So “ph” is pronounced like “f”? It’s odd that Vietnamese spelling would incorporate an odd aspect of French and English that way. Should that sound actually be the bilabial unvoiced fricative (represented by the Greek letter phi)? Or should I just shut up and assume the Vietnamese decided to fuck up their spelling along Francophone lines when they switched to the Latin alphabet?
I call it “yum.”
I didn’t know how badly I’d been mispronouncing it – oh, I KNEW I was way off, but I didn’t know how.
Still, YUM. Mmmmmmmmmmm!!!
Um…I don’t mean that I pronounce it “yum.” Ya gotta admit, though, the stuff is good.
Excalibre, I could be wrong, but I seem to recall reading somwhere that the Vietnamese really didn’t have an alphabet of their own, so the French made on for them.
It would explain the Frankish/Anglo feel to some of the written language, but then again I could be high.
The written Vietnamese language was originally based on Chinese characters and was extremely difficult, so few in the country were literate. The alphabet was created by a Frenchman to what we see today and is much, much easier than the old stuff, making the written language more accessible to the people.
Thank you for the clarification.
The modern Vietnamese alphabet was indeed a recent invention under French rule - various systems based on Chinese characters were difficult and hard to adapt to the language (as Vietnamese is quite different from and unrelated to Chinese, although they may seem similar to the uninformed Westerner.) Originally it was written essentially as Chinese, much as written Japanese, several hundred years ago, was essentially a Chinese translation. The Vietnamese adapted the characters to their own uses, changing the characters’ phonetic components to reflect Vietnamese pronunciation.
In this century, it was replaced with a modified version of the Latin alphabet, featuring diacritics reflecting tones as well extra vowels - also using diacritics - to accurately reflect the number of vowels in the language. (English uses the weaker kludge of simply allowing spelling and pronunciation to be utterly dissimilar.)
So I’m aware that the language is based on French. However, using “ph” routinely for a sound that’s more efficiently rendered with “f” (which French, of course, uses) seems like an odd choice. I was wondering, then, if it uses it to indicate the “phi” sound (the Greek sound rendered into Latin with “ph”.) “Phi”, in Greek, is an unvoiced bilabial fricative - put your lips close together and blow between them, and use it as a consonant sound if you want a demonstration of it. This was simplified in Latin to the native “f” sound (as the bilabial fricatives aren’t used in Latin.)
It’s possible that beginning English speakers aren’t taught and don’t fully recognize this distinction, and so I’m wondering if any linguistic-types, or native speakers, can elaborate on whether this is simply a spectacularly poor choice by the authors of the Vietnamese alphabet or a semi-accurate transcription of a sound unfamiliar to speakers of European languages.