NhipCauDuyen: VOA News

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As you all know, there are millions of blogs on the net, and mine is just one of them. However, as our Vietnamese language is different from other languages in the world, not only the way it is formulated and displayed, but mainly because it appears as belonging to the same category as English, French, German, Spanish, and so forth, but not at all behaving similarly! In terms of appearance, it looks like it is composed of roman letters of the alphabet, and should, therefore, not present any particular problem(s) when using it on the computer! No, mams! No, sirs! This is not the case! While the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, even the Arabs, ... have developed their own standard keyboards for their respective languages, we Vietnamese must use the American standard keyboard. The English language, if you can count from your standard keyboards, has exactly 26 letters of the alphabet. Those letters are broken down into five vowels (a, e, i, o and u) and 21 consonants. The Vietnamese language, however, used to look like Chinese, and Japanese, and Korean, ... until the Portuguese, Spanish, and French missionaries came to our country somewhere around the later part of the 19th century, and "created" the written Vietnamese for their preaching ans teaching of christianity in Vietnam. In this regard, it is clear that the Vietnamese written language was very artificial: their creators borrowed from the letters of the european languages to make the Vietnamese written language a combination of Portuguese and Spanish. Like any other languages, the Vietnamese language continues to evolve in more than 200 years to what it is now, consisting of 22 consonants (the "w" being imported for foreign names, and another extra "d" modified to become "đ". It seems to be no big deal, but many new vowels were created as a derivation from the roman vowels (such as "a" "ă" and "â"; "e" and "ê"; "u" and "ý"; "o", "õ" and "ô", making altogether 10 vowels!). In addition to those extra consonants and vowels, come the so-called "diacritical marks" that those missionaries put on the top of the word, and even underneath the words! Then come the extremely complicated words which contain extra consonants, extra vowels, and marks! If you look at the computer keyboard in front of you now, you will see how monumental the integration of the Vietnamese language is, both in the composition of the Vietnamese words and its display either on the monitor, AND on hard copies, considering the different platforms people are using over the world! I will return to the problem of how to use the Vietnamese language on the internet, not in terms of software developments by computer engineers, but the difficulties of using the language on the internet by people like my Vietnamese friends, like me. Thank you for taking the time to read, and thank you for sharing my pains! Sincerely, OTOTOT

NhipCauDuyen

Friday, January 22, 2010

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