Vietnamese Quoted-Readable
Encyclopedia
Vietnamese Quoted-Readable (usually abbreviated VIQR), also known as Vietnet, is a convention for writing Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...

 using ASCII
ASCII
The American Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character-encoding scheme based on the ordering of the English alphabet. ASCII codes represent text in computers, communications equipment, and other devices that use text...

 characters. Because the Vietnamese alphabet
Vietnamese alphabet
The Vietnamese alphabet, called Chữ Quốc Ngữ , usually shortened to Quốc Ngữ , is the modern writing system for the Vietnamese language...

 contains a complex system of diacritical marks, VIQR requires the user to type in a base letter, followed by one or two characters that represent the diacritical marks.

Syntax and usage

VIQR uses the following convention:
Diacritical Marks in VIQR
Diacritical mark Typed character Examples
trăng (breve
Breve
A breve is a diacritical mark ˘, shaped like the bottom half of a circle. It resembles the caron , but is rounded, while the caron has a sharp tip...

)
( a( → ă
(circumflex
Circumflex
The circumflex is a diacritic used in the written forms of many languages, and is also commonly used in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from Latin circumflexus —a translation of the Greek περισπωμένη...

)
^ a^ → â
móc (horn
Horn (diacritic)
The horn is a diacritic mark attached to the top right corner of the letters o and u in the Vietnamese alphabet to give ơ and ư, unrounded variants of the vowel represented by the basic letter...

)
+ o+ → ơ
huyền (grave
Grave accent
The grave accent is a diacritical mark used in written Breton, Catalan, Corsican, Dutch, French, Greek , Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Occitan, Portuguese, Scottish Gaelic, Vietnamese, Welsh, Romansh, and other languages.-Greek:The grave accent was first used in the polytonic orthography of Ancient...

)
` a` → à
sắc (acute
Acute accent
The acute accent is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts.-Apex:An early precursor of the acute accent was the apex, used in Latin inscriptions to mark long vowels.-Greek:...

)
' a' → á
hỏi (hook
Hook (diacritic)
In typesetting, the hook is a diacritic mark placed on top of vowels in the Vietnamese alphabet. In shape it looks like a tiny question mark without the dot underneath. For example, a capital A with a hook is "Ả", and a lower case "u" with a hook is "ủ". It functions as a tone marker...

)
? a? →
ngã (tilde
Tilde
The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....

)
~ a~ → ã
nặng (dot below
Dot (diacritic)
When used as a diacritic mark, the term dot is usually reserved for the Interpunct , or to the glyphs 'combining dot above' and 'combining dot below'...

)
. a. →


VIQR uses DD or Dd for the Vietnamese letter Đ, and dd for the Vietnamese letter đ. To type certain punctuation marks
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...

 (namely, the period
Full stop
A full stop is the punctuation mark commonly placed at the end of sentences. In American English, the term used for this punctuation is period. In the 21st century, it is often also called a dot by young people...

, question mark
Question mark
The question mark , is a punctuation mark that replaces the full stop at the end of an interrogative sentence in English and many other languages. The question mark is not used for indirect questions...

, apostrophe
Apostrophe
The apostrophe is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritic mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet or certain other alphabets...

, forward slash
Slash (punctuation)
The slash is a sign used as a punctuation mark and for various other purposes. It is now often called a forward slash , and many other alternative names.-History:...

, opening parenthesis, or tilde
Tilde
The tilde is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Portuguese and Spanish, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics....

) directly after most Vietnamese words, a backslash
Backslash
The backslash is a typographical mark used mainly in computing. It was first introduced to computers in 1960 by Bob Bemer. Sometimes called a reverse solidus or a slosh, it is the mirror image of the common slash....

 (\) must be typed directly before the punctuation mark, so that it will not be interpreted as a diacritical mark.

Unlike VISCII
VISCII
The Vietnamese Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character set comprising the Vietnamese alphabet, punctuation, and other graphemes. Vietnamese requires slightly too many letter/diacritic combinations to make a traditional extended ASCII character set for it...

, VIQR is not a character encoding; rather, it is a way to type out Vietnamese using plain ASCII text. The advantage of VIQR over a character encoding like VISCII is that VIQR does not need specialized software or hardware for input. However, as Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

 is becoming increasingly available on computers worldwide, it is usually desirable to use software that will convert VIQR to Unicode as one types; thus, VIQR would be used only as an input method
Input method editor
An input method is an operating system component or program that allows any data, such as keyboard strokes or mouse movements, to be received as input. In this way users can enter characters and symbols not found on their input devices...

.

History

By the early 1990s, an ad-hoc system of mnemonics known as Vietnet was in use on the Viet-Net mailing list
Mailing list
A mailing list is a collection of names and addresses used by an individual or an organization to send material to multiple recipients. The term is often extended to include the people subscribed to such a list, so the group of subscribers is referred to as "the mailing list", or simply "the...

 and [news://soc.culture.vietnamese/ soc.culture.vietnamese] Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 group.

In 1992, the Vietnamese Standardization Group (Viet-Std, Nhóm Nghiên Cứu Tiêu Chuẩn Tiếng Việt) from the TriChlor Software Group in California
California
California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 formalized the VIQR convention. It was described the next year in RFC 1456.

See also

Alternative schemes for Vietnamese:
  • Telex
    Telex (IME)
    Telex is a convention for writing Vietnamese using ASCII characters commonly found on computer keyboard layouts. Because the Vietnamese alphabet uses a complex system of diacritical marks, Telex requires the user to type in a base letter, followed by one or two characters that represent the...

  • VISCII
    VISCII
    The Vietnamese Standard Code for Information Interchange is a character set comprising the Vietnamese alphabet, punctuation, and other graphemes. Vietnamese requires slightly too many letter/diacritic combinations to make a traditional extended ASCII character set for it...

  • VNI
    VNI
    VNI Software Company is the Westminster, California–based, family-owned developer of various education, entertainment, office, and utility software packages.-History:...

  • VPSKeys
    VPSKeys
    VPSKeys is a freeware input method editor developed and distributed by the Vietnamese Professionals Society . One of the first input method editors for Vietnamese, it allows users to add accent marks to Vietnamese text on computers running Microsoft Windows. The first version of VPSKeys, supporting...



ASCII mnemonics for other writing systems:
  • Informal romanizations of Russian
    Informal romanizations of Russian
    Informal or ad hoc romanizations of Russian have been in use since the early days of electronic communications, starting from early e-mail and bulletin board systems...

  • ITRANS
    ITRANS
    The "Indian languages TRANSliteration" is an ASCII transliteration scheme for Indic scripts, particularly for Devanagari script. It was developed by Avinash Chopde. The latest version of ITRANS is version 5.30 released in July, 2001...

     for Devanagari
  • SAMPA for IPA
  • Volapük encoding
    Volapuk encoding
    Volapuk encoding or latinitsa is a slang term for rendering the letters of the Cyrillic script with Latin ones...

     for Cyrillic

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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