I. PHONOLOGY
1.0. The Writing of Vietnamese
The official transcription of the language is so near to being a phonemic writing that it will be used entirely in the chapters following the present one. In this chapter on the phonology, phonetic symbols will be given first (the IPA, with modifications, is used), then two phonemic solutions and writings, and then statements for the conversion from these systems to the official spelling.
A note on the history of writing among the speakers of Vietnamese is of interest, since it explains the phonetic values given to certain of the letters in the transcription. The earliest writing known in the area is in Chinese. This remained the written language of officialdom and the intelligentsia (equivalent classes, since we are in a Chinese culture province) from sometime prior to the ninth or tenth century A.D. almost to the present day, though the latter class has tended in the last half century to abandon the prestigeful traditional Chinese classics for other types of learning and, consequently, other writing systems. Fairly early, a system of modified Chinese characters was worked out for the writing of Vietnamese; it is called chữ nôm “the vulgar or demotic characters.”’ The earliest document that is known in it, an inscription, belongs to the year 1343 A.D. This system, however, never gained sufficient prestige, as against Chinese, to become an official vehicle in government. It was used for writing down Vietnamese popular literature and for other documents that had no connexion with officialdom. At present, this system has only antiquarian interest.
In the seventeenth century, Catholic missionaries invented a Roman transcription for the language. It is now known as quốc ngữ "the national language" (in Vinh pronunciation, quốc ngự). The details of the history of the invention are not all clear; but Portuguese, French, and Italians were involved, and the system shows traces of the spelling habits of all these languages. The sibilant value borne by x is Portuguese; the use of ngh and gh for ng and g before front vowels is probably Italian; and the use of o for ṷ (w) as first member of rising diphthongs may reflect the phonetic value of the French oi. The first printing in the language was apparently done in 1649, in Alexandre de Rhodes’ Dictionarium annamitico-latinum. The history of the system since its invention is not too clear, either, but almost from the time of its invention quốc ngữ was in constant use among Christianized Vietnamese and finally became to some extent official early in the present century. The earliest reference to official use that I have been able to find is in 1910—a circular of the Résident supérieur of Tonkin, requiring that all public documents be transcribed into quốc ngữ ("soient transcrits en quốc ngữ"; quoted from Roux, Le Triomphe définitif en Indochine du mode de transcription de langue annamite à l'aide des caractères romains du "quốc ngữ," Paris, 1912; the title of this pamphlet reflects the public debate, often acrimonious, that went on among officials, scholars, and others, both French and Vietnamese, on the question of the official use of the system). Its use for all purposes, official,
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