Vietnamese is written in Latin letters, thanks to Jesuits.

For centuries Vietnam wrote in Chinese characters and the derived chữ Nôm. From 1620 Portuguese and Italian Jesuits began transcribing the language in Latin script; Alexandre de Rhodes printed a dictionary in Rome in 1651. The script stayed confined to Catholics for two centuries until the French administration enforced it in 1910. Today: 29 letters, 5 tone marks.

Useful: When you read Vietnamese, you're looking at 17th-century Portuguese spelling habits.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

MissionareSchriftVietnam

Difficulty:

Related cards

The German letter that wasn't allowed a capital until 2017.The ß emerged in the Middle Ages as a fusion of long s and z. No German word starts with it, so …
Why Spanish starts questions with '¿'.The Real Academia Española recommended the inverted question mark at the start of sentences in …
The English alphabet once had 27 letters.The & sign is a ligature of e and t, Latin "et", attested since the 1st century. In 19th-century …
ABC News counted 112 spellings of Gaddafi's name.There is no universally accepted authority for transliterating Arabic names into Latin letters. So …
How six dots make a whole alphabet.A braille cell has six dots; each is raised or not, giving 64 combinations including the space. …
How to type tens of thousands of Chinese characters with 26 keys.You type the romanisation pinyin, say "ma", and the system lists every character with that …
A man who couldn't read invented a writing system.Sequoyah, a Cherokee, knew neither English nor how to read. From around 1809 he nonetheless …
Thai writes whole sentences without a single space.Thai script has 44 consonant symbols with vowels attached as marks, making it an abugida. There are …

Keep reading

This card belongs to the topic Language & World. Every card is short, cites a source and can be saved – due ones come back by themselves later.

About Doomlearn · Projects · Legal notice · Privacy · Terms