4 ms·

The whole language is already a romanization. If the diacritics didn't contain useful information, they wouldn't exist. I can understand writing without diacrit

The whole language is already a romanization. If the diacritics didn't contain useful information, they wouldn't exist. I can understand writing without diacritics when writing informally - even Vietnamese people do that - but in something published I would hope they'd go through the effort of committing to the English or the Vietnamese name. Nuoc mam is neither, it's a placeholder that says "we don't want to sound low-market by saying 'Vietnamese fish sauce', but we also don't care about being correct". It's not like Chinese characters, where it needs to be romanized for English speakers to recognise it: if we see nước mắm in sequential sentences, we'll know it's talking about the same thing even if we don't remember the diacritics. These will be things from SMCP's style guide and will be shared by many other publications, because it's the way most of us treat other languages. There's a similar treatement of name order. I think the style shows disregard for the languages and cultures, so I don't like it.

eindiran 6y ago
The additional information contained in the diacritics is essentially useless to English speakers: they certainly aren't going to get the tones right and the dipthong "ướ" has no equivalent sound in English. Vietnamese speakers themselves frequently elide diacritics as you point out, so you aren't really hurting anyone's comprehension. Diacritics are pretty rare in English publications for the most part: most drop diacritics even off of the English words that technically should have them: cliché, crêpe, façade, piñata, protégé, résumé, risqué... Even the New Yorker, with its famously persnickety style guide, drops the tone diacritics from Vietnamese dish names: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/van-das-tour-of-vietnamese-delicacies https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/van-das-tour-o... Outside of this, I think the point about "nuoc mam" being the standard (complete) romanization still stands: it is common enough that some common English dictionaries have added it (eg https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuoc%20mam https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuoc%20mam and https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nuoc-mam https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nuoc-ma...). This is quite a common occurrence in languages which use the Latin alphabet + additional letters: most speakers of German are used to seeing "ß" become "ss" in English publications. I can see why you interpret this as a disregard for other languages, but people are more likely to try to say these words if they think the word is easily pronounceable. And using the word makes the foods, places, names, etc of other cultures more likely to be shared and become a part of the common parlance; I'd go so far as to say that having an anglicized form of a name means that it is much more likely to become a common thing in the Anglophone world, which breeds greater appreciation of other cultures.
- freddie_mercury 6y ago
  > The additional information contained in the diacritics is essentially useless to English speakers This is a plausible sounding line of thought but English-language sources are rarely consistent about it. In particular, Western European languages, especially French, often get to keep their accents even though they are meaningless to English speakers. Compare, for instance, how many places will write "Côte de bœuf" but "nuoc mam". German, Spanish, Portugese, and Swedish are other languages where I often see "weird letters" and diacritics left in, even in English-language publications that don't do the same favors for other languages. That said, it is possible that SCMP is consistent about this so I don't want to call them out as hypocritical without checking.
  - wonderlg 6y ago
    I guess I’ll be calling it the Uait Aus in Uoscinton because in my language “sh” is unreadable and contains no extra information. Some words have been imported and adapted into English in the past, but I doubt that nước mắm is one of them. I‘d also say that news outlets should be held to a higher standard than “conversational language.”
    - fiblye 6y ago
      I mean, that's normal. "Germany" isn't what the so-called "Germans" call their country. And if we're being pedantic, referring to the country as "Vietnam" is absolutely wrong. It's "Việt Nam". But of course, this is all BS. Languages constantly borrow new words. 20 years ago, nobody knew what "pho" or "banh mi" were, but now we all do. We know what it means so much that we leave off the diacritics entirely and nobody is confused. Those diacritics cannot be represented within the framework of English. They're components of a completely different language. Is it unreasonable that English speakers today will borrow the word "nuoc mam" and use it in normal English conversation? I've already been seeing it on recipe sites for a couple years now. It's about as English as kimchi and ramen. Nobody ever has or ever will look up the hangul or katakana to write about those in an English article, despite them being easy to remember. "nước mắm" is a foreign word written in its language. "Nuoc mam" is the thoroughly transliterated, romanized equivalent. This phenomenon exists in every language on earth that has ever come in contact with another culture. There isn't a higher standard to hold the author to--they're writing how humans do.
Igelau 6y ago
Are you opposed to katakana too? Enough with the virtue signalling already.
- deleted 6y ago
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fiblye 6y ago
Nobody cares when "Hanoi" or "pho" is written without proper tones marked. Strange to draw the line here. It's not even a disregard of another language or culture. It's a word that's been assimilated into another language. English has plenty of French loanwords, and for the most part, we drop the accent marks. Not because of disrespect for the French, but because they're simply extraneous in our language. Nobody is looking up the word every single time they write it. They've become accepted as having a distinct meaning within of our language, just like nuoc mam.
- mark-r 6y ago
  I have a Resume, not a Résumé. No biggie.

eindiran 6y ago

The additional information contained in the diacritics is essentially useless to English speakers: they certainly aren't going to get the tones right and the dipthong "ướ" has no equivalent sound in English. Vietnamese speakers themselves frequently elide diacritics as you point out, so you aren't really hurting anyone's comprehension. Diacritics are pretty rare in English publications for the most part: most drop diacritics even off of the English words that technically should have them: cliché, crêpe, façade, piñata, protégé, résumé, risqué... Even the New Yorker, with its famously persnickety style guide, drops the tone diacritics from Vietnamese dish names: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/van-das-tour-of-vietnamese-delicacies https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/05/27/van-das-tour-o... Outside of this, I think the point about "nuoc mam" being the standard (complete) romanization still stands: it is common enough that some common English dictionaries have added it (eg https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuoc%20mam https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nuoc%20mam and https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nuoc-mam https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/nuoc-ma...). This is quite a common occurrence in languages which use the Latin alphabet + additional letters: most speakers of German are used to seeing "ß" become "ss" in English publications. I can see why you interpret this as a disregard for other languages, but people are more likely to try to say these words if they think the word is easily pronounceable. And using the word makes the foods, places, names, etc of other cultures more likely to be shared and become a part of the common parlance; I'd go so far as to say that having an anglicized form of a name means that it is much more likely to become a common thing in the Anglophone world, which breeds greater appreciation of other cultures.

freddie_mercury 6y ago
> The additional information contained in the diacritics is essentially useless to English speakers This is a plausible sounding line of thought but English-language sources are rarely consistent about it. In particular, Western European languages, especially French, often get to keep their accents even though they are meaningless to English speakers. Compare, for instance, how many places will write "Côte de bœuf" but "nuoc mam". German, Spanish, Portugese, and Swedish are other languages where I often see "weird letters" and diacritics left in, even in English-language publications that don't do the same favors for other languages. That said, it is possible that SCMP is consistent about this so I don't want to call them out as hypocritical without checking.
- wonderlg 6y ago
  I guess I’ll be calling it the Uait Aus in Uoscinton because in my language “sh” is unreadable and contains no extra information. Some words have been imported and adapted into English in the past, but I doubt that nước mắm is one of them. I‘d also say that news outlets should be held to a higher standard than “conversational language.”
  - fiblye 6y ago
    I mean, that's normal. "Germany" isn't what the so-called "Germans" call their country. And if we're being pedantic, referring to the country as "Vietnam" is absolutely wrong. It's "Việt Nam". But of course, this is all BS. Languages constantly borrow new words. 20 years ago, nobody knew what "pho" or "banh mi" were, but now we all do. We know what it means so much that we leave off the diacritics entirely and nobody is confused. Those diacritics cannot be represented within the framework of English. They're components of a completely different language. Is it unreasonable that English speakers today will borrow the word "nuoc mam" and use it in normal English conversation? I've already been seeing it on recipe sites for a couple years now. It's about as English as kimchi and ramen. Nobody ever has or ever will look up the hangul or katakana to write about those in an English article, despite them being easy to remember. "nước mắm" is a foreign word written in its language. "Nuoc mam" is the thoroughly transliterated, romanized equivalent. This phenomenon exists in every language on earth that has ever come in contact with another culture. There isn't a higher standard to hold the author to--they're writing how humans do.

Igelau 6y ago

Are you opposed to katakana too? Enough with the virtue signalling already.

deleted 6y ago
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deleted 6y ago

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fiblye 6y ago

Nobody cares when "Hanoi" or "pho" is written without proper tones marked. Strange to draw the line here. It's not even a disregard of another language or culture. It's a word that's been assimilated into another language. English has plenty of French loanwords, and for the most part, we drop the accent marks. Not because of disrespect for the French, but because they're simply extraneous in our language. Nobody is looking up the word every single time they write it. They've become accepted as having a distinct meaning within of our language, just like nuoc mam.

mark-r 6y ago
I have a Resume, not a Résumé. No biggie.