7 ms·

I 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

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I 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 ago
    I'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 ago
  As 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 ago
    It'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 ago
      I 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 ago
        Handwriting 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.
- realusername 1y ago
  So first, almost all words in vietnamese are only differentiated by diacritics, it's just not a case of one word here and there, removing them makes vietnamese text mostly unreadable. So they are necessary even if you don't know the language, just to translate it, even with a computer. And then no, diacritics are also relevant outside of Vietnam, Vietnam isn't the only tonal language in the world, some other nearby countries like China or Thailand might get a better (but imperfect of course) idea on how to pronounce these words.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Diacritics are not just tone markers, and half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers, so I doubt Chinese language speakers would get much from seeing these diacritics either. The Thai script tone markers are even more distinct, and it seems that the Latin transcription of Thai script used in Thailand tends to not include any tone markers at all - so again, I doubt that Thai speakers would recognize the Vietnamese diacritics and be better able to distinguish Hỏa Lò from Hòa Lỏ.
    - realusername 1y ago
      > Diacritics are not just tone markers, and half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers I'm not 100% fluent but I don't know a single word which isn't pronounced like it's phonetic writing. If these words do exist, they must be very rare. > I doubt that Thai speakers would recognize the Vietnamese diacritics and be better able to distinguish Hỏa Lò from Hòa Lỏ. At a first glance probably not but it should be very easy to teach them that.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        > I'm not 100% fluent but I don't know a single word which isn't pronounced like it's phonetic writing. If these words do exist, they must be very rare. I'm saying that even if people familiar with pinyin recognized the (very approximate) correspondnce between Vietnamese tone markers and pinyin tone markers, they would still not understand all of the other diacritics that do other phonetic things that have no correspondent in pinyin. > At a first glance probably not but it should be very easy to teach them that. The same argument applies to anything that is teachable. The NYT could start throwing in a few Chinese characters in every article, to get people more familiar with Chinese writing. Would that be nice? Sure. Does it make any sense to wonder why they don't do it? I don't think so.
- numpad0 1y ago
  I think the argument here is that Vietnamese script is so extremely reliant on diacritics that it cannot possibly make sense without them, despite looking legible to non-speakers. Similar argument could be made about Chinese or Japanese, but phonetic transcripts of those languages are actual gibberish to everybody that nobody cares. Vietnamese is on a such marginal point that frustrations can be expressed.
  - tsimionescu 1y ago
    Even if this is true, it is irrelevant. The reality is that the vast majority of the NYT's audience will not get any extra information from including those diacritics than excluding them. If the article is not intelligible without diacritics, then it won't be intelligible with diacritics either, because people who don't know the language, nor any similar language, can't see a difference between Hoa Lo and Hỏa Lò and Hòa Lỏ.
    - unkeen 1y ago
      You will die on that hill, won't you.
      - tsimionescu 1y ago
        I dislike this general trend of rejecting the need for adaptation/transliteration and pretending that it's a moral failing or a rejection of diversity. Like people who insist it's a good idea for a European website of a European business to accept any Unicode input for names, as if an employee who speaks Italian and English could be expected to know how to process a request for a customer named 田中 who claims their correspondence was mistakenly sent to 東京 instead of 京都. There is generally too much linguistic diversity in the world to be able to expect people to know even the most basic facts about some other culture's language. There's nothing wrong with adapting your message to your audience, even if it loses a lot of nuance that they could theoretically get if they spent just a little bit of time on studying, say, Vietnamese writing. And I want to emphasize that I'm saying this who is neither American nor English, and who is personally fascinated by language, and who has taken the time to study a little bit about quite a few languages. But I'm also someone who has understood that you can't expect people to be able to, say, pronounce your name correctly, or spell it correctly, and that there's nothing offensive about that.
walthamstow 1y ago
Perhaps 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 ago
  Close, it was actually portuguese missionaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
  - walthamstow 1y ago
    Right, 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.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
    - decimalenough 1y ago
      Almost 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.
      - deleted 1y ago
        [deleted]
refactor_master 1y ago
The 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 ago
  That 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".

tsimionescu 1y ago

I 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 ago
I 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 ago
  I'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 ago
As 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 ago
  It'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 ago
    I 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 ago
      Handwriting 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.
realusername 1y ago
So first, almost all words in vietnamese are only differentiated by diacritics, it's just not a case of one word here and there, removing them makes vietnamese text mostly unreadable. So they are necessary even if you don't know the language, just to translate it, even with a computer. And then no, diacritics are also relevant outside of Vietnam, Vietnam isn't the only tonal language in the world, some other nearby countries like China or Thailand might get a better (but imperfect of course) idea on how to pronounce these words.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Diacritics are not just tone markers, and half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers, so I doubt Chinese language speakers would get much from seeing these diacritics either. The Thai script tone markers are even more distinct, and it seems that the Latin transcription of Thai script used in Thailand tends to not include any tone markers at all - so again, I doubt that Thai speakers would recognize the Vietnamese diacritics and be better able to distinguish Hỏa Lò from Hòa Lỏ.
  - realusername 1y ago
    > Diacritics are not just tone markers, and half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers I'm not 100% fluent but I don't know a single word which isn't pronounced like it's phonetic writing. If these words do exist, they must be very rare. > I doubt that Thai speakers would recognize the Vietnamese diacritics and be better able to distinguish Hỏa Lò from Hòa Lỏ. At a first glance probably not but it should be very easy to teach them that.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      > I'm not 100% fluent but I don't know a single word which isn't pronounced like it's phonetic writing. If these words do exist, they must be very rare. I'm saying that even if people familiar with pinyin recognized the (very approximate) correspondnce between Vietnamese tone markers and pinyin tone markers, they would still not understand all of the other diacritics that do other phonetic things that have no correspondent in pinyin. > At a first glance probably not but it should be very easy to teach them that. The same argument applies to anything that is teachable. The NYT could start throwing in a few Chinese characters in every article, to get people more familiar with Chinese writing. Would that be nice? Sure. Does it make any sense to wonder why they don't do it? I don't think so.
numpad0 1y ago
I think the argument here is that Vietnamese script is so extremely reliant on diacritics that it cannot possibly make sense without them, despite looking legible to non-speakers. Similar argument could be made about Chinese or Japanese, but phonetic transcripts of those languages are actual gibberish to everybody that nobody cares. Vietnamese is on a such marginal point that frustrations can be expressed.
- tsimionescu 1y ago
  Even if this is true, it is irrelevant. The reality is that the vast majority of the NYT's audience will not get any extra information from including those diacritics than excluding them. If the article is not intelligible without diacritics, then it won't be intelligible with diacritics either, because people who don't know the language, nor any similar language, can't see a difference between Hoa Lo and Hỏa Lò and Hòa Lỏ.
  - unkeen 1y ago
    You will die on that hill, won't you.
    - tsimionescu 1y ago
      I dislike this general trend of rejecting the need for adaptation/transliteration and pretending that it's a moral failing or a rejection of diversity. Like people who insist it's a good idea for a European website of a European business to accept any Unicode input for names, as if an employee who speaks Italian and English could be expected to know how to process a request for a customer named 田中 who claims their correspondence was mistakenly sent to 東京 instead of 京都. There is generally too much linguistic diversity in the world to be able to expect people to know even the most basic facts about some other culture's language. There's nothing wrong with adapting your message to your audience, even if it loses a lot of nuance that they could theoretically get if they spent just a little bit of time on studying, say, Vietnamese writing. And I want to emphasize that I'm saying this who is neither American nor English, and who is personally fascinated by language, and who has taken the time to study a little bit about quite a few languages. But I'm also someone who has understood that you can't expect people to be able to, say, pronounce your name correctly, or spell it correctly, and that there's nothing offensive about that.

walthamstow 1y ago

Perhaps 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 ago
Close, it was actually portuguese missionaries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
- walthamstow 1y ago
  Right, 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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - decimalenough 1y ago
    Almost 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.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]

refactor_master 1y ago

The 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 ago
That 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".