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Comment by tsimionescu | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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).

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