I found a couple of nice sites with Hmong lessons. The former one has digitized pronunciations, while the latter is mainly a vocabulary and sundry sentences. The interesting thing about the romanization scheme [RPA] is that it uses letters at the end of syllables to indicate one of its seven tones.
| Tone | Character | Example |
|---|---|---|
| high | -b | pob 'ball, lump' |
| high falling | -j | poj 'female' |
| mid rising | -v | pov 'throw' |
| mid | -- | po 'spleen' |
| breathy mid low | -g | pog 'grandmother' |
| low | -s | pos 'thorn' |
| low falling (creaky) | -m | pom 'see' |
I found these sites linked off of Jennifer's Language Page which has a medley of language resources, including some links to Iu Mien. And the title of this entry means: "I would like to learn Hmong."
Posted by jim at October 9, 2003 08:08 AM | TrackBackThe system for indicating tones is sensible and doubtless works well for native speakers, since they don't have final non-nasal consonants. For foreigners, on the other hand, it's a nightmare, since it's almost impossible (for me, at any rate) to turn off the pronunciation mechanism that sees "pob" and says /pob/. Combined with the fact that the final nasal is indicated (if I remember correctly) by doubling the written vowel, so that "hmoob" is pronounced /hmong/ with high tone, it's about as counterintuitive as it can get for people used to any other version of Roman alphabet.
Posted by: language hat on October 9, 2003 09:41 AMYup, as you say, dreadful. I think digits would be better and diacritics best.
Posted by: jim on October 9, 2003 09:58 AM