UniLang

Talib wrote:Come now, that's just gratuitous.

I know, but I couldn't remember the Vietnamese word.

linguoboy wrote:Check in with them in a couple of generations and see if there are any systematic differences between them and the speakers of Lasalimu or Kumbewaha.

They're obviously doomed and will all be eating kimchi 50 years from now.

Or maybe not, since the whole shebang is not going well anyway.

linguoboy wrote:I know, but I couldn't remember the Vietnamese word.

Don't bother, Vietnamese has yet to have a translation for Gedankenexperiment, only experiement.

Which of these 2 scripts do you like in terms of efficiency?

English: A pig's snout
Quốc Ngữ: Lỗ mũi con heo
Chữ Nôm:

Now how about in terms of aesthetics?

English: To trade a thousand autumns for one's mother's smile
Quốc Ngữ: Đổi cả thiên thu tiếng mẹ cười
Chữ Nôm:

Imbecilica wrote:Which of these 2 scripts do you like in terms of efficiency?

English: A pig's snout
Quốc Ngữ: Lỗ mũi con heo
Chữ Nôm:

Now how about in terms of aesthetics?

English: To trade a thousand autumns for one's mother's smile
Quốc Ngữ: Đổi cả thiên thu tiếng mẹ cười
Chữ Nôm:

I'll take option number 3: simpflied Chu Nom

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr I was hoping for something more original. just taking a small pause looking around. more like hopping that someone made a syllabary for this language or something like that.

I was surprised to find that AFAIK Vietnamese had never been written in a Khmer derived script. If it could be done for Lao and Thai then tone marking is doable in such a script.

That said, Quoc Ngu is doing fine in terms of what a script is supposed to do: Allow as many native speakers of the language as possible to write what they want to.

There's no indication that chu nom ever fulfilled that basic criteria (since literacy when it was used was the prerogative of a chosen few) and simplifying it won't helpt it do that.

Why would Vietnamese speakers want to learn thousands of characters or learn some outsiders' idea of a more nationalistic script?

mafke wrote:Why would Vietnamese speakers want to learn thousands of characters or learn some outsiders' idea of a more nationalistic script?

+1

Plus the aesthetic argument is a very weak one. Most English speakers who dismiss the Vietnamese alphabet do so because they're not not used to seeing a language written with so many diacritics, as opposed to English, which practically has none. What would that say about them? Aesthetic xenophobes? Seems like the case to me. It wouldn't look any uglier than a plain Roman alphabet to you if you grow up in Vietnam.

In real life diacritics are never meant to be as big as letters, so forget this "eye-sore" criticism already. Not to mention they allow additional creativity in decorating and designing, and it doesn't matter if they're made hard to be seen. Fun fact: a native speaker can read through diacritic-free texts without any major problem.

I'm pretty proud, I'm beginning to get to the point where I can read Facebook posts by Vietnamese friends totally without diacritics and mostly understand. So yay!

But anyway, I think Quoc Ngu is just such an incredibly effective system. It's definitely an acquired taste (the only thing I don't like about it still is that all the syllables are separated, but I'll get over it). I've recently become quite fond of it, particularly after experiencing the cluster-fuck that is hanzi and kanji. Vietnamese is so much easier, and that's nice

I've received emails in diacritic free quoc ngu that I could read. But being able to do so depends on must usage being with the diacritics (the same is true of Polish). I think some of the diacritics could be eliminated with no loss (why write viết when the syllable viêt isn't used?) but that isn't my call.

The writing of each syllable separately is a major pain for all non-Viet readers. If there's a sentence with one syllable I don't know I have no idea how to look it up (and usually guess wrong). But that's going to be just as big a problem in any script for Vietnamese.

But I understand why native speakers write that way. As far as I can tell the whole idea of 'word' is not really developed in the Vietnamese tradition (just like a number of other Asian languages). Even vietnamese linguists I've asked are often helpless when it comes to parsing setences whose meaning is completely transparent....

Rumpetroll wrote:It's the same bloody language, it doesn't matter what script you use nor does it matter who invented that script.

The script does affect the culture over time. The Chinese, for example, are very inventive with words simply because they have a hell of a difficult time borrowing sounds directly from other languages. The Vietnamese, however, opted to take advantage of the fact that they were writing with Roman letters anyway and imported words nearly unmolested (like vi-de-o).

Cen-Sin wrote:like vi-de-o.

That's not how it's written.

Draven wrote:

Cen-Sin wrote:like vi-de-o.

That's not how it's written.

My apologies—I was unable to copy and paste, but look at the bottom of the page:
http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writviet.html

Cen-Sin wrote:My apologies—I was unable to copy and paste, but look at the bottom of the page:
http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writviet.html

To say the truth, that site is a bit misinforming, on Vietnamese at least. In Saigon where I live, no signage actually reads "vi-de-o" anymore, just "video" (no diacritic) or occasionally "vidéo", if they want to French things up a bit.

Hmm, "video", would the Saigonese say it with a general Southern [j] instead of original French/English [v]?

JackFrost wrote:Hmm, "video", would the Saigonese say it with a general Southern [j] instead of original French/English [v]?

That depends on the speaker and situation. /v/ sounds classy but pretentious.

http://www.skyknowledge.com/gr-annam.htm

Actually why not Greek? Something more aesthetically pleasing? Hey Alexander certainly would've wanted to get this far into Asia ;P

This got a little away from discussion of alternate scripts for Vietnamese, a similar discussion is taking place in Hungary. They also use the roman alphabet but they have their own indigenous script that some are starting to use again. Again it's not a question of practicality since both are equally good at their job but a matter of culture I suppose.

I think Vietnamese Roman script works, yes, but could be better.
It has too many diacritics. For me, it's difficult to remember the correct diacritics (especially when double), I usually only remember the letters without the diacritics, and hope the Vietnamese people will understand.
For me, a near-sighted, it's a pain to distinguish diacritics when looking at far signs. If I knew Vietnamese, I would probably deduct the meaning from the context, instead of trying to see the diacritics.
There could be a system to group together words and compounds, since this is already done for foreign (non-Chinese) loanwords. This could make spellcheckers possible, and possibly make typing faster.
Currently it's slow to type, especially on smartphones. I wish they developed smart IMEs that automatically detect the correct diacritics according to the context, similar to what IMEs for Chinese or Japanese do.
And moreover, different types of fonts.