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Wednesday, January 16, 2019

Vietnamese alphabet marks - diacritics

I had given up on understanding the little marks when I noticed them on the bag I was wearing, above and below the letter e on the word Vietnam. If I can show my bag to a Vietnamese speaker and hear them pronounce the name of their own country and get them to correct my pronunciation, I should know at least one of the six marks or sounds.

I looked at the following website for a reminder.
https://vietnamesetypography.com/tone-marks/

Three of the six sounds are easy.
1 Blank is obviously blank.
2 I speak French, so the acute or upwards slash is easy.
3 The downward slash is easy too. think of the French word for school pupil, eleve.  The first e rises in tone, The second comes down. The third is unpronounced in this case or neutral.

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