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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.
by 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 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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- mFixman 1y agoThe Latin alphabet is not native to English, and it's a much worse fit for that language that it is for Vietnamese.
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- rdlw 1y agoIt's not a transliteration. What supposed writing system are Vietnamese originally writing in, before they transfer it to Latin script?
- walthamstow 1y agoChinese-like characters, which were transliterated by Europeans into Latin. This system was made official by the French rulers of Vietnam.
- haskellshill 1y agoSo you're saying that because the country was once colonized, their writing system is not "real" enough for you, and you only consider it a transliteration? That seems extremely disrespectful.
- walthamstow 1y agoNope, I didn't say any of that.
- nsonha 1y agoit's the only official writing system that we have. The non latin scripts have practically disappeared from modern life. We had centuries of Chinese scripts, which is definitely not native, then a short lived Chinese-like writing system that is the closest thing to "native", (it's not, see "Chinese-like"). Even that was not used as official system for as long as the current latin alphabet.
- haskellshill 1y agoThat is a really dumb point. Then Finnish has no writing system either, because it was created by a swede in the 16th century. Strange how there exist languages without writing systems, yet people write them?
- nsonha 1y agoAs a Viet, I am just speechless to you, someone brought up the topic of respecting the language as it's used today, and you wanna dilute the conversation by arguing what is native and what is not?
- walthamstow 1y agoSorry, I mean no disrespect. For my own language, Latin isn't native to English and English isn't native to Britain. These facts are nothing to get upset about.
- haskellshill 1y agoRidiculous opinion. If no country in the world has either a native alphabet nor a native language, then what is the point of the word "native"?
- walthamstow 1y ago> If no country in the world has either a native alphabet nor a native language Who said that? I certainly didn't. It's not very nice to go around calling people ignorant, ridiculous and dumb. You should stop doing that.
- nsonha 1y agoit's annoying because it's irrelevant to the topic at hand