Romanized Popular Alphabet, A Primer

Preface

This book is a tutorial for learning Romanized Popular Alphabet RPA. RPA is a writing system, based on Latin alphabets, developed for writing the Hmong language in the early 1950’s. The creators of RPA were Christian missionaries Father Yves Bertrais, Dr. Linwood Barney and Dr. William Smalley. Father Bertrais developed and taught RPA in the Guars Mountains or Roob Nyuj Qus, in the Xiangkhouang Province within the Kingdom of Laos. The intended audience of this book are English speakers who want to be literate in Hmong using the RPA writing system. The RPA writing system is called Ntawv Las Tees (Latin Script) in Hmong.

Warning

This book is a work-in-process and more information and learning content will be included in the future. This book does not aim to be technically and linguistically correct (though we try). It is meant to be a quick, but effective, way to learn how to read, write and speak Hmong using the RPA writing system.

Contents

• 1. CVT
  • 1.1. Consonants
  • 1.2. Vowels
  • 1.3. Tones
• 2. Syllables
  • 2.1. Mono-consonant syllables
  • 2.2. Bi-consonant syllables
  • 2.3. Tri-consonant syllables
  • 2.4. Quadra-consonant syllables
  • 2.5. Syllables without Consonants
• 3. Visualization
• 4. Enunciation
  • 4.1. Drop the consonant
  • 4.2. Respect the tones
• 5. Spelling
• 6. Counting
  • 6.1. Basic
  • 6.2. Teens
  • 6.3. Tens
  • 6.4. Hundreds
  • 6.5. Thousand and beyond
  • 6.6. Examples
  • 6.7. Ordinal Counting
• 7. Vocabulary
  • 7.1. Greeting
  • 7.2. Calendar
  • 7.3. Time
  • 7.4. Meals
  • 7.5. Family relationships
  • 7.6. More
• 8. Grammar
  • 8.1. Pronouns
  • 8.2. Classifiers
  • 8.3. Sentence structures
• 9. Speaking
  • 9.1. Name
  • 9.2. Age
  • 9.3. Residence
  • 9.4. Dialog
  • 9.5. Proverbs

About

One-Off Coder is an educational, service and product company. Please visit us online to discover how we may help you achieve life-long success in your personal coding career or with your company’s business goals and objectives.

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Copyright

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License by One-Off Coder.



The full source code is available on GitHub.

Cite this book as follows.:

@misc{oneoffcoder_rpa_2019,
title={Romanized Popular Alphabet, A Primer},
url={https://rpa.oneoffcoder.com},
author={Jee Vang},
year={2019},
month={Dec}}

Author

Jee Vang, Ph.D.

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Logo Design

Sheng Xiong

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my father, Nyiaj Yis Vaj.