12 ms·

History of Vietnamese Typography

100 points by thenewwazoo 3y ago

Timwi 3y ago
It's definitely cool that Vietnam ditched the overcomplicated ideographic system, but the Latin-based script could still do with a lot of improvement. The need for multiple diacritics on almost every vowel reveals starkly how ill-fitting Latin is for a tonal language. Meanwhile, for the consonants, Vietnamese spelling adopted French/Portuguese-inspired digraphs such as qu and ph when the much more internationally recognized k and f would have been available and clearly be preferable. I feel it's a missed opportunity. Vietnamese writing could have been a lot cooler. The ideal would have been a specially crafted writing system designed for the language, much like Hangeul is tailor-made for Korean; but even if adopting Latin letters were somehow a requirement, it could have been more thought-out than the French-imposed hodgepodge that we got.
- yannis 3y ago
  True too many diacritics are difficult to use, although I think it was as easy as anything else when handwritten. As technologies progress any script will be written easily, so a nation having a distinct script is part of its identity. Also a mistaken belief is that a scripts glyphs and clusters need to represent the phonetics accurately. Hangeul is possibly the best phonetic script that I can think of other than using IPA which is now used for some African languages.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- npn 3y ago
  Picking non convenient consonants works wonders for us now as we can mix almost freely with many English words without causing any confusion.
- amluto 3y ago
  > The need for multiple diacritics on almost every vowel reveals starkly how ill-fitting Latin is for a tonal language. How so? There are some phonetic systems for Mandarin that adjust spelling to indicate tones, and IMO they’re terrible. Fortunately they’re also obsolete. I don’t know much about Vietnamese, but it seems to use 5 diacritics for tones, which seems just fine. The real issue seems to be that Vietnamese has too many vowels for the Latin alphabet, and that was also’solved with diacritics, so there are tone diacritics and vowel diacritics. English also has too many vowel sounds, and it’s, ahem, solved by being ambiguous. Mandarin has too many vowels and Pinyin uses (somewhat ill-conceived IMO) pairs of vowels. But that means that all the diacritics [0] are tones, which is nice. [0] As a sort of exception, Pinyin occasionally needs an apostrophe as a word/syllable break, which is a side effect of the aforementioned vowel pair issue and the fact that Mandarin doesn’t actually need spaces to be readable, so spaces are kind of optional except when they aren’t.
sinuhe69 3y ago
Interestingly, Filipino and Indonesian also had their own scripts for some time (a subset of Indian scripts) then converted to Latin scripts in the 18th century and later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baybayin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baybayin
resolutebat 3y ago
Vietnam is remarkable in that it's the only one of the four major Sinosphere languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, aka CJKV) to fully abandon Chinese characters and adopt the Latin alphabet instead. China and Japan both had serious movements to do the same, Japan during the Meiji reformation, China during the Cultural Revolution, but only Vietnam went ahead and did it. Korea forged its own path with their native Hangul writing system, but even there Chinese characters are still occasionally used.
- keiferski 3y ago
  I’m not super familiar with the history, but it is worth noting that many of the countries around Vietnam also adopted the Latin alphabet: Malay/Indonesian, Filipino, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_the_Latin_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_the_Latin_script
  - JimDabell 3y ago
    I’m in Malaysia at the moment and it’s surprising just how many everyday words are the same as English but “spelt with a Malay accent”. Ones I saw today were “restaurant” => “restoran” and “complex” => “kompleks”.
    - resolutebat 3y ago
      They're English borrowings. Head over to Indonesia, and it's essentially the same language, but with Dutch borrowings instead.
      - JimDabell 3y ago
        I guess I’m just surprised at the sheer volume.
    - justsomehnguy 3y ago
      It's not a "Malay accent" but a simple "written as heard".

100 points by thenewwazoo 3y ago

It's definitely cool that Vietnam ditched the overcomplicated ideographic system, but the Latin-based script could still do with a lot of improvement. The need for multiple diacritics on almost every vowel reveals starkly how ill-fitting Latin is for a tonal language. Meanwhile, for the consonants, Vietnamese spelling adopted French/Portuguese-inspired digraphs such as qu and ph when the much more internationally recognized k and f would have been available and clearly be preferable. I feel it's a missed opportunity. Vietnamese writing could have been a lot cooler. The ideal would have been a specially crafted writing system designed for the language, much like Hangeul is tailor-made for Korean; but even if adopting Latin letters were somehow a requirement, it could have been more thought-out than the French-imposed hodgepodge that we got.

yannis 3y ago
True too many diacritics are difficult to use, although I think it was as easy as anything else when handwritten. As technologies progress any script will be written easily, so a nation having a distinct script is part of its identity. Also a mistaken belief is that a scripts glyphs and clusters need to represent the phonetics accurately. Hangeul is possibly the best phonetic script that I can think of other than using IPA which is now used for some African languages.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
npn 3y ago
Picking non convenient consonants works wonders for us now as we can mix almost freely with many English words without causing any confusion.
amluto 3y ago
> The need for multiple diacritics on almost every vowel reveals starkly how ill-fitting Latin is for a tonal language. How so? There are some phonetic systems for Mandarin that adjust spelling to indicate tones, and IMO they’re terrible. Fortunately they’re also obsolete. I don’t know much about Vietnamese, but it seems to use 5 diacritics for tones, which seems just fine. The real issue seems to be that Vietnamese has too many vowels for the Latin alphabet, and that was also’solved with diacritics, so there are tone diacritics and vowel diacritics. English also has too many vowel sounds, and it’s, ahem, solved by being ambiguous. Mandarin has too many vowels and Pinyin uses (somewhat ill-conceived IMO) pairs of vowels. But that means that all the diacritics [0] are tones, which is nice. [0] As a sort of exception, Pinyin occasionally needs an apostrophe as a word/syllable break, which is a side effect of the aforementioned vowel pair issue and the fact that Mandarin doesn’t actually need spaces to be readable, so spaces are kind of optional except when they aren’t.

sinuhe69 3y ago

Interestingly, Filipino and Indonesian also had their own scripts for some time (a subset of Indian scripts) then converted to Latin scripts in the 18th century and later. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baybayin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baybayin

resolutebat 3y ago

Vietnam is remarkable in that it's the only one of the four major Sinosphere languages (Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, aka CJKV) to fully abandon Chinese characters and adopt the Latin alphabet instead. China and Japan both had serious movements to do the same, Japan during the Meiji reformation, China during the Cultural Revolution, but only Vietnam went ahead and did it. Korea forged its own path with their native Hangul writing system, but even there Chinese characters are still occasionally used.

keiferski 3y ago
I’m not super familiar with the history, but it is worth noting that many of the countries around Vietnam also adopted the Latin alphabet: Malay/Indonesian, Filipino, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_the_Latin_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spread_of_the_Latin_script
- JimDabell 3y ago
  I’m in Malaysia at the moment and it’s surprising just how many everyday words are the same as English but “spelt with a Malay accent”. Ones I saw today were “restaurant” => “restoran” and “complex” => “kompleks”.
  - resolutebat 3y ago
    They're English borrowings. Head over to Indonesia, and it's essentially the same language, but with Dutch borrowings instead.
    - JimDabell 3y ago
      I guess I’m just surprised at the sheer volume.
  - justsomehnguy 3y ago
    It's not a "Malay accent" but a simple "written as heard".