Recently I came across the question of translating the word “unlock” into another language.  In Vietnamese the word would be translated “mo khoa” or “open lock”.  This got me thinking why they didn’t just use the word “lock” with another word that means to undo, the same function as “un-” in English.

When I thought about it further I realized that, although “un-” can be used for adjectives and verbs, it can be used for most adjectives but only a handful of verbs.  For example, we can unlock, undo (at least in the computer age), unfasten, unbutton, unzip, undress, or unleash but we cannot undrive, unhit, unpay, unclose, or uneat.  And we can only un-break my heart in certain songs.

So what’s the difference between verbs that can take un- and the verbs that cannot?  Well, all the verbs in the first list represent actions that change the state of something that can only be in two states.  For example, a lock can be locked or unlocked, a seatbelt can be fastened or unfastened, and I can be dressed or undressed but I can dress and undress and then dress and undress ad infinitum.  In fact, all those verbs can also take the prefix re-, for example, re-lock, re-fasten.

For adjectives, the prefix un- basically means “not”.  So unpopular means not popular, unintelligent means not intelligent, unusual means not usual, undressed means not dressed, and unlocked means not locked.  But why don’t we say unpossible, unbalanced, unregular, unaccurate, or unnumerable?  Instead we say impossible, imbalanced, irregular, inaccurate, and innumerable because Latin used im-, in-, and ir-instead of un- depending on the first letter of the word.

And we have some other prefixes that have the same meaning of “not”: a-, de-, and dis- (which comes from a Latin word similar to “dual”).  Sometimes dis- is used used for verbs where otherwise un- may have worked.  For example, disconnect and disappear.

But I still have another question.  Just as the Vietnamese open locks instead of unlocking them, why do we open doors but don’t un-open them?  Or why do we open windows instead of un-closing them?

Today I ran across an academic paper of questionable standards on the possible relations or origins of Vietnamese pronouns from a number of languages including Chinese languages, other Southeast Asian languages, and even French, English, and Japanese.

The paper is titled “Đại Danh Từ Tiếng Việt” (Vietnamese pronouns) and the authors are Nguyễn Đức Hiệp and Trần Thị Vĩnh Tường.

Firstly, Vietnamese has many words for the first person singular pronoun, not including the words depending on family or social status: Tôi, ta, tớ, tui, tao, mỗ, mình, miềnh, qua.  Of these, only tôi, ta, tớ, tui, tao, and mình are commonly used today, the standard being tôi.  Besides the common explanation that tôi comes from a Chinese (Middle Chinese) word meaning servant the authors note:

Nhiều tự điển, đặc biệt vài cuốn đầu tiên, như cuốn Annamite-
Portuguese-Latin của Alexandre de Rhodes [3], cho rằng ‘tôi đòi’, ‘đầy
tớ’, ‘tôi tớ’, xuất phát từ Tôi và Tớ. Điều này hoàn toàn phù hợp với phát
âm ngày nay trong tiếng Hẹ và Quảng Đông từ [Toi] { 儓 }. Phiên âm
Quan Thoại cho [toi] có 2 cách: [tai-2] và [dai-4], có nghĩa ‘tôi đòi’, hay
‘đầy tớ’, rất giống với Quan thoại [tai dai]. Thật ra ’Tớ’ có âm rất gần với
từ [tsut] hay [su] trong tiếng Hẹ, và [zeot] hay [syu] Quảng Đông viết là
豎 hay 卒 , cả hai có nghiã ‘tôi đòi’. Tuy vậy, nguồn gốc gần hơn là từ
[Tub] trong tiếng Hmong có nghiã ’Tớ’, “b’ là dấu chỉ âm cao giống như
với dấu sắc trong tiếng Việt. Trong tiếng Tày-Nùng, “Khỏi” tương đương
với ‘Tôi” với cả hai nghĩa: Tôi và đầy tớ.

In summary there is a strong resemblance to words in Cantonese, Hakka (another southern Chinese language/dialect), as well as Hmong which has a word ‘tub’ which is pronounced like ‘tu’ in a rising tone.

[Note: Japanese “boku” used by younger males to older people also comes from a Chinese word meaning “manservant”.]

Mình, pronounced miềnh in some places in central Vietnam and in the Mường language, is compared to mi and mei in Hakka and Cantonese respectively as well as the word me in English!

Mình cũng gần với [mi] 微 của
Hẹ, [mei] Quảng Đông, và cả tiếng Anh [me].

I think it’s a little incredible to assume any relation with the English word.  But it is noted that the Mon-Khmer word [Ming] has the same origins as Mình.

Overall, the paper suggests a number of possible similarities many of which can be ruled out easily.  For example Vietnamese anh is similar to Japanese ani, both meaning older brother, but is also similar to Japanese ane, which means older sister.  Likewise em (younger sibling) and imouto (younger sister) may have some similarities but if the head im/em had a meeting of younger sibling then how does one account for otouto (younger brother)?

Anyways, without reading the full paper you can view the table of languages and suggested cognates to each of a number of pronouns near the bottom paper.  You can read the paper online here: http://tailieu.vn/xem-tai-lieu/dai-danh-tu-tieng-viet.29091.html

One of the more difficult aspects of learning Japanese as a foreign language is learning the writing system especially the thousands of kanji characters necessary to be considered literate.  One must strive to practice reading the characters one has already learned and attempt to learn new ones.  In Japan manga is popular for people of all ages not just children.  They can also be a fun way to practice Japanese.

But constantly looking up unknown kanji by radical and by number of strokes can be quite time consuming.  And so furigana, also known as Ruby text, can be of great assistance to any student of the Japanese language. Furigana is hiragana written in a small size next to a kanji character that will show you how to pronounce the word or sometimes give an alternate translation.  The Firefox browser has a great plug-in called Furigana Injector which can insert furigana next to kanji characters in any webpage.

Many manga books for young people, shounen/shonen for boys or shoujo/shojo for girls, will have furigana.  For example any title from Shonen Jump, Dragon Ball, everybody’s favorite Doraemon, Inspector Conan (Meitantei Konan), and Ranma 1/2.  While it may be easy to find translated copies of these in your country you want to read the original untranslated Japanese.  If you can’t find them locally you may have to resort to importing them from Amazon.jp.

And while there are many websites where you can read scanned and translated manga online it’s harder to find RAW scans that haven’t been translated.  Unfortunately rawmanga.com and mangahelpers.com are both down.  If you know of any alternate resources please leave a comment!

I just heard of a good way to use your new Vietnamese language skills — use Vietnamese phrases as your passwords!  Who is going to guess bu1nthi5tnu7o71ng (which comes out to bún thịt nướng using the VNI typing system) yet it’s still easy to remember.  [My password on this blog isn’t using this system so don’t bother trying to guess it!]

In Vietnamese one can decrease the effect of an adjective by doubling it. For example, to say something is “vui” means it’s fun but if you say “vui vui” it’s only a little fun. Vietnamese adjectives can be doubled in this way without any changes it the tone is ngang (no tone, as in “vui”) or the falling tone, thanh huyền.

For words with other tones (sắc, hỏi, ngã, nặng) the tone is lost in the first word. For example “đỏ” (red) becomes “đo đỏ”.

For words that end in consonant that are stops (-p, -t, -ch, -c) the tone will always be sắc or nặng and the first word will actually change. First, the tone changes. If the tone is sắc then the first word will have a tone of ngang. Otherwise, if the tone is nặng then the first word will have a tone of huyền.

The second change is to the consonant. T changes to n, p changes to m, ch changes to nh, and c changes to ng.

So for example “mát” (cool) doubles up to become “man mát” or “khác” (different) becomes “khang khác”.

This lesson in the Vietnamese language seems to suggest that in that language is a phonological relationship between the stops (plosive consonants) above and the nasal consonants they change into.

My Nokia phone that runs Symbian OS S60 V3 happens to come with a dictionary installed. This free dictionary is the Kernerman Semi-Bilingual Dictionaries MOT GlobalDix 3.0. Within the dictionary software itself you can go to Nokia’s website and download and install other foreign languages. So imagine my delight when I saw that Vietnamese was one of the available languages and for free!

After downloading and installing it I was soon disappointed. It seems that nobody had even bothered to try using the software. It can hardly be described as working software. When looking up an English word you are presented with several possible Vietnamese translations but no help in deciding which one you want. This can certainly get you in trouble in Vietnamese or in any language if you choose the wrong translation.

Then if you want to translate from Vietnamese to English you have to go to the menu, select language, select source, select Vietnamese, go back to the menu, select language, select source, select English. There’s no easy way to just switch from English-Vietnamese to Vietnamese-English.

Now, in Vietnamese there can be many versions of a vowel letter depending on the diacritic marks. But this dictionary software ignores those altogether. For example, if you search for “mat” and choose mát you’ll be shown the translation for mát, cool, but also mất, mật, mắt, and mặt which could mean to lose, honey, eye, etc. and each of those Vietnamese words could have several other translations which would also be shown. This software is useless.

So then I tried to find some other dictionary software and I lucked upon a few forums in Vietnamese where people were offering commercial English-Vietnamese dictionaries for S60 V3. I won’t link directly to these places but here’s how you can find them on Google:
English to Vietnamese dictionaries for S60
Vietnamese to English dictionaries for S60

If you notice that in Vietnam if you buy a dictionary it usually translates one way either from English to Vietnamese or from Vietnamese English but not both. It’s the same with dictionary software so you may need to find different software to translate in each direction.

One software I found was EVDict/M-Dict which is supposed to have 110,000 words. This is a decent English-Vietnamese dictionary with a horrible user interface. Words don’t appear as you type them like in most other dictionaries instead they are searched when you hit the search button. And there is no shortcut key to go back to searching after looking at an entry.

Another I found was LexisGoo which has a slick interface except that I can’t actually type anything at least on my Nokia E63 which makes this software completely useless also.

So as it stands, I’m still looking for a dictionary that translates from Vietnamese to English for my Nokia phone. Please leave a comment if you have any suggestions.

One of the many reasons that Vietnamese and other foreigners need a teacher that can speak the language is because it is difficult to read English words and pronounce them correctly without first having somebody read them to you. This is because English orthography, the spelling system, is very inconsistent and contains many words from other languages such as French and Latin. Many Vietnamese students studying English rely on electronic dictionaries that can say the words out loud but these dictionaries cost in the neighborhood of $100 and so are out of the reach of many students.

However, most British English dictionaries transcribe the pronunciation of each word. The system that is used is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) simplified a bit for the English language. Unfortunately, many dictionaries don’t explain this alphabet and even those that do usually explain in English which requires that you know how to pronounce the example words already.

So I put together this chart to help Vietnamese students correspond IPA notation to approximate Vietnamese sounds.

First, the English consonants. Since the Vietnamese alphabet is based on French which is similar to English most of the letters are the same. But there are many symbols that are not in the alphabet which generally represent sounds not found in Vietnamese.

International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) has many symbols for vowel sounds that are not in either the English or Vietnamese alphabets. Most English-Vietnamese dictionaries are British and and therefore the pronunciations are British English.

Over six months ago Morgan Stanley warned of a currency crisis in Vietnam. But the valuation of the Vietnam dong would have been similar in magnitude of the severe devaluation of the Thai baht in 1997 which sparked the Asian financial crisis. In the months following Morgan Stanley’s warning we have seen a global financial crisis but only slow, gradual devaluation of the Vietnam dong after a one time 2% drop back in June.

At the time we hear were spooked and helped spread the Morgan Stanley rumor of imminent dong devaluation. But as nothing happened and now Morgan Stanley is talking of a “large realignment” of the exchange rate in 2009 are they really to be believed?

At the time one of the factors was the 12-month nondeliverable forwards which predicted a 39% drop against the dollar. However, that figure may not be an accurate predictor because of the small size of that market which allows a small number of players to have a large influence on the price.

Another factor was the high double-digit rate of inflation in Vietnam. However, as the world falls into recession demand and the price of oil has dropped sharply and as oil was largely imported and was a large component of consumer spending inflation has dropped sharply. In fact, consumer prices are now falling and oil continues to fall.

On the other hand, Vietnam still has a high current account deficit and there is still the problem of loan repayments due to the stalled real estate market. And as the countries that Vietnam exports to, the United States, Japan, and Europe, are now in recession Vietnam has to try harder to compete with its exports possibly by devaluing its currency to make its products cheaper. China, which has long kept the Chinese yuan artificially cheap, could devalue its currency which could force Vietnam to follow suit in order to remain competitive.

While Vietnam wants to remain competitive Hanoi also wants to prevent the negative social ramifications of sudden and steep currency devaluations. Vietnamese companies like coffee exporters who took out loans in US dollars because they were much cheaper than loans in Vietnamese dong might not be able to repay those loans if the price of dollars were to suddenly go up. So Hanoi favors slow, incremental devaluation. However, the State Bank of Vietnam widened the dong’s trading band from 2% to 3%. Just over six months ago they had increased it from 1% to 2%. This allows for larger one time increases in the drop of the dong’s value.

As interest rates have been cut in the US and around the world they have also been cut in Vietnam. Whereas before a rate of nearly 20% could be had on Vietnam dong deposits the rate now is from 10 to 12% and hovering around 4% for US dollar deposits for 12 months. So while the rate for dong deposits is still three times higher as a percentage than for dollar deposits it’s only an 8% difference and it looks possible that the dong could devalue 8% against the dollar in 2009 and there is always risk that it could devalue even more.

Another language learning resource that was featured on Mashable recently is a site called Forvo that, according to the CEO:

We have created a database for word pronunciations. We have +45000 pronunciations in 75 languages in only 6 months. We hope Forvo becomes a useful tool to learn languages. All words in all languages is our goal. The recordings are 100% real, not text-to-voice applications.

English, for example, has almost no consistent pronunciation rules. Original English words are pretty weird when you think about it and then a huge portion of the words used in English now come from French, but so many other languages have contributed words to the English language. But when a word from another language enters the English lexicon it usually does so under a convention of transcribing words in that language so that you need to know the rules of that convention. Chinese, for example, has a number of conventions for writing its words in English. Being able to spell most of the words used in the English language today means being able to pronounce words in many languages. This makes spelling English notoriously difficult and of course is why we have spelling bees.

That problem aside, when learning a foreign language it also takes a while to learn all the rules for pronouncing regular words in that language. So how do you do that without having a native speaker pronounced the word for you? This is where Forvo comes in.

Right now the number of Vietnamese words that have been pronounced on the site is tiny. But perhaps in the future this site can be a resource to be mashed with other sites to create a more useful resource with pronunciation available for those times it’s needed.

One suggestion I have is to be able to say which dialect you’re speaking. This is especially useful in Vietnamese where words are pronounced quite differently depending on if you speak the North, Central, or Southern dialect. And of course there are plenty of differences between British English and American English.

Livemocha is a new website for those who are learning a foreign language. It combines lessons with flash cards to a community of fellow learners. I’ve had success with other sites for meeting language partners such as My Language Exchange but Livemocha is a lot more advanced. Here’s what mashable has to say:

I have to agree with the approach. The way most students learn a foreign language is inadequate. You really need to practice using the language and having a language partner helps with that as well as with motivation. And now Web technology is advanced enough to really facilitate interactively learning online.

In the same vein is Mango Languages software, another website with a large set of developed lessons with audio as well is an attached community of language students. I recommend this site.