[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"