Hacker News Reader

Comment by freddie_mercury | Hacker News Reader

> The additional information contained in the diacritics is essentially useless to English speakers

This is a plausible sounding line of thought but English-language sources are rarely consistent about it. In particular, Western European languages, especially French, often get to keep their accents even though they are meaningless to English speakers.

Compare, for instance, how many places will write "Côte de bœuf" but "nuoc mam". German, Spanish, Portugese, and Swedish are other languages where I often see "weird letters" and diacritics left in, even in English-language publications that don't do the same favors for other languages.

That said, it is possible that SCMP is consistent about this so I don't want to call them out as hypocritical without checking.

View on HN

I guess I’ll be calling it the Uait Aus in Uoscinton because in my language “sh” is unreadable and contains no extra information.

Some words have been imported and adapted into English in the past, but I doubt that nước mắm is one of them.

I‘d also say that news outlets should be held to a higher standard than “conversational language.”

I mean, that's normal. "Germany" isn't what the so-called "Germans" call their country. And if we're being pedantic, referring to the country as "Vietnam" is absolutely wrong. It's "Việt Nam".

But of course, this is all BS. Languages constantly borrow new words. 20 years ago, nobody knew what "pho" or "banh mi" were, but now we all do. We know what it means so much that we leave off the diacritics entirely and nobody is confused. Those diacritics cannot be represented within the framework of English. They're components of a completely different language.

Is it unreasonable that English speakers today will borrow the word "nuoc mam" and use it in normal English conversation? I've already been seeing it on recipe sites for a couple years now. It's about as English as kimchi and ramen. Nobody ever has or ever will look up the hangul or katakana to write about those in an English article, despite them being easy to remember. "nước mắm" is a foreign word written in its language. "Nuoc mam" is the thoroughly transliterated, romanized equivalent. This phenomenon exists in every language on earth that has ever come in contact with another culture. There isn't a higher standard to hold the author to--they're writing how humans do.

I think it's a bit disingenuous to compare the Hangul of kimchi to the writing of nước mắm when Vietnamese is already in latin script. Of course the diacritics aren't going to convey much knowledge to non-speakers besides "this is not pronounced how you're probably going to think it's pronounced" but in a world of Unicode it doesn't seem like it requires much extra effort. Maybe I can relate because everytime I look at my ID, I don't see my name, just a bastardization of it.

It should also be noted that most Vietnamese people don't really care about texting without diacritics. Most text messages are written without diacritics in order to minimize the payload size. It's just about perception when you see foreign western dishes with their diacritics like crème brûlée but see foreign eastern dishes without theirs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com