of composing and recording a text may be referred to as writing , and
1660-527: Is also spoken by the Jing people traditionally residing on three islands (now joined to the mainland) off Dongxing in southern Guangxi Province , China . A large number of Vietnamese speakers also reside in neighboring countries of Cambodia and Laos . In the United States, Vietnamese is the sixth most spoken language , with over 1.5 million speakers, who are concentrated in a handful of states. It
1743-468: Is an alphabetic writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one. In an abugida, there may be a sign for k with no vowel, but also one for ka (if a is the inherent vowel), and ke is written by modifying the ka sign in a consistent way with how la would be modified to get le . In many abugidas, modification consists of
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#17327910289421826-451: Is defined as a potentially permanent means of recording information, then these systems do not qualify as writing at all, since the symbols disappear as soon as they are used. Instead, these transient systems serve as signals . Writing systems may be characterized by how text is graphically divided into lines, which are to be read in sequence: For example, English and many other Western languages are written in horizontal rows that begin at
1909-586: Is no evidence of contact between China and the literate peoples of the Near East, and the Mesopotamian and Chinese approaches for representing aspects of sound and meaning are distinct. The Mesoamerican writing systems , including Olmec and the Maya script , were also invented independently. The first known alphabetic writing appeared before 2000 BC, and was used to write a Semitic language spoken in
1992-415: Is notated i or y (with the difference between the two often indicating differences in the quality or length of the preceding vowel), and after /ð/ and /β/ , where it is notated ĕ . This ĕ , and the /j/ it notated, have disappeared from the modern language. Note that b [ɓ] and p [p] never contrast in any position, suggesting that they are allophones. The language also has three clusters at
2075-534: Is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing. As a result of emigration , Vietnamese speakers are also found in other parts of Southeast Asia , East Asia , North America , Europe , and Australia . Vietnamese has also been officially recognized as a minority language in the Czech Republic . As the national language, Vietnamese is the lingua franca in Vietnam. It
2158-582: Is often mistakenly thought as being an monosyllabic language, Vietnamese words typically consist of from one to many as eight individual morphemes or syllables; the majority of Vietnamese vocabulary are disyllabic and trisyllabic words. Vietnamese is written using the Vietnamese alphabet ( chữ Quốc ngữ ). The alphabet is based on the Latin script and was officially adopted in the early 20th century during French rule of Vietnam . It uses digraphs and diacritics to mark tones and some phonemes . Vietnamese
2241-410: Is significantly closer to the modern Saigon dialect than the modern Hanoi dialect. The following diagram shows the orthography and pronunciation of Middle Vietnamese: ^1 [p] occurs only at the end of a syllable. ^2 This letter, ⟨ ꞗ ⟩ , is no longer used. ^3 [j] does not occur at the beginning of a syllable, but can occur at the end of a syllable, where it
2324-650: Is the Brahmic family of scripts, however, which includes nearly all the scripts used in India and Southeast Asia. The name abugida is derived from the first four characters of an order of the Geʽez script used in some contexts. It was coined as a linguistic term by Peter T. Daniels ( b. 1951 ), who borrowed it from the Ethiopian languages. Originally proposed as a category by Geoffrey Sampson ( b. 1944 ),
2407-408: Is the first language of the majority of the Vietnamese population, as well as a first or second language for the country's ethnic minority groups . In the Czech Republic , Vietnamese has been recognized as one of 14 minority languages, on the basis of communities that have resided in the country either traditionally or on a long-term basis. This status grants the Vietnamese community in the country
2490-653: Is the third-most spoken language in Texas and Washington; fourth-most in Georgia, Louisiana, and Virginia; and fifth-most in Arkansas and California. Vietnamese is the third most spoken language in Australia other than English, after Mandarin and Arabic. In France, it is the most spoken Asian language and the eighth most spoken immigrant language at home. Vietnamese is the sole official and national language of Vietnam. It
2573-996: Is used in various models either as a synonym for "morphographic", or as a specific subtype where the basic unit of meaning written is the word . Even with morphographic writing, there remains a correspondence between graphemes and the sounds of speech, but the pronunciation values of the units of meaning is not what is being encoded firstly by the writing system. Many classifications define three primary categories, where phonographic systems are subdivided into syllabic and alphabetic (or segmental ) systems. Syllabaries use symbols called syllabograms to represent syllables or moras . Alphabets use symbols called letters that correspond to spoken phonemes—or more technically to diaphonemes . Alphabets are generally classified into three subtypes, with abjads having letters for consonants , pure alphabets having letters for both consonants and vowels , and abugidas having characters that correspond to consonant–vowel pairs. David Diringer proposed
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2656-440: Is used throughout the study of writing systems, the precise interpretations of and definitions for concepts often vary depending on the theoretical model employed by the researcher. A grapheme is the basic functional unit of a writing system. Graphemes are generally defined as minimally significant elements which, when taken together, comprise the set of symbols from which texts may be constructed. All writing systems require
2739-413: Is used, among others, by Gérard Diffloth , with a slightly different proposal on subclassification, within which the term "Viet–Muong" refers to a lower subgrouping (within an eastern Vietic branch) consisting of Vietnamese dialects, Mường dialects, and Nguồn (of Quảng Bình Province ). Austroasiatic is believed to have dispersed around 2000 BC. The arrival of the agricultural Phùng Nguyên culture in
2822-446: Is written with two Chinese characters or in a composite character made of two different characters. This conveys the transformation of the Vietnamese lexicon from sesquisyllabic to fully monosyllabic under the pressure of Chinese linguistic influence, characterized by linguistic phenomena such as the reduction of minor syllables; loss of affixal morphology drifting towards analytical grammar; simplification of major syllable segments, and
2905-428: The allographs of a grapheme: For example, the lowercase letter ⟨a⟩ may be represented by the double-storey | a | and single-storey | ɑ | shapes, or others written in cursive, block, or printed styles. The choice of a particular allograph may be influenced by the medium used, the writing instrument used, the stylistic choice of the writer, the preceding and succeeding graphemes in
2988-444: The Latin alphabet and Chinese characters , glyphs are made up of lines or strokes. Linear writing is most common, but there are non-linear writing systems where glyphs consist of other types of marks, such as in cuneiform and Braille . Egyptian hieroglyphs and Maya script were often painted in linear outline form, but in formal contexts they were carved in bas-relief . The earliest examples of writing are linear: while cuneiform
3071-988: The Mon–Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family (which also includes the Khmer language spoken in Cambodia , as well as various smaller and/or regional languages , such as the Munda and Khasi languages spoken in eastern India, and others in Laos , southern China and parts of Thailand). In 1850, British lawyer James Richardson Logan detected striking similarities between the Korku language in Central India and Vietnamese. He suggested that Korku , Mon , and Vietnamese were part of what he termed "Mon–Annam languages" in
3154-605: The Red River Delta at that time may correspond to the Vietic branch. This ancestral Vietic was typologically very different from later Vietnamese. It was polysyllabic, or rather sesquisyllabic , with roots consisting of a reduced syllable followed by a full syllable, and featured many consonant clusters. Both of these features are found elsewhere in Austroasiatic and in modern conservative Vietic languages south of
3237-662: The Sinai Peninsula . Most of the world's alphabets either descend directly from this Proto-Sinaitic script , or were directly inspired by its design. Descendants include the Phoenician alphabet ( c. 1050 BC ), and its child in the Greek alphabet ( c. 800 BC ). The Latin alphabet , which descended from the Greek alphabet, is by far the most common script used by writing systems. Several approaches have been taken to classify writing systems, with
3320-560: The Tengwar script designed by J. R. R. Tolkien to write the Elven languages he also constructed. Many of these feature advanced graphic designs corresponding to phonological properties. The basic unit of writing in these systems can map to anything from phonemes to words. It has been shown that even the Latin script has sub-character features. In linear writing , which includes systems like
3403-597: The Vietnamese orthography with the phonetic pronunciation to the right. Some consonant sounds are written with only one letter (like "p"), other consonant sounds are written with a digraph (like "ph"), and others are written with more than one letter or digraph (the velar stop is written variously as "c", "k", or "q"). In some cases, they are based on their Middle Vietnamese pronunciation; since that period, ph and kh (but not th ) have evolved from aspirated stops into fricatives (like Greek phi and chi ), while d and gi have collapsed and converged together (into /z/ in
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3486-408: The ampersand ⟨&⟩ and the numerals ⟨0⟩ , ⟨1⟩ , etc.—which correspond to specific words ( and , zero , one , etc.) and not to the underlying sounds. A logogram is a character that represents a morpheme within a language. Chinese characters represent the only major logographic writing systems still in use: they have historically been used to write
3569-546: The second or first language for other ethnicities of Vietnam , and used by Vietnamese diaspora in the world. Like many languages in Southeast Asia and East Asia , Vietnamese is highly analytic and is tonal . It has head-initial directionality, with subject–verb–object order and modifiers following the words they modify. It also uses noun classifiers . Its vocabulary has had significant influence from Middle Chinese and loanwords from French . Although it
3652-404: The uppercase and lowercase forms of the 26 letters of the Latin alphabet (with these graphemes corresponding to various phonemes), punctuation marks (mostly non-phonemic), and a handful of other symbols, such as numerals. Writing systems may be regarded as complete if they are able to represent all that may be expressed in the spoken language, while a partial writing system cannot represent
3735-622: The varieties of Chinese , as well as Japanese , Korean , Vietnamese , and other languages of the Sinosphere . As each character represents a single unit of meaning, many different logograms are required to write all the words of a language. If the logograms do not adequately represent all meanings and words of a language, written language can be confusing or ambiguous to the reader. Logograms are sometimes conflated with ideograms , symbols which graphically represent abstract ideas; most linguists now reject this characterization: Chinese characters are often semantic–phonetic compounds, which include
3818-478: The 20th century due to Western influence. Several scripts used in the Philippines and Indonesia, such as Hanunoo , are traditionally written with lines moving away from the writer, from bottom to top, but are read horizontally left to right; however, Kulitan , another Philippine script, is written top-to-bottom in columns arranged right-to-left. Ogham is written bottom-to-top and read vertically, commonly on
3901-565: The French colonial era. The following diagram shows the phonology of Proto–Viet–Muong (the nearest ancestor of Vietnamese and the closely related Mường language ), along with the outcomes in the modern language: ^1 According to Ferlus, * /tʃ/ and * /ʄ/ are not accepted by all researchers. Ferlus 1992 also had additional phonemes * /dʒ/ and * /ɕ/ . ^2 The fricatives indicated above in parentheses developed as allophones of stop consonants occurring between vowels (i.e. when
3984-494: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the 20th century. In the first several decades of modern linguistics as a scientific discipline, linguists often characterized writing as merely the technology used to record speech—which was treated as being of paramount importance, for what was seen as the unique potential for its study to further the understanding of human cognition. While certain core terminology
4067-727: The Red River Delta and into the adjacent uplands, possibly to escape Chinese encroachment. The oldest layer of loans from Chinese into northern Vietic (which would become the Viet–Muong subbranch) date from this period. The northern Vietic varieties thus became part of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area , in which languages from genetically unrelated families converged toward characteristics such as isolating morphology and similar syllable structure. Many languages in this area, including Viet–Muong, underwent
4150-527: The Red River area. The language was non-tonal, but featured glottal stop and voiceless fricative codas. Borrowed vocabulary indicates early contact with speakers of Tai languages in the last millennium BC, which is consistent with genetic evidence from Dong Son culture sites. Extensive contact with Chinese began from the Han dynasty (2nd century BC). At this time, Vietic groups began to expand south from
4233-635: The act of viewing and interpreting the text as reading . The relationship between writing and language more broadly has been the subject of philosophical analysis as early as Aristotle (384–322 BC). While the use of language is universal across human societies, writing is not—having first emerged much more recently, and only having been independently invented in a handful of locations throughout history. While most spoken languages have not been written, all written languages have been predicated on an existing spoken language. When those with signed languages as their first language read writing associated with
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#17327910289424316-415: The addition of a vowel sign; other possibilities include rotation of the basic sign, or addition of diacritics . While true syllabaries have one symbol per syllable and no systematic visual similarity, the graphic similarity in most abugidas stems from their origins as abjads—with added symbols comprising markings for different vowel added onto a pre-existing base symbol. The largest single group of abugidas
4399-566: The addition of dedicated vowel letters, as with the derivation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician alphabet c. 800 BC . Abjad is the word for "alphabet" in Arabic and Malay: the term derives from the traditional order of the Arabic alphabet 's letters 'alif , bā' , jīm , dāl , though the word may have earlier roots in Phoenician or Ugaritic . An abugida
4482-475: The beginning of syllables, which have since disappeared: Most of the unusual correspondences between spelling and modern pronunciation are explained by Middle Vietnamese. Note in particular: De Rhodes's orthography also made use of an apex diacritic, as in o᷄ and u᷄ , to indicate a final labial-velar nasal /ŋ͡m/ , an allophone of /ŋ/ that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. This diacritic
4565-498: The change of suprasegment instruments. For example, the modern Vietnamese word "trời" (heaven) was read as *plời in Old/Ancient Vietnamese and as blời in Middle Vietnamese. The writing system used for Vietnamese is based closely on the system developed by Alexandre de Rhodes for his 1651 Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum . It reflects the pronunciation of the Vietnamese of Hanoi at that time,
4648-583: The consonantal sounds of a language. They were the first alphabets to develop historically, with most that have been developed used to write Semitic languages , and originally deriving from the Proto-Sinaitic script . The morphology of Semitic languages is particularly suited to this approach, as the denotation of vowels is generally redundant. Optional markings for vowels may be used for some abjads, but are generally limited to applications like education. Many pure alphabets were derived from abjads through
4731-513: The corner of a stone. The ancient Libyco-Berber alphabet was also written from bottom to top. Vietnamese language Vietnamese ( tiếng Việt ) is an Austroasiatic language spoken primarily in Vietnam where it is the official language . Vietnamese is spoken natively by around 85 million people, several times as many as the rest of the Austroasiatic family combined. It is the native language of ethnic Vietnamese (Kinh), as well as
4814-466: The daughter languages from distinctions in the initial and final consonants. Vietnamese tones developed as follows: Glottal-ending syllables ended with a glottal stop /ʔ/ , while fricative-ending syllables ended with /s/ or /h/ . Both types of syllables could co-occur with a resonant (e.g. /m/ or /n/ ). At some point, a tone split occurred, as in many other mainland Southeast Asian languages . Essentially, an allophonic distinction developed in
4897-442: The diphthongs [āj] and [āːj] the letters y and i also indicate the pronunciation of the main vowel: ay = ă + /j/ , ai = a + /j/ . Thus, tay "hand" is [tāj] while tai "ear" is [tāːj] . Similarly, u and o indicate different pronunciations of the main vowel: au = ă + /w/ , ao = a + /w/ . Thus, thau "brass" is [tʰāw] while thao "raw silk" is [tʰāːw] . The consonants that occur in Vietnamese are listed below in
4980-523: The earliest true writing, closely followed by the Egyptian hieroglyphs . It is generally agreed that the two systems were invented independently from one another; both evolved from proto-writing systems between 3400 and 3200 BC, with the earliest coherent texts dated c. 2600 BC . Chinese characters emerged independently in the Yellow River valley c. 1200 BC . There
5063-473: The hand is to the right side of the pen. The Greek alphabet and its successors settled on a left-to-right pattern, from the top to the bottom of the page. Other scripts, such as Arabic and Hebrew , came to be written right-to-left . Scripts that historically incorporate Chinese characters have traditionally been written vertically in columns arranged from right to left, while a horizontal writing direction in rows from left to right became widely adopted only in
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#17327910289425146-446: The late 19th century, French gradually replaced Literary Chinese as the official language in education and government. Vietnamese adopted many French terms, such as đầm ('dame', from madame ), ga ('train station', from gare ), sơ mi ('shirt', from chemise ), and búp bê ('doll', from poupée ), resulting in a language that was Austroasiatic but with major Sino-influences and some minor French influences from
5229-427: The main syllable). When a minor syllable occurred, the main syllable's initial consonant was intervocalic and as a result suffered lenition , becoming a voiced fricative. The minor syllables were eventually lost, but not until the tone split had occurred. As a result, words in modern Vietnamese with voiced fricatives occur in all six tones, and the tonal register reflects the voicing of the minor-syllable prefix and not
5312-441: The most common based on what unit of language is represented by each unit of writing. At the highest level, writing systems are either phonographic ( lit. ' sound writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of sound in a language, or morphographic ( lit. ' form writing ' ) when graphemes represent units of meaning, such as words or morphemes . The term logographic ( lit. ' word writing ' )
5395-497: The north and /j/ in the south). Not all dialects of Vietnamese have the same consonant in a given word (although all dialects use the same spelling in the written language). See the language variation section for further elaboration. Syllable-final orthographic ch and nh in Vietnamese has had different analyses. One analysis has final ch , nh as being phonemes /c/, /ɲ/ contrasting with syllable-final t , c /t/, /k/ and n , ng /n/, /ŋ/ and identifies final ch with
5478-405: The plain-voiced stops became voiceless and the allotones became new phonemic tones. The implosive stops were unaffected, and in fact developed tonally as if they were unvoiced. (This behavior is common to all East Asian languages with implosive stops.) As noted above, Proto-Viet–Muong had sesquisyllabic words with an initial minor syllable (in addition to, and independent of, initial clusters in
5561-546: The same except that ơ [əː] is of normal length while â [ə] is short – the same applies to the vowels long a [aː] and short ă [a] . The centering diphthongs are formed with only the three high vowels (i, ư, u). They are generally spelled as ia, ưa, ua when they end a word and are spelled iê, ươ, uô, respectively, when they are followed by a consonant. In addition to single vowels (or monophthongs ) and centering diphthongs, Vietnamese has closing diphthongs and triphthongs . The closing diphthongs and triphthongs consist of
5644-473: The same time, according to the following pattern: ^3 In Middle Vietnamese , the outcome of these sounds was written with a hooked b (ꞗ), representing a /β/ that was still distinct from v (then pronounced /w/ ). See below. ^4 It is unclear what this sound was. According to Ferlus 1992, in the Archaic Vietnamese period (c. 10th century AD, when Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary
5727-483: The script. Braille is a non-linear adaptation of the Latin alphabet that completely abandoned the Latin forms. The letters are composed of raised bumps on the writing substrate , which can be leather, stiff paper, plastic or metal. There are also transient non-linear adaptations of the Latin alphabet, including Morse code , the manual alphabets of various sign languages , and semaphore, in which flags or bars are positioned at prescribed angles. However, if "writing"
5810-542: The split from Muong around the end of the first millennium AD, the following stages of Vietnamese are commonly identified: After expelling the Chinese at the beginning of the 10th century, the Ngô dynasty adopted Classical Chinese as the formal medium of government, scholarship and literature. With the dominance of Chinese came wholesale importation of Chinese vocabulary. The resulting Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up about
5893-477: The spoken language in its entirety. Writing systems were preceded by proto-writing systems consisting of ideograms and early mnemonic symbols. The best-known examples include: Writing has been invented independently multiple times in human history. The first writing systems emerged during the Early Bronze Age , with the cuneiform writing system used to write Sumerian generally considered to be
5976-505: The syllable-initial ch /c/ . The other analysis has final ch and nh as predictable allophonic variants of the velar phonemes /k/ and /ŋ/ that occur after the upper front vowels i /i/ and ê /e/ ; although they also occur after a , but in such cases are believed to have resulted from an earlier e /ɛ/ which diphthongized to ai (cf. ach from aic , anh from aing ). (See Vietnamese phonology: Analysis of final ch , nh for further details.) Each Vietnamese syllable
6059-451: The text, the time available for writing, the intended audience, and the largely unconscious features of an individual's handwriting. Orthography ( lit. ' correct writing ' ) refers to the rules and conventions for writing shared by a community, including the ordering of and relationship between graphemes. Particularly for alphabets , orthography includes the concept of spelling . For example, English orthography includes
6142-579: The tones, whereby the tones in syllables with voiced initials were pronounced differently from those with voiceless initials. (Approximately speaking, the voiced allotones were pronounced with additional breathy voice or creaky voice and with lowered pitch. The quality difference predominates in today's northern varieties, e.g. in Hanoi , while in the southern varieties the pitch difference predominates, as in Ho Chi Minh City .) Subsequent to this,
6225-444: The top of a page and end at the bottom, with each row read from left to right. Egyptian hieroglyphs were written either left to right or right to left, with the animal and human glyphs turned to face the beginning of the line. The early alphabet could be written in multiple directions: horizontally from side to side, or vertically. Prior to standardization, alphabetic writing could be either left-to-right (LTR) and right-to-left (RTL). It
6308-501: The units of meaning in a language, such as its words or morphemes . Alphabets typically use fewer than 100 distinct symbols, while syllabaries and logographies may use hundreds or thousands respectively. A writing system also includes any punctuation used to aid readers and encode additional meaning, including that which would be communicated in speech via qualities of rhythm , tone , pitch , accent , inflection , or intonation . According to most contemporary definitions, writing
6391-422: The voicing of the main-syllable stop in Proto-Viet–Muong that produced the fricative. For similar reasons, words beginning with /l/ and /ŋ/ occur in both registers. (Thompson 1976 reconstructed voiceless resonants to account for outcomes where resonants occur with a first-register tone, but this is no longer considered necessary, at least by Ferlus.) Old Vietnamese/Ancient Vietnamese was a Vietic language which
6474-452: The world such as in the United States , Germany and France . Vietnamese has a large number of vowels . Below is a vowel diagram of Vietnamese from Hanoi (including centering diphthongs ): Front and central vowels (i, ê, e, ư, â, ơ, ă, a) are unrounded , whereas the back vowels (u, ô, o) are rounded. The vowels â [ə] and ă [a] are pronounced very short, much shorter than the other vowels. Thus, ơ and â are basically pronounced
6557-494: Was borrowed) it was * r̝ , distinct at that time from * r . The following initial clusters occurred, with outcomes indicated: A large number of words were borrowed from Middle Chinese , forming part of the Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary . These caused the original introduction of the retroflex sounds /ʂ/ and /ʈ/ (modern s , tr ) into the language. Proto-Viet–Muong did not have tones. Tones developed later in some of
6640-484: Was historically written using chữ Nôm , a logographic script using Chinese characters ( chữ Hán ) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, together with many locally invented characters representing other words. Early linguistic work in the late 19th and early 20th centuries ( Logan 1852, Forbes 1881, Müller 1888, Kuhn 1889, Schmidt 1905, Przyluski 1924, and Benedict 1942) classified Vietnamese as belonging to
6723-435: Was most commonly written boustrophedonically : starting in one (horizontal) direction, then turning at the end of the line and reversing direction. The right-to-left direction of the Phoenician alphabet initially stabilized after c. 800 BC . Left-to-right writing has an advantage that, since most people are right-handed , the hand does not interfere with text being written—which might not yet have dried—since
6806-409: Was not linear, its Sumerian ancestors were. Non-linear systems are not composed of lines, no matter what instrument is used to write them. Cuneiform was likely the earliest non-linear writing. Its glyphs were formed by pressing the end of a reed stylus into moist clay, not by tracing lines in the clay with the stylus as had been done previously. The result was a radical transformation of the appearance of
6889-837: Was separated from Viet–Muong around the 9th century, and evolved into Middle Vietnamese by 16th century. The sources for the reconstruction of Old Vietnamese are Nom texts, such as the 12th-century/1486 Buddhist scripture Phật thuyết Đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh ("Sūtra explained by the Buddha on the Great Repayment of the Heavy Debt to Parents"), old inscriptions, and a late 13th-century (possibly 1293) Annan Jishi glossary by Chinese diplomat Chen Fu (c. 1259 – 1309). Old Vietnamese used Chinese characters phonetically where each word, monosyllabic in Modern Vietnamese,
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