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Read your way through Hà Nội
- unkeen 1y ago> Note: The Vietnamese words in the original version of this essay used diacritical marks. To comply with New York Times style, the marks were removed before publication. Why, in the year 2025, does the NYT still deem this to be necessary?
- haskellshill 1y agoYeah, very silly in an article specifically about language. But one may also ask, why do people still read NYT (and other newspapers) in 2025, given that they are just inferior versions of blogs, that you also have to pay for?
- saoh 1y agoRead the text and judge for yourself how the diacritical marks affect readability.
- unkeen 1y agoCome on. I had no problems whatsoever.
- haskellshill 1y agoUh yeah they don't? Unless you also have problems with words such as über, façade, señor or crème brûlée. Rather, the removal of them affects readability in a similar way to removing accents, punctuation or writing in all lowercase.
- tsimionescu 1y agoThere are two types of diacritics, from the perspective of any reader: the ones they are familiar with and understand, and the ones that are visual noise. American and (West) European audiences are typically more or less familiar with the umlaut, accent, cedille and circumflex mark, and the tilde. Other diacritical marks typically fall in the second category for them, outside of use in their own language.
- haskellshill 1y agoso just ignore the "visual noise" or "random scribbles"? i dont get why youd want to remove meaning from an article simply because you dont undestand it.
- tsimionescu 1y agoFor the same reason you choose one font over another: the aesthetics of a text matter, especially to publishers. Now, I should add that for an article that is specifically about language, and even has some illustrations of the meaning of these diacritics, this is almost certainly a bad choice on the NYT's part. But as a general rule, I think it is defensible.
- haskellshill 1y agoWell, I disagree that simpler means better looking. It's akin to arguing that a commie block has better æsthetics than a gothic cathedral.
- mavhc 1y agoSo expose the reader to them until they become familiar, problem solved
- galaxy_gas 1y agoSo many website that use custom font cannot render the diacritics. I hate to see the single letter font change constantly. Maybe this is related?
- haskellshill 1y agoThis really shouldn't be a problem for a newspaper with 2.5 billion USD revenue to figure out in 2025 though.
- keane 1y agohttps://rd.nytimes.com https://rd.nytimes.com should be able to handle it
- ragazzina 1y agoBecause the NYT readers value simplicity more than authenticity.
- tsimionescu 1y agoNot directly related, but to avoid another thread on diacritics: I wonder if any other language chose to use so many diacritics for its official transliteration to a Latin alphabet. As someone who doesn't read it, Vietnamese text often appears as if it's randomly scribbled over. On to your main topic: diacritics are only really useful for people who speak a language. To everyone else, such as the vast majority of the NYT's audience, they are purely a distraction. My own language uses some diacritics, and we basically never use them in international contexts. For example, if I have to write my address on a paper form outside my country, I won't ever write București, I will write Bucuresti, because it makes no difference to the reader and it may even confuse them. For example, if someone wrote their address on paper as "Đinh Lễ", I wouldn't be surprised if it got copied over as "Inh Le" street, with the person doing the copying assuming that the striketrhough was a correction, not a diacrtic.
- haskellshill 1y agoI disagree, but your opinion may come from your ignorance (sorry, lack of knowledge perhaps) of Vietnamese. First, it's not a transliteration, it's their native alphabet. And the diacritics mark tones, which is a very important part of the language. An example from the article itself: > In the case of Hỏa Lò Prison, for example, “hỏa” means “fire,” and “lò” means “furnace”: the Burning Furnace Prison. Without the marks, “hoa” means “flowers,” and “lo” means “worry,” rendering the term “Hoa Lo” meaningless. Your example doesn't work because (a) it's an address, not text meant for reading and (b) turning ș into s only alters the pronunciation, while the meaning is still intelligible.
- tsimionescu 1y agoI didn't know this is the official writing system of Vietnam. This explains why they have so many diacritics then, if it's their only writing system. Even so, I don't think that changes my point. Sure, diacritics serve an important purpose in a language. Many words in Romanian are only differentiated in writing by diacritics (for example, "în" means in, inside, while "in" means linseed; "să" means "to", while "sa" means his/her). However, this is only relevant for a Romanian audience: an international audience will not understand the words either way, and will usually not even be able to differentiate them from a list based on the presence or absence of the marks. If Hanoi had both a Hỏa Lò Prison and a Hoa Lo Prison, non-Vietnamese speakers will have no idea which to go to. Even less so if they had a Hòa Lỏ Prison in addition to the others.
- keiferski 1y agoI don’t really fault the NYT for writing Hanoi and Vietnam, not Hà Nội and Việt Nam. It’s a newspaper for English-speakers, at the end of the day. It calls Warszawa Warsaw, Praha Prague, Москва Moscow, and hundreds of other places by their English names. I wouldn't expect Russian newspapers to write New York instead of Нью-Йорк, either.
- vjerancrnjak 1y agoI like how Serbian is completely fine with Njujork or Majkl Ðekson. Phonemic orthography should win and destroy all spelling bees.
- rkomorn 1y agoThis seems homonymphobic. Edit: homophonephobic, technically.
- decimalenough 1y agoHanoi and Vietnam are sufficiently well known to be anglicized. What's less excusable is stripping names like Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai of their diacritics.
- electroly 1y agoNguyễn Phan Quế Mai is the one name that the NYT did not strip the diacritics from. Every other Vietnamese term and name has been stripped (including the names of the other authors in the reading list), but the article author's name, alone, retains its diacritics in the NYT article. They do seem to have gotten the diacritics subtly wrong in the article subtitle vs. the byline (which is correct and, I assume, generated automatically). https://archive.ph/Gi1HX https://archive.ph/Gi1HX
- antonyh 1y agoThey do this, only using the Latin alphabet for brand names etc. For example, pravda.ru spells Finland as Финляндия (Edit: I misread your comment, fixed mine, I agree with you)
- keiferski 1y agoHere’s a related article about Vietnamese graphic design: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149266 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149266
- antonyh 1y agoThe irony that this is an article about reading and literature, and yet the NYT butchered it for stylistic purposes. Changing peoples names I find unforgivable.
- jhbadger 1y agoHow far do you want to take it? Should we write Chinese names in characters and Arabic names in their writing system? And of course, historically Vietnamese used Chinese characters -- the Romanized form was introduced under colonialism (although granted, there seems to be no desire to go back after independence)
- bobbylarrybobby 1y agoWhereas rendering Chinese names with Chinese characters would make the names entirely unintelligible to an audience of English speakers, the nice thing about the diacritical marks in Vietnamese is that they can simply be ignored by those familiar with the Roman alphabet but not Vietnamese. I would similarly expect an article about Spain or Spaniards to include the accents and the ñ character and an article about France or the French to include accents and the ç. (I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to writing out Chinese names in Chinese, then putting the pinyin in a parenthetical, either. Obviously there would be no point to this with Vietnamese, Spanish, or French.)