The Vietnamese tilde, also known by its Latin name of apex, was a curved diacritic used in the 17th century to mark final
nasalization
In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .
...
in the early
Vietnamese alphabet
The Vietnamese alphabet (, ) is the modern writing script for the Vietnamese language. It uses the Latin script based on Romance languages like French language, French, originally developed by Francisco de Pina (1585–1625), a missionary from P ...
. It was an adoption of the Portuguese
tilde
The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
, and should not be confused with the
tone mark ''ngã'', which is encoded as a tilde in
Unicode
Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...
(and in Vietnamese derivatives of
ISO-8859-1
ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology—8-bit computing, 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character (computing), character sets—Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character enc ...
such as
VISCII
VISCII is an unofficially-defined modified ASCII character encoding for Vietnamese language and computers, using the Vietnamese language with computers. It should not be confused with the similarly-named officially registered VSCII encoding. VI ...
,
VPS or
Windows-1258
Windows-1258 is a code page used in Microsoft Windows to represent Vietnamese texts. It makes use of combining diacritical marks.
Windows-1258 is compatible with neither the Vietnamese standard ( TCVN 5712 / VSCII), nor the various other encodin ...
), despite actually being an adoption of the Greek
perispomeni
Greek orthography has used a variety of diacritics starting in the Hellenistic period. The more complex polytonic orthography (), which includes five diacritics, notates Ancient Greek phonology. The simpler monotonic orthography (), introduce ...
. ''Apex'' is the name used in contemporary Latin texts.
In his 1651 ',
Alexandre de Rhodes
Alexandre de Rhodes, SJ (; 15 March 1593 – 5 November 1660), also Đắc Lộ was an Avignonese Jesuit missionary and lexicographer who had a lasting impact on Christianity in Vietnam. He wrote the '' Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latin ...
describes the diacritic:
The apex appears atop , , and less commonly . As with other accent marks, a tone mark can appear atop the apex.
According to canon law historian Roland Jacques, the apex indicated a final
labial-velar nasal , an allophone of that is peculiar to the Hanoi dialect to the present day. The apex apparently fell out of use during the mid-18th century, being unified with (representing ), in a major simplification of the orthography, though the Vietnamese
Jesuit
The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...
() continued to use the old orthography into the early 19th century. In
Pierre Pigneau de Behaine
Pierre is a masculine given name. It is a French form of the name Peter. Pierre originally meant "rock" or "stone" in French (derived from the Greek word πέτρος (''petros'') meaning "stone, rock", via Latin "petra"). It is a translation ...
and
Jean-Louis Taberd's 1838 ', the words ' and ' became ' and ', respectively.
The Middle Vietnamese apex is known as ' or ' in modern Vietnamese. The apex is often mistaken for a tilde in modern reproductions of early Vietnamese writing, such as in
Phạm Thế Ngũ's '.
Examples
Obtained from
Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum
The ''Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum'' (known in Vietnamese as ') is a trilingual Vietnamese- Portuguese-Latin dictionary written by the French Jesuit lexicographer Alexandre de Rhodes after 12 years in Vietnam. It was publish ...
, a trilingual Vietnamese, Portuguese and Latin dictionary by Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes.
File:Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, breve acute apex.png, The entry for ' shows distinct breves (ĕ), acutes (ó), and apices (u᷃).
File:Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, u-apex-acute.png, The entry for ' shows that a vowel with an apex can take on an additional tone mark, in this case an acute.
File:Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, o-horn-apex.png, The entry for ' illustrates the difference between a horn and an apex.
References
{{Navbox diacritical marks
Vietnamese language
Diacritics