Vietnamese Alphabet - Structure

Structure

As a result of influence from the Chinese writing system, each syllable in Vietnamese is written separately as if it were a word. In the past, syllables in multisyllabic words were concatenated with hyphens, but this practice had died out, and hyphenation is now reserved for foreign borrowings. A written syllable consists of at most three parts, in the following order from left to right:

  1. An optional beginning consonant part
  2. A required vowel syllable nucleus and the tone mark, if needed, applied above or below it
  3. An optional ending consonant part, can only be one of the following: c, ch, m, n, ng, nh, p, t, or nothing.

Read more about this topic:  Vietnamese Alphabet

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