[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).