[refactor_master]

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]

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?