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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

by 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.
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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.

by Timwi 3y ago

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

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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.