Why does vietnamese use english letters

Copy link to share with friends. This is why Vietnamese is much easier for Westerners to read than Chinese. Alexandre de Rhodes gets all the credit, but his Portuguese predecessors did the donkey work. Today, Western travelers in rural parts of China are met by signposts and storefronts filled with alienating logograms, or characters. Abundant accents aside, the words look so familiar that they may even be tempted to give pronouncing them a try, and they have Catholic missionaries to thank.

The French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, author of the first Portuguese-Tonkinese-Latin dictionary, is widely credited as the inventor of the script. De Rhodes had not even been born when the Jesuits were expelled from Japan in , when the missionaries began spreading out across Asia.

Pham in Composing a Sacred Space. Most of the early Jesuits were from Portugal, but their number also included Germans, Italians, Spaniards and at least one Frenchman.

The Vietnamese alphabet can be taught in a matter of months, and once learned there are no orthographical irregularities. To evangelize the Vietnamese. Unlike their counterparts in South America and Africa, the Tonkinese Jesuits encountered an elaborate, bureaucratic state governed by a well-established monarchy.

This meant that they had to tread very carefully and focus their efforts on disenfranchised sections of society. Despite the challenges, says Dutton, the number of converts in Tonkin by was estimated at about 80, Countrywide, Vietnamese Catholics still comprise around 7 percent of the total population. Source Creative Commons.

Not only were there significant regional differences, but knowledge of the full character-based Chinese system was required to read and write. So the missionaries started looking for alternative ways to reach the masses.

Unfortunately, none of these handwritten documents were ever found, but de Rhodes acknowledges all three of them in the prologue to his dictionary, published in All three Portuguese missionaries died before they were able to finish their projects, and de Rhodes systematized and standardized what they had started in one volume that allowed for triangulation between Latin, Portuguese and Vietnamese. Subsequently, question is, why does Vietnamese use Roman alphabet?

In an effort to ease pedagogy, the Catholics developed quoc ngu, a romanization of Vietnamese. When the French conquered Vietnam , quoc ngu systematically replaced Chu Nom as the written language for everybody.

Under Ataturk, the first President of the Republic, a latin alphabet was designed and applied to the language. Outside of Vietnam, the surname is commonly rendered without diacritics as Nguyen.

The official Latin -based Vietnamese alphabet consists of twenty-nine letters: seventeen consonants and twelve vowels. Except f, j, w, and z, twenty-two letters come from the Roman alphabet. What is the hardest language to learn? Interestingly, the hardest language to learn is also the most widely spoken native language in the world. How many tones are there in Vietnamese? Why do Vietnamese use Latin? That Vietnamese-localized Latin alphabet is called Ch? The Portuguese missionaries went to Vietnam in 17th century and recorded Vietnamese language using ABC characters and a bunch of tone marks.

Then, in 19th century, under French colonization, the French promoted that script. Is Vietnamese difficult to learn? Learning Vietnamese is neither hard nor easy. As we will see, many more aspects of Vietnamese grammar are d?