[tsimionescu]

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.

[dontlaugh]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

> 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]

> 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.

[realusername]

I still don't get your point, we use Chinese pinyin because they give a somewhat spoken version of words, vietnamese sentences without diacritics are 100% useless, they are useless to foreigners, useless to vietnamese people and even more importantly, useless even for machine translation and search. Who are they intended for, I've no idea.

The western equivalent maybe would be removing all the vowels of a sentence, yes you can do it but I'm not sure how it's useful in any way to any audience.

[tsimionescu]

I only talked about pinyin because Chinese familiarity with tones was brought up as a reason why some non-Vietnamese speakers might still recognize the diacritics and get some value from them.

But even beyond that, I highly doubt that the article is really ambiguous without diacritics. I somehow doubt that if the NYT talks about a Hoa Lo prison somewhere in Hanoi, there is any real ambiguity about the actual place they are talking about. Sure, the words in themselves are ambiguous, but the context makes them very clear. This is not about writing Vietnamese without diacritics, which I'm sure is extremely ambiguous. It's only about some place names with very clear context about where and what they are.

[haskellshill]

> half of the tone marker diacritics don't correspond to the Pinyin tone markers

Yeah, they are different languages. What'd you expect? First you didn't even know that the Vietnamese alphabet was their actual alphabet, and now you're criticizing it for not being similar enough to some other random alphabet. Whatever your point is, you're failing at making it terribly.

[tsimionescu]

The person I was responding to here claimed that the diacritics, even if they don't help people in the USA or Europe to get a better idea of the pronunciation, should help speakers of other tonal languages to do so.

So, I investigated what a Chinese speaker who is not familiar with Vietnamese writing might make of the diacrtics, specifically the tone markers since this is what I was replying about. Since the regular Chinese writing system doesn't include tone markers, I looked at Pinyin, which sometimes does. The conclusion was that no: even a Chinese speaker would not recognize the meaning of the Vietnamese diacritics, so even for them, it would not be useful.

This was just intended as a refutation of the previous poster's point, not anything broader.

Also, none of what I am saying is in any way a criticism of the Vietnamese writing system or language. The only thing I'm criticizing is the idea that it helps in any way for a non-Vietnamese audience to include language-specific diacrtics in a non-Vietnamese article (and I have the exact same opinion for my own language's diacritics, and for any other - Vietnamese just happens to be the topic here).

[haskellshill]

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]

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.

[numpad0]

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]

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.

[sosborn]

The reality is that the vast majority of the NYT's audience will not lose any information from including those diacritics, and some people will gain quite a bit.

[tsimionescu]

There's another angle here as well: I doubt NYT editors are familiar with Vietnamese spelling. If there are errors in the diacritics, they will not be able to spot them, and may end up with a text that appears more precise than it actually is. If they just remove all diacritics, no reader will be confused they avoid this potential for errors altogether.

[haskellshill]

"We need to remove information from the text because perhaps the author (who clearly speaks Vietnamese) may have made a mistake". Do you also think that we should remove all algebraic symbols from mathematics papers, because perhaps the author has made a mistake, and the audience may contain people that won't spot it?

[rdlw]

The vast majority of readers won't get any information from anything in the article. Why not pseudonymize everything and scramble the place names? I at least appreciate that in principle, I could research the people mentioned. Romanian happens to be intelligible with diacritics removed, but I bet you'd feel differently if you read an article about Mr Ccsrtr and Em Cnr.

[numpad0]

My point is that, I think, if you frame the diacritics-stripped Vietnamese as a language transcribed in a different script, than half measured attempt at representing Vietnamese script, it solves the question of whether it's useful as half measure Vietnamese.

"Huawei is written and read huawei in Chinese" is not so useful, and it's okay, because it's obvious. "Vietnam is actually written and pronounced Viet Nam" is less okay, because it's not as obvious.

And, I think, frankly, it's justifiable to consider Vietnamese script(both Chinese based and Latin based) as scripts of their own rather than derivatives of something else, as there never were meaningful synergies in pretending otherwise. Vietnamese appears to have been always phonetic and nothing made sense unless you were a speaker. That's quite unlike how everyone knows what entrepreneurship is regardless of languages in use or whether diacritical marks are supported.

[unkeen]

You will die on that hill, won't you.

[tsimionescu]

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.

[unkeen]

I've stopped saying “hi mom” to my mother when I visit her. After all, my mother /knows/ that I love her. Hence, it's just so much more practical not to greet her every time, no? Surely no one can dispute this incorruptible logic.

[haskellshill]

"I am so fascinated by language that I wish my newspapers would include less foreign languages"