[LAC-Tech]

How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese?

I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.

[realusername]

> 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]

There are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.

[realusername]

That 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]

Chinese 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).

[alephnerd]

Like this - https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m

[wisty]

Like Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.