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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 Chi
by 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 agoI’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 agoI’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 agoThey're English borrowings. Head over to Indonesia, and it's essentially the same language, but with Dutch borrowings instead.
- JimDabell 3y agoI guess I’m just surprised at the sheer volume.
- justsomehnguy 3y agoIt's not a "Malay accent" but a simple "written as heard".
- eatonphil 3y agoTeddy Roosevelt as president tried to put this in place in the US once a upon a time too. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board#:~:text=In%20August%201906%2C%20President%20of,communications%20and%20messages%20to%20Congress https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board#:~....
- JimDabell 3y agoI’m not sure what the difference is between what I said and what you are saying? Another one I spotted today was “barbecue sauce” => “sos barbeku”
- justsomehnguy 3y agoWritten text doesn't have tones and accents, so everyone understands as they could. I definitely read your comment with the accent on 'Malay accent', missing the whole part was in quotes. I just had enough experience to know it not limited to Malaysia or Asia.
- numpad0 3y agoVietnamese Chu Nom is a bit of Cyrillic among CJKV. I think they always shared too little with Chinese language and especially vocabulary that script could be anything so long aurally rich, unlike with CJK languages.
- yorwba 3y agoThe share of Chinese loans in Vietnamese is quite large and doesn't differ much from Japanese or Korean, though estimates vary depending on whether you're looking at everyday speech or the number of dictionary entries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_vocabulary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_vocabulary
- karmasimida 3y agoThe list in it is super interesting to me. 进士/举人/客栈，such words are only used in period drama now in China, not as everyday vocabulary.
- numpad0 3y agoAs seen on that page, they use too much of invented or re-assigned characters that maps to native Vietnamese vocabulary. Sentence structures also differs too much. As implied in a sibling comment by karmasimida, we CJK speakers have a bit of mutual text-only intelligibility across CJK - speeches are all steelpans unless you have few years of training + auditory cortex power cycling, just writing - and that completely breaks apart in Vietnamese, in the way very reminiscent of looking at Cyrillic script.
- bugbuddy 3y agoWikipedia and all linguistic resources that I have come across categorize Vietnamese as an Austroasiatic language (which includes Khmer) and not “Sinosphere language” (whatever that means). You are confusing writing system with language. I would argue that adopting the Latin alphabets was a great mistake. It basically severe all the young generations from all their historical writings. Also, Latinized Vietnamese scripts is one the most hideous scripts out there.
- resolutebat 3y agoYes, I'm talking about the writing systems here, the article is about typography after all.
- bradrn 3y agoThe ‘Sinosphere’ is the cultural and linguistic area which has been influenced by China. This area includes the Vietnamese language, which has undergone heavy Chinese influence. At the same time, Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language by descent, related to other Austroasiatic languages like Khmer (as you note), Mon and Santhali. Most other Austronesian languages are not part of the Sinosphere, but Vietnamese is.
- magnio 3y ago> I would argue that adopting the Latin alphabets was a great mistake. It basically severe all the young generations from all their historical writings. Also, Latinized Vietnamese scripts is one the most hideous scripts out there. No thanks. Most historical texts have been transliterated into modern chữ quốc ngữ without much compromise in meaning and literary eloquence. The writing facilitates learning Latin languages so much, and most importantly it has perfect phonemic orthography: there exists a bijection between well-formed words and speech, i.e., spelling bee is not a thing in Vietnamese.
- yorwba 3y agoI don't think it's a bijection for anyone's speech, it's more of a compromise between different varieties with incompatible phoneme inventories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#Hanoi_initials https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#Hanoi_ini...
- karmasimida 3y agoChu Nom is no Chinese Characters, I can't read Cho Noms for example (can read kanji/hanja without any issue), it is more like `Vietnamese` Characters, it is its own set of unique logograms, if that makes sense. It is complex and difficult to use/write, abolishing it really didn't take too much effort, as most of the population is illiterate at the time.
- yorwba 3y agoThere's plenty of unmodified Chinese characters in the mix, e.g. in the Tale of Kieu: https://www.nomfoundation.org/nom-project/tale-of-kieu/tale-of-kieu-version-1866?uiLang=en https://www.nomfoundation.org/nom-project/tale-of-kieu/tale-...
- karmasimida 3y agoFrom skimming of it, it seems to be around 50/50. However, this is very different from CJK countries, where the Chinese characters are mostly kept consistent. Cho nom on the other hand, renders almost completely unreadable to me.
- yorwba 3y agoTry reading some Japanese in man'yougana https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%B8%87%E8%91%89%E9%9B%86/%E7%AC%AC%E4%B8%80%E5%B7%BB https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%B8%87%E8%91%89%E9%9B%86/%... and compare to the version where all characters used purely for their sound value have been distorted into squiggly hiragana. I find it much easier to pick out coherent words in the latter because they're clearly visually distinct.
- resolutebat 3y agoJapanese also developed a Chu Nom type system (manyogana) to represent Japanese sounds using Chinese characters, and it was almost as complex, requiring a good understanding of Chinese as a foundation. But manyogana was simplified into the two syllabaries used today, hiragana and katakana.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoChinese has a small set of pronunciations and, as a consequence, a huge number of homophones. I think that's partly the reason why words are usually 2 characters: Yes, there is a character that means 'forest', for example, but when you want to actually say 'forest' it is combined with another character (of similar meaning) so that the spoken word is intelligible. There is a huge loss of information when writing in pinyin (Latin characters) vs. ideograms. It might be the same in Vietnamese. I suspect a lot of the shift away from sinograms in Vietnam was due to nationalism, which is also partly why China is so attached to them.
- realusername 3y ago> It might be the same in Vietnamese It's not, there's only 4 tones in Chinese but 6 + 2 what I'd call special syllables in Vietnamese (not sure what's the official term for that) So homophones are pretty rare. There's never any ambiguity with the Latin script.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoCool, thanks. No ambiguity in context or per word? The point of my comment remains for Chinese, then.
- realusername 3y agoNo, no ambiguity at all. I'm sure you could construct deliberately a sentence with a double meaning playing on the two components of some words but that's a hard task for sure. I have around a B1 level now so I'm not nearly good enough to build such complex puns though.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoVery interesting. For someone who knows (some) Chinese but no Vietnamese there seems to be a lot of commonality so it's very interesting that Vietnamese does not have all those homophones. I guess that explains a lot of the appeal of Latin characters, then.
- freddie_mercury 3y agoI read somewhere that it's estimated only about 5,000 Vietnamese could read Chu Nom when it was replaced by Quoc Ngu. Dunno what numbers are like in those other countries but I imagine literacy rates were slightly higher.
- jhanschoo 3y ago> even there Chinese characters are still occasionally used. > Chữ Nho is still used today in calligraphic banners for traditional occasions such as festivals, funerals, Lunar New Year (Tết), and weddings. Unless I'm mistaken the role of Chinese characters in Korea and that which it has in Vietnam as claimed in the article seems similar to me.
- inkyoto 3y agoIt was the French who pushed for a Latin based writing system for Vietnamese in an attempt to improve literacy in Vietnam and to also cut the cultural umbilical cord with China. If China itself were colonised by Western powers towards the end of the Qing dynasty or after, the fate of Chinese characters in China could have become quite different, although it is a matter of speculation, of course.
- geekpondering 3y agoThere's occasional talk in Japan for dumping Kanji in favor of Hiragana and Katakana only but Kanji makes it easier to read the written word: 1) Japanese doesn't use spaces between words (and the language is structured in a way to make it difficult to decide what is a 'word') - you'll sometimes see signs in Japan that use Katakana spellings for some words that aren't normally katakanized. 2) Japanese would have a TON of homographs if they got rid of Kanji, so determining which word is harder even with some context.
- lynguist 3y ago1) You can introduce the innovation of spaces, as is used for example in older Japanese video games that had no Kanji 2) If that were a problem oral Japanese would be unintelligible. It is not. Most homonyms can be resolved. Furthermore, they could adopt a Korean system, where everyone uses a non-Kanji system, but the Kanji are still taught in high school as a type of “Latin”/“Greek” where they draw literally 55% of their vocabulary from.
- svara 3y agoRegarding your point (2), it's not that simple, since written / literary language uses a larger vocabulary, making homonyms more of a problem. In fact if you search a Japanese dictionary in hiragana with a combination of two reasonably common kanji readings (say かん+ちょう), you'll often get a double digit number of results (12 in jmdict in this example). Most of these are uncommon words unlikely to be used in the spoken language, but could occur in writing. It could probably still work more or less by relying on context, but it's more of an issue than you make it sound. Another point is that writing in hiragana with spaces would disconnect the language from its roots. The Kanji used add a layer of meaning to the language that isn't there in languages with phonetic alphabets, and help guessing at the meanings of unknown words. You could probably argue that making it easier to learn to read and write would outweigh the loss of those benefits, but I'm not so sure. Japan has a high literacy rate, so it does seem to work alright.
- bane 3y ago
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoIt's kind of funny too, since of all those languages (besides Chinese), Vietnamese is the most suited to the Chinese characters, being isolating. That said, they probably also had the easiest time abandoning them because there was never any real formalisation of how to write Vietnamese, as opposed to Literary Chinese, whereas in both Korea and Japan, people were writing their vernacular language in Chinese characters, or derived scripts, for centuries. Vietnam of course having chu Nom and other systems of writing vernacular, but not to the same degree as Korea or Japan did.
- yorwba 3y agoI think the French colonizers trying to make their empire more legible to them and suppressing the use of Chinese characters in service of that goal had a bigger influence on the decline of chu Nom than a particular lack of formalization.
- kergonath 3y agoThere is more context than that in the article. The gist of it is that it was originally developed for religious reasons, became official late in the colonisation process, and was further developed by Vietnamese intellectuals. It out-competed chữ Nôm because it was easier to learn. No need for nefarious master plans.
- b112 3y agoIt was the French, but that doesn't make it nefarious. Have you seen how annoying it is to type pictographic characters on a computer? Try doing so on a typical typewriter, or using an old style printing press. Whether right or wrong, it was seen as beneficial.
- yorwba 3y agoThis doctoral thesis has a short discussion of French language and education policy in their Vietnamese colonies: https://theses.hal.science/tel-02056541/document#page=35 https://theses.hal.science/tel-02056541/document#page=35 Unsurprisingly, it's in French.