That's interesting. Thai, another tonal language has dialects but according to my wife they used the same tones (you'd change the meaning of the word if you didn't) but with a different pronunciation. That would seem like a puzzler except that you can sing in tonal languages without losing the meaning of the words (changing pitch without…
That's interesting. Thai, another tonal language has dialects but according to my wife they used the same tones (you'd change the meaning of the word if you didn't) but with a different pronunciation. That would seem like a puzzler except that you can sing in tonal languages without losing the meaning of the words (changing pitch without changing tones). She may be thinking of something different regarding tones than you.
The Thai alphabet serves as a pronunciation guide with high, middle and low consonants which when combined with certain vowels and tone marks give syllables a high, middle, low, rising or falling tone. They are not interchangeable without completely changing the meaning of the word. Yet there is a different "pronunciation" of a different kind. They also use different slang. She understands Lao, technically a different language, because to her it is just another dialect since she grew up hearing it. I suspect that it would be as difficult for you to describe the different dialects as it is for her. The thing is that Thai people from all regions can understand each other (maybe not Lao since they put Thai subtitles with Laotian shows on my wife's Thai TV channels). What you describe with the people in Hue is a real zinger.
I had a friend who was one of the first Marines to learn Vietnamese during the war (interrogator). He is no longer alive for me to ask if he needed a Kit Carson for places like Hue. Do they all watch the same TV?
People in Bangkok may consider themselves to be superior to people from people in the Isaan Provence but since I'm not on their chats I don't know if there is animosity. There "might" be something like what you are referring to. I don't know. Young assholes are what they are worldwide. After years in America, her Thai is noticeably changed enough for people in Thailand to notice.
I mention all this because your mention of people in Hue reversing syllables jumped out at me.
The words for old (not people), tool, and penis are all cu with different tones. Poem and laborer, likewise. Transfer, trip, specialty, all chuyên with different tones.
It can be eerie. Go to a sandwich kiosk and ask for "banh mi" (bon me) without the right tones and she won't understand you. She sells one thing, she has sold one thing for thirty years, but if you don't do rising-banh descending-mi she will not understand, and she is not being coy. It's eerie.
I will say "xin một ộ bánh mì," please one ộ bread/sandwich, where the ộ is what is called a "measure word," a counter, with no equivalent in European languages, and while I could leave it out, using it shows that I can do better than pidgin, that I know the idiom. But that is being polite, most people would just say "một ộ." Old languages leave out a lot of words.
There are a lot of measure words, just like Chinese. That word á»™ by itself means "umbrella."
Everyone understands the specific version of northern dialect spoken in Hanoi, the capitol. All news, all government announcements, airport recorded instructions, all Hanoi dialect. But they don't speak it unless they live there.
I had a friend from the USA in Saigon, now back in the USA, and when I met his girlfriend she spoke to my partner and I said "oh, you're from the north!" He looked at me with horror, "HOW DO YOU KNOW!!" I laughed and spoke to her again, "... but you aren't from Hanoi." Right again.
Aside from the rapidity of speech the tones are the only obstacle. No plurals, no conjugation, no declension, no adverbs, and the grammar is all subject-verb-object.
Want eat what?
Want eat noodle.
Pronouns are a little weird as the rules of deference are a lot more complex than how-low-do-I-bow as in Japan. The same word can mean I, you, and he in the same sentence but it's usually pretty clear. Two twins know which was born a few minutes before the other and address each other differently. But there are defaults for most cases, "friend" being a near-universal one.
Some people pick up the tones easily, but in Cantonese it took me six weeks then between one minute and the next I got them, exactly as I started using the middle and ring fingers of my right hand to pick guitar strings. Vietnamese took a year, but once I could do the northern tones the southern were easy.
Other people simply can't fathom them ever. In my first class we had two Chinese students and I figured they would get Vietnamese tones much faster than they rest of us. If anything it took them longer, because as I said before the tones are at the foundation of their listening. For me they're just pronunciation.
But .. Vietnamese is an unearthly sounding language. Even though I can speak and be clearly understood, I can read most signs (not newspapers, they are hard), I can still barely understand spoken Vietnamese, unless I talk to northerners and then I get about half of it. Listening to southerners I may as well be trying to understand Hindi.
While I was there, I saw it as a beautiful place I would like to visit after the war (never did). I was in the area that the US military designated as I-Corps (mountains and valleys). Sadly, in places those mountains looked like the surface of the moon from helicopter rides due to defoliant, artillery and bomb craters. Hopefully their natural beauty has been restored, assuming that the effect of Agent Orange is shorter lived on plant life than on the local population and veterans. And there are the damned mines.
Pronunciation gives me fits where "I said that" "no you didn't" is my world. The Thai language also has some embarrassing word meaning changes due to tones.
"After years in America, her Thai is noticeably changed enough for people in Thailand to notice."
American Vietnamese everything is different. Vietnamese food is better in the USA with a few exceptions. Ice cream is kem here, ka-rem in the USA. There are some dishes I can get in any Vietnamese restaurant in America but have never seen here.
Most American Vietnamese fled the south so you don't hear much Hanoi dialect. And in places with a lot of Vietnamese people are not shocked at a white person speaking it. In 2017 I went into one and asked for a table for two and nobody raised an eyebrow.
I once asked why even 3rd generation Vietnamese people in the US Speak English with a Vietnamese accent. They reached their children Vietnamese first. For the most part they feel displaced I'm America.
Food is a different thing for Thai food. In restraints in the US you mostly find Bangkok Thai food. Good but I prefer the variety from my wife's provence. Some of it is actually Lao and it is all a bit different. The misty glaring difference is that Bangkok Thai food is often sweetened with sugar, something my wife would never add. Even desserts are naturally sweetened with fruits rather than sugar in her meal preparation.
American Chinese food isn't Chinese at all/ I thought I was eating it all my life till a Chinese took me out to eat. A whole new world.
Thai food is closer. Sometimes it's recognizably Thai, sometimes very close.
There *is* no Americanized Vietnamese food. Different dishes, yes, different species of fish. but it's Real Asian Food.
That's why decent Vietnamese noodle houses are packed with Asians from everywhere. Because phở may not be the same as the Chinese dish it comes from but it feeds the soul.
The Asian grocery stores that we frequent are Vietnamese owned. Most of the stuff is common. The big exception is that the various curry pastes are uniquely Thai. I prefer Thai curries to the ones from India. An exceptional appropriation made their own.
Our Vietnamese friends, like us, cook smelly Asian varieties of fish on the back porch to not smell up the house. We have a two-burner propane camp stove for that. It's too cumbersome to do that for the hot peppers so our kitchen often seems to have received a visit from SWAT, but that dissipates more quickly than some of the fish varieties we cook. The Vietnamese markets are our fish markets.
I was crushed to learn that the grocery I shopped at twice a week for years, Viet Wah ("Vietnamese Chinese [people]") shut down a few years ago. When my partner moved in with me we went there and spent about $100 to stock the pantry.
That's interesting. Thai, another tonal language has dialects but according to my wife they used the same tones (you'd change the meaning of the word if you didn't) but with a different pronunciation. That would seem like a puzzler except that you can sing in tonal languages without losing the meaning of the words (changing pitch without changing tones). She may be thinking of something different regarding tones than you.
The Thai alphabet serves as a pronunciation guide with high, middle and low consonants which when combined with certain vowels and tone marks give syllables a high, middle, low, rising or falling tone. They are not interchangeable without completely changing the meaning of the word. Yet there is a different "pronunciation" of a different kind. They also use different slang. She understands Lao, technically a different language, because to her it is just another dialect since she grew up hearing it. I suspect that it would be as difficult for you to describe the different dialects as it is for her. The thing is that Thai people from all regions can understand each other (maybe not Lao since they put Thai subtitles with Laotian shows on my wife's Thai TV channels). What you describe with the people in Hue is a real zinger.
I had a friend who was one of the first Marines to learn Vietnamese during the war (interrogator). He is no longer alive for me to ask if he needed a Kit Carson for places like Hue. Do they all watch the same TV?
People in Bangkok may consider themselves to be superior to people from people in the Isaan Provence but since I'm not on their chats I don't know if there is animosity. There "might" be something like what you are referring to. I don't know. Young assholes are what they are worldwide. After years in America, her Thai is noticeably changed enough for people in Thailand to notice.
I mention all this because your mention of people in Hue reversing syllables jumped out at me.
The words for old (not people), tool, and penis are all cu with different tones. Poem and laborer, likewise. Transfer, trip, specialty, all chuyên with different tones.
It can be eerie. Go to a sandwich kiosk and ask for "banh mi" (bon me) without the right tones and she won't understand you. She sells one thing, she has sold one thing for thirty years, but if you don't do rising-banh descending-mi she will not understand, and she is not being coy. It's eerie.
I will say "xin một ộ bánh mì," please one ộ bread/sandwich, where the ộ is what is called a "measure word," a counter, with no equivalent in European languages, and while I could leave it out, using it shows that I can do better than pidgin, that I know the idiom. But that is being polite, most people would just say "một ộ." Old languages leave out a lot of words.
There are a lot of measure words, just like Chinese. That word á»™ by itself means "umbrella."
Everyone understands the specific version of northern dialect spoken in Hanoi, the capitol. All news, all government announcements, airport recorded instructions, all Hanoi dialect. But they don't speak it unless they live there.
I had a friend from the USA in Saigon, now back in the USA, and when I met his girlfriend she spoke to my partner and I said "oh, you're from the north!" He looked at me with horror, "HOW DO YOU KNOW!!" I laughed and spoke to her again, "... but you aren't from Hanoi." Right again.
"The words for old (not people), tool, and penis are all cu with different tones."
And with that sentence, you've convinced me not to try to learn Vietnamese😅 Beautiful country though, I spent a month there a few years ago.
Aside from the rapidity of speech the tones are the only obstacle. No plurals, no conjugation, no declension, no adverbs, and the grammar is all subject-verb-object.
Want eat what?
Want eat noodle.
Pronouns are a little weird as the rules of deference are a lot more complex than how-low-do-I-bow as in Japan. The same word can mean I, you, and he in the same sentence but it's usually pretty clear. Two twins know which was born a few minutes before the other and address each other differently. But there are defaults for most cases, "friend" being a near-universal one.
Some people pick up the tones easily, but in Cantonese it took me six weeks then between one minute and the next I got them, exactly as I started using the middle and ring fingers of my right hand to pick guitar strings. Vietnamese took a year, but once I could do the northern tones the southern were easy.
Other people simply can't fathom them ever. In my first class we had two Chinese students and I figured they would get Vietnamese tones much faster than they rest of us. If anything it took them longer, because as I said before the tones are at the foundation of their listening. For me they're just pronunciation.
But .. Vietnamese is an unearthly sounding language. Even though I can speak and be clearly understood, I can read most signs (not newspapers, they are hard), I can still barely understand spoken Vietnamese, unless I talk to northerners and then I get about half of it. Listening to southerners I may as well be trying to understand Hindi.
While I was there, I saw it as a beautiful place I would like to visit after the war (never did). I was in the area that the US military designated as I-Corps (mountains and valleys). Sadly, in places those mountains looked like the surface of the moon from helicopter rides due to defoliant, artillery and bomb craters. Hopefully their natural beauty has been restored, assuming that the effect of Agent Orange is shorter lived on plant life than on the local population and veterans. And there are the damned mines.
Pronunciation gives me fits where "I said that" "no you didn't" is my world. The Thai language also has some embarrassing word meaning changes due to tones.
"After years in America, her Thai is noticeably changed enough for people in Thailand to notice."
American Vietnamese everything is different. Vietnamese food is better in the USA with a few exceptions. Ice cream is kem here, ka-rem in the USA. There are some dishes I can get in any Vietnamese restaurant in America but have never seen here.
Most American Vietnamese fled the south so you don't hear much Hanoi dialect. And in places with a lot of Vietnamese people are not shocked at a white person speaking it. In 2017 I went into one and asked for a table for two and nobody raised an eyebrow.
I once asked why even 3rd generation Vietnamese people in the US Speak English with a Vietnamese accent. They reached their children Vietnamese first. For the most part they feel displaced I'm America.
Food is a different thing for Thai food. In restraints in the US you mostly find Bangkok Thai food. Good but I prefer the variety from my wife's provence. Some of it is actually Lao and it is all a bit different. The misty glaring difference is that Bangkok Thai food is often sweetened with sugar, something my wife would never add. Even desserts are naturally sweetened with fruits rather than sugar in her meal preparation.
American Chinese food isn't Chinese at all/ I thought I was eating it all my life till a Chinese took me out to eat. A whole new world.
Thai food is closer. Sometimes it's recognizably Thai, sometimes very close.
There *is* no Americanized Vietnamese food. Different dishes, yes, different species of fish. but it's Real Asian Food.
That's why decent Vietnamese noodle houses are packed with Asians from everywhere. Because phở may not be the same as the Chinese dish it comes from but it feeds the soul.
The Asian grocery stores that we frequent are Vietnamese owned. Most of the stuff is common. The big exception is that the various curry pastes are uniquely Thai. I prefer Thai curries to the ones from India. An exceptional appropriation made their own.
Our Vietnamese friends, like us, cook smelly Asian varieties of fish on the back porch to not smell up the house. We have a two-burner propane camp stove for that. It's too cumbersome to do that for the hot peppers so our kitchen often seems to have received a visit from SWAT, but that dissipates more quickly than some of the fish varieties we cook. The Vietnamese markets are our fish markets.
I was crushed to learn that the grocery I shopped at twice a week for years, Viet Wah ("Vietnamese Chinese [people]") shut down a few years ago. When my partner moved in with me we went there and spent about $100 to stock the pantry.