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Not 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
by tsimionescu 1y ago
Not 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.
- haskellshill 1y agoI still don't understand this attitude of "I can't be bothered to try to understand it so it's useless". Vietnamese is actually one of the more easy tonal languages for westerners to understand, given that the tone marks are literally pictograms of the pitch (and it's not a transliteration like 你好 -> nǐ hǎo). Why are you so allergic to actually making use of that feature?
- tsimionescu 1y agoI'm not saying its useless, not at all - not for people who speak Vietnamese. I'm saying it's not relevant for people who don't.
- dontlaugh 1y agoAs a fellow Romanian, I don’t see how Vietnamese is that different from Romanian in its writing system. They both overlay information onto the Latin alphabet, Vietnamese merely does a lot more of it.
- tsimionescu 1y agoIt's not, that's my point. And yet, I don't often use Romanian diacrtics when writing English, and I certainly don't feel an international audience loses something if we talk about driving down the Transfagarasan instead of the Transfăgărășan.
- dontlaugh 1y agoI feel differently, I always write the diacritics. There are fewer ambiguities than in Vietnamese, but enough to matter. And everything has Unicode support now.
- tsimionescu 1y agoHandwriting definitely doesn't have Unicode support. And neither does people's reading. It may even be easier to guess what someone is mispronouncing if you see exactly what they read (i.e. the letters without diacritics) than if you see the diacritics and forget they mean nothing to the other person.
- walthamstow 1y agoPerhaps I am also ignorant, but I thought the Latin+diacritics system was invented by a Frenchman in modern times, rather than being native to Vietnam.
- pcardoso 1y agoClose, it was actually portuguese missionaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
- walthamstow 1y agoRight, so then it is a transliteration and it is not native to Vietnamese, despite what GP says.
- Loughla 1y ago>early 17th century. At what point does something become naturalized? This feels needlessly pedantic.
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- decimalenough 1y agoAlmost every writing system was imported from somewhere else, including something like half a dozen evolutions of the one we're using now (which was Latin, which was Greek, before that Phoenician, before that Egyptian). What matters is that the Vietnamese use the script to write their own language, which is not the case for (say) romanized Chinese.
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- refactor_master 1y agoThe term is actually a Chinese loanword, 火爐. One could then argue that without writing it with characters it just becomes meaningless sounds, which could have originated from any number of characters, if given no context. So therefore, your example doesn’t work so well either. I would argue that the loss of characters work for the Vietnamese because the intelligibility is “good enough”, in the same way that writing Vietnamese completely without diacritics for an English-language newspaper is also “good enough”.
- haskellshill 1y agoThat is nonsensical. You could make the same argument by taking any English word, tracing its origins to Greek or Latin, calling it a loan word, and therefore arguing that it doesn't matter if you spell it correctly or not. Clearly misspelled words are "good enough" to be understood, but wouldn't you be disappointed if a newspaper contained a bunch of misspellings?
- munificent 1y ago> First, it's not a transliteration, it's their native alphabet. Then what the New York Times is doing is correct. If they write "Hanoi" instead of "Hà Nội", they are not writing "Hanoi" using the Vietnamese alphabet incorrectly. They are writing "Hanoi" using the English alphabet correctly and idiomatically. The fact that those two alphabets happen to share some glyphs is coincidental. One can write "shchi" in English and all of those letterforms also happen to exist in Cyrillic. But that is not how a Russian would spell their word for cabbage soup. It's a coincidence that the letterforms exist in both alphabets. If your argument is that the New York Times should use the native alphabet for words related to that region, then it would be a fair criticism. But I don't think most English readers would expect an article about Moscow to say "Москва", or an article about Tokyo to say "東京" or even "Tōkyō". By that same logic, an article about Hanoi should say "Hanoi" not "Hà Nội".
- thanhhaimai 1y agoI wouldn't say the Vietnamese alphabet is "transliteration". Vietnamese is one of the most, if not the most tonal language in the world. The same word, speaking with different tones will convey different meanings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics) The modern Vietnamese alphabet was developed in 17th century (so it's not a transliteration) with tonal marks as a core feature. The writing language is very phonetic. Within a region with similar accent, if you hear a word, you can write it. And if you see a word, you can pronounce it. The tonal marks are very important to the language. It allows for rich poetic rules that makes Vietnamese poem fun and musical to read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%E1%BB%A5c_b%C3%A1t https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%E1%BB%A5c_b%C3%A1t
- tsimionescu 1y agoYes, I had never looked into this and had assumed Vietnamese uses a Chinese-inspired writing system natively, like other languages in the region. Knowing that this is the only writing system immediately made sense of why this is necessary.
- hashmush 1y agoEhm, like in Vietnam's neighbors Laos (ພາສາລາວ) and Cambodia (ខ្មែរ)? Sure Vietnamese used to (a long time ago) be written in its own version of the Chinese script, I'll give you that. But most languages in the region do not use a script derived from Chinese.
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- tasuki 1y ago> 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. Funny thing, this is exactly the reason I always include the diacritics!
- rawgabbit 1y agoYou can blame a Jesuit priest for the diacritics. He published a Vietnamese-Portugese-Latin dictionary in 1641 and invented the modern Vietnamese script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionarium_Annamiticum_Lusitanum_et_Latinum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionarium_Annamiticum_Lusit...
- nsonha 1y ago> To everyone else, such as the vast majority of the NYT's audience, they are purely a distraction in the same sense that any foreign word you can't pronounce is a distraction. I thought the point of reading is to learn new things? Words and pronounciation are unremarkable now?
- rodrigodlu 1y agoI think it's quite the opposite, diacritics teach me how to speak a language that I'm not native. Portuguese don't use as many as Romanian, but they are very useful. After all what's the difference between avó and avô and just avo? We don't use in very informal settings, like Whatsapp chat, because a native reader can infer from the context. And that's how English without them works, right? Actually I wanted the English language to have some, so the tiny differences in certain constructions would be more obvious.
- simiones 1y agoYes, diacritics are very helpful if you want to understand the language. But they aren't any help if you're trying to read a travel journal about a place whose language you neither speak nor want to learn, which will be the case for the vast majority of the target audience for this article - spelling the names of places with or without diacritics will not improve the reader's pronunciation.
- bobbylarrybobby 1y agoThe latin alphabet was designed for atonal languages. When you need to also indicate tone, you've gotta put the marks somewhere. You could do a lot worse than diacritics whose shape roughly reflects a graph of pitch over time. (In Mandarin, pinyin uses diacritics that exactly graph pitch over time. Very helpful.)