An accurate Vietnamese alphabet?

James Puckett

I’m looking for an accurate list of letters in the Vietnamese alphabet. The list built into Glyphs seems to be incomplete, as do Adobe’s fonts. For example, trying to set Genesis with fonts that support Vietnamese often results in ḿ ṇ ṛ missing. Online lists of the Vietnamese alphabet are often missing these and other letters, like ø. The Scriptsource list of characters for Vietnamese fonts contains many characters not in Vietnamese because it includes complete codepages containing characters used in Vietnam. Is there a reliable list somewhere? Are ḿ ṇ ṛ and ø just errors in old text?

James Puckett

How about the old Tiro Vietnamese encodings from Fontlab on Steroids? Are they good? 

Andreas Stötzner

I’m not sure if ḿ ṇ ṛ ø are to be considered Vietnamese letters. In German é can occur in some loanword (Café), yet it does not make the particular character a German letter.
I always found the Unicode table quite helpful. Be cautious with text bits for testing found online, there may be wrong/strange encodings for diacritics in it.
However, if you want to be on the very safe side with *all possible* Latin characters, your scope of choice probably narrows down to Arial Unicode and, last exit, Andron Mega.

Igor Freiberger

These letters (ḿ ṇ ṛ ø) are not part of Vietnamese alphabet.

This alphabet is correctly informed in sources like Wikipedia, Unicode's CLDR or Vietunicode. Omniglot is also correct, although they firstly list the base alphabet and later talk about the six tones applied to all vowels. You can even compare these to the old VSCII, the standard interchange code used to support Vietnamese before Unicode inception.

There is an English/Vietnamese translation of Genesis here and none of those letters are present. Anyway, I don't know how good it is.

There are historical letters, but ḿ ṇ ṛ ø are not among them. D with bar crossing the whole letter was used during 1800s but is not coded as it is just a variant of Đ. B with flourish at left, encoded in Unicode 8.0, is even older, but it seems not to be in use for more than 300 years. I have no notice of other historical letters.

Talking about language support in general, Andreas' note is quite important. There are authoritative sources listing letters present in loan words as needed to language support. Unicode's CLDR, Microsoft's locale definitions and Underware's Latin Pro are full of problems due to this approach. Their "additional letters" goes far beyond the actual alphabet and pinch loan letters based on document scans. My advice is to avoid this (although CLDR is ok for Vietnamese).

John Hudson

Yes, Igor has it right, I think, for the standard modern orthography.

Unicode added two abandoned characters for Middle Vietnamese fairly recently:
A796 Ꞗ LATIN CAPITAL LETTER B WITH FLOURISH
A797 ꞗ LATIN SMALL LETTER B WITH FLOURISH
but I don't think ḿ ṇ ṛ and ø were ever used.

James, what is the source of the Genesis text? It's possibly some kind of non-standard encoding in which those character codepoints were hijacked.

James Puckett

I got the Vietnamese Genesis text from Murton Systems. It seems like they got it from http://bibledatabase.org. I’m not sure what the original source is. This text is all over the internet.

John Hudson

This version of the Vietnamese Bible text looks as I would expect.
https://www.bible.com/bible/151/gen.1

Yeah, that Murton Systems Bible text is definitely not Vietnamese Unicode. Maybe it's some 8-bit Vietnamese codepage being interpreted as ANSI?

Google Translate has a great time with the Murton text 

Andreas Stötzner

I’m not sure wether this is relevant for Bible texts but anyhow, make sure you include the dong sign, for complete language support.

Kent Lew

I’m not saying it shouldn’t be included in a font that claims support, but . . . I am told that the ₫ symbol is rarely, if ever, actually used in Vietnamese communities. It’s hard to find an example in the wild. More often a simple đ or Đ abbreviation is used.

Andreas Stötzner

I’m not sure how frequently it is used but I would wish to be assured that a user of my Vietnamese font would not be left with a frustration, just in case. The dong glyph is a very simple components operation, nothing to get grey hair about.
I found an example like this in the wild, rather quickly:

John Hudson

The dong glyph is a very simple components operation

Not necessarily. I design it to sit within the lining numeral height, so it involves adjustment to scale, proportion and weight, not simply making a composite of the barred-d and an underline.

Kent Lew

Yes, it can be found. But most such examples tend not to be community-based use. That’s all. I’m not arguing that it should not be included in a font. Just adding a qualifier on the notion of “language support.”

And I, too, do not design it as a component.

Andreas Stötzner

However you would decide on the design of it, I think it is just decent to include the character in a font that pretends to support Vietnamese.