Essay On Vietnamese Phonology

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Vietnamese Phonology In the Vietnamese language, there is a range of 19 to 21 consonant phonemes, which differs in result of how a word is pronounced. A consonant such as “/p/” only comes about when a word is borrowed from the French language. Other consonants experience more pronunciation such as “/tʰ/”, which occurs when there is an exhale of air that is followed by the words release. The Vietnamese language is also made up of 72 vowels. Technically, there are 12 vowels in the Vietnamese language. However, the language consists of six tones which therefore leads to a total of 72 distinct vowels. (Thompson 2013). In the Vietnamese language, there are six different tones that a word may have. The tones may either be high rising, low falling or low rising. There are also high broken tones or low broken tones. These tones all differ in ways where some tones start off as high and slowly end low, or quickly end low. Some tones can start low and quickly end high or slowly end high. However, in the middle of all these tones is the mid …show more content…

The language is also made up of 25 consonants; “B (be), C (ce), CH (che), D (de), F (efe), G (ge), H (hache) J (jota), K (ka), L (ele), LL (elle), M (eme), N (ene), Ñ (eñe), P (pe), Q (cu), R (ere), RR (erre), S (ese), T (te), V (uve), W (doble ve), X (equis), Y (i griega), Z (zeta).” These letters can be stressed when the indicated with the symbol //. (Warren 2016) Examples of Spanish phonemes that do not exist in English are CH, LL, Ñ and RR. The common double letter rr holds a significance in the meaning of a word and the way it is pronounced. The word “churro” in Spanish would be pronounced with the rolling of the tongue when saying the letter r. In contrast, the English pronunciation of the word churro is often with a singular r sound. This same rolling of the tongue applies to the double LL such as in the word “amarillo” which means yellow. (Frederick

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