Songs for the Spirits: Music and Mediums in Modern Vietnam

Note on Vietnamese Language

note on Vietnamese language Modern Vietnamese is written with a romanized script called quoc ngu (lit. “national script”). This script was initially devised by French and Portuguese missionaries in the seventeenth century and became the predominant script from the beginning of the twentieth century. The quoc ngu script replaced the older systems of writing Vietnamese with Chinese characters , chu nho, and with Vietnamese characters, chu nom, a system that is based on modified Chinese characters. Vietnamese is a tonal language, and the quoc ngu script includes diacritics to indicate the speech tones and to distinguish different vowel and consonant sounds. For the sake of simplicity and accessibility to non-Vietnamese-speaking readers, the Vietnamese words in this text are written without the use of diacritics, except for the musical transcription in Figure 5.1. The quoc ngu system is required in Figure 5.1 in order to illustrate the relationship between speech tones and melodic contour, and Figure 5.2 graphically represents the six speech tones used in standard Vietnamese. The six speech tones are indicated with the following diacritics (using the vowel “e”): High rising (sac): é Mid level (khong dau): e (i.e., no diacritic) High broken (nga): ẽ Low rising (hoi): e ˀ Low broken (nang): e . Low falling (huyen): è Vietnamese names are conventionally written with the family name first, followed by given names. This convention is adhered to in this book. ...