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> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Ch
by realusername 11mo ago
> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?
Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo agoThere are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.
- realusername 11mo agoThat was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that. The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
- seanmcdirmid 11mo agoChinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).