22 July 2008

Vietnamese

I think the people who first spoke Vietnamese didn’t want outsiders to learn. They came up with 6 tones, which they denote by putting various marks on top of vowels. It’s also a sing-song language. No singing = no Vietnamese.


English: Tư commits suicide slowly.

Vietnamese: Tư T T T T


English: The size of the warehouse is small; hence drying is difficult and miserable.

Vietnamese: Kh nhà kho nh vì thế đ khô khó và kh


The language has many traps. Thieu means pepper, Dieu means cashew, and Thieu Dieu means disaster. Similarly, some word with a cap on the vowel could mean ‘God is great’, the same word with a question mark on the vowel could mean ‘you fucking bitch!’

1 comment:

Jaggernaut said...

I presume credit is due somewhere for the lucid warehouse sentence :)