is there a way to type Vietnamese language without diacritics?



Thuan asked. His family name is Nguyen of Phan Rang Town and we became friends of each other since 1992 or 1994 whereabout, when we worked as employees in some typing shops on Ly Thai To Street, Saigon 3. He used to type VNI’s style while fija typed serpent’s style. Once, fija was free and passed by Thuan’s working shop for a chat. He was sitting and typing something, looked tired – perhaps – of reaching his fingers many times to press the numerical keys again and again, he sighed and posed a question with no hope of available answer ‘is there any way to type Vietnamese language without diacritics?’ He asked and truthfully he spent lot of time to find the solution but he failed to reach a satisfied one. To his question, fija just said ‘wait, man!’ And, fija started to study to know…



what Vietnamese lingual diacritics are



The current written Vietnamese language together with its signs above, beneath and on the right side is the product of (needless to interrogate) a Christian named Alexandre De Rhodes. To fulfill the mission of preaching the Gospel in this country of Vietnam, he learned Nom language, which to be written in the formula of Chinese combination, for example, the character ‘God’ is combined with ‘up.’ The character God is written above and the character up is written below and this set look like a Chinese character but read ‘trời.’ Chinese character is difficult itself, now the new form by combining Chinese characters together, it is no doubt the former education required a lot of work! It is said that (perhaps) in the situation of ‘a thousand years to be conquered by Chinese troop, our ancestors decided to play a joke that to create the character set themselves) by combining Chinese together which to be read following the voice of Nom language. Thus, Vietnamese reading Chinese and understanding (because to learn Nom language, one must learn Chinese first) while Chinese people reading Nom language see that it looks like Chinese the same but wondering themselves, failing to understand. Nom language is so ironical in this situation…



fija still incomplely remembers the style of leaning by heart formerly tam thiên tự (i.e. three thousand characters) ‘thiên trời địa đất tử cất tồn còn tử con tôn cháu lục sáu tam ba gia nhà quốc nước tiền before hậu sau…’ each Chinese character followed by a Nom character explaining the meaning of the preceeding Chinese character. Alexandre De Rhodes learned Nom language and used the way of phonetic – some documents say Alexandre De Rhodes is not the author of the said phonetic way [yeah, fija is discussing this later] – because there had been many researches, Alexandre De Rhodes or inherited or summarized those works… and therefore Vietnamese language written in Latin alphabet was born (moreover was also) called national written language (while indeed, it is a mere phonetic word set!) No one can find any diacritics in Latin language the question therefore must be…



where do the diacritics come from?



The accents aigue, grave, circonflex and tide may come from French language. French has its influence on letters C and NG which convert to K and NGH before vowels E and I respectively [the conversion of NG to NGH itself makes trouble while many speakers ignore and they write ‘nghành’ innocently!] The hook seems to borrow from Greek but the dot beneath is what fija fails. In certain languages of Europe, some letters are found with a coma beneath, such as letter Ç of French but the dot beneath a letter is sure only shown in Vietnamese. It is possible to comment that Alexandre De Rhodes dotted below just to note that the tone must be lowered (because in other voices, the coma beneath doesn’t indicate the tone of the letter must be lowered!) Particularly the crescent over letter A and hooks on the top right of U, O… Some European languages include letters with small circle over A while German has double horizontal dots over A, O and U [Ä, Ö and Ü, called umlaub, while in French found over E and I, called tréma]. One should thinks old Alexandre De Rhodes created his own particularity and this is not need to discuss, but, what is the reason the old man got letter D, read it /z/ and inserted letter ð of Greek and read /ð/. Wierd… this old… Nevertheless, the available letter F he didn’t want to apply and turned to get P then combined with H to form PH which voices /f/. The same like letter J available he also ignored and busy to attach G with I. What a hard work for nonsense!



Fuff! Vietnamese are those whose character seems so easy, no comment! That european had already worked hard and presented, now, just to use and to make him happy because of hospitality! Uh huh, that mess of…

[to be continued]