History of Vietnamese Typography
vietnamesetypography.com
vietnamesetypography.com
That said, they probably also had the easiest time abandoning them because there was never any real formalisation of how to write Vietnamese, as opposed to Literary Chinese, whereas in both Korea and Japan, people were writing their vernacular language in Chinese characters, or derived scripts, for centuries. Vietnam of course having chu Nom and other systems of writing vernacular, but not to the same degree as Korea or Japan did.
It out-competed chữ Nôm because it was easier to learn. No need for nefarious master plans.
Have you seen how annoying it is to type pictographic characters on a computer? Try doing so on a typical typewriter, or using an old style printing press.
Whether right or wrong, it was seen as beneficial.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board#:~....
Another one I spotted today was “barbecue sauce” => “sos barbeku”
I definitely read your comment with the accent on 'Malay accent', missing the whole part was in quotes. I just had enough experience to know it not limited to Malaysia or Asia.
进士/举人/客栈，such words are only used in period drama now in China, not as everyday vocabulary.
As implied in a sibling comment by karmasimida, we CJK speakers have a bit of mutual text-only intelligibility across CJK - speeches are all steelpans unless you have few years of training + auditory cortex power cycling, just writing - and that completely breaks apart in Vietnamese, in the way very reminiscent of looking at Cyrillic script.
No thanks. Most historical texts have been transliterated into modern chữ quốc ngữ without much compromise in meaning and literary eloquence. The writing facilitates learning Latin languages so much, and most importantly it has perfect phonemic orthography: there exists a bijection between well-formed words and speech, i.e., spelling bee is not a thing in Vietnamese.
It is complex and difficult to use/write, abolishing it really didn't take too much effort, as most of the population is illiterate at the time.
However, this is very different from CJK countries, where the Chinese characters are mostly kept consistent. Cho nom on the other hand, renders almost completely unreadable to me.
At best they are inspired by Chinese characters. No one in China or Japan will classify kanas as Japanese made Chinese characters, which by itself, meant something different entirely, like 畑/辻/雫
Wantonly altering character shapes to make them easier to write quickly may not be a blessed way to create new characters, but it has tradition. It's not like the Oracle Bone Script was passed unchanged from generation to generation and only the moderns dared lay hand to it. Lazy scribes have existed for as long as there have been scribes.
That hiragana and katakana are now treated as a completely separate category is more down to them being used very differently than how they were derived.
Though for foreign people it will be a challenge.
Hard disagree, from a Japanese speaker standpoint. I suspect it's almost deliberate that any mixtures of Chu Nom and Chinese can be handled natively to Vietnamese speakers, and nobody else. Nothing in it makes sense to me, far less than Chinese text do.
Understandable, because it was based on how it sounded, not based on the meaning of the compound characters. So it only makes sense for Vietnamese people.
For example, from this wikipedia image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_vocabulary#/me...
The first word "núi" (mountain) is made up of 山 and 內, 山 is the meaning of the word, and 內 is how it (mostly) sounds. Without knowing Vietnamese it is impossible to guess the meaning.
There is a huge loss of information when writing in pinyin (Latin characters) vs. ideograms.
It might be the same in Vietnamese.
I suspect a lot of the shift away from sinograms in Vietnam was due to nationalism, which is also partly why China is so attached to them.
It's not, there's only 4 tones in Chinese but 6 + 2 what I'd call special syllables in Vietnamese (not sure what's the official term for that)
So homophones are pretty rare. There's never any ambiguity with the Latin script.
The point of my comment remains for Chinese, then.
I have around a B1 level now so I'm not nearly good enough to build such complex puns though.
I guess that explains a lot of the appeal of Latin characters, then.
Vietnamese is a language with an highly complex pronunciation so some kind of writing which maps as close to possible to this complex pronunciation fits better.
Pronuncing and recognizing the pronounciation properly is the hardest task in Vietnamese and you really want the writing to help you with that.
And since more complex words are usually 2 syllable components of simpler ones, the Latin script actually helps you to guess the meaning of the new word as well, similarly as a Chinese character I guess.
Dunno what numbers are like in those other countries but I imagine literacy rates were slightly higher.
> Chữ Nho is still used today in calligraphic banners for traditional occasions such as festivals, funerals, Lunar New Year (Tết), and weddings.
Unless I'm mistaken the role of Chinese characters in Korea and that which it has in Vietnam as claimed in the article seems similar to me.
If China itself were colonised by Western powers towards the end of the Qing dynasty or after, the fate of Chinese characters in China could have become quite different, although it is a matter of speculation, of course.
2) If that were a problem oral Japanese would be unintelligible. It is not. Most homonyms can be resolved.
Furthermore, they could adopt a Korean system, where everyone uses a non-Kanji system, but the Kanji are still taught in high school as a type of “Latin”/“Greek” where they draw literally 55% of their vocabulary from.
In fact if you search a Japanese dictionary in hiragana with a combination of two reasonably common kanji readings (say かん+ちょう), you'll often get a double digit number of results (12 in jmdict in this example).
Most of these are uncommon words unlikely to be used in the spoken language, but could occur in writing.
It could probably still work more or less by relying on context, but it's more of an issue than you make it sound.
Another point is that writing in hiragana with spaces would disconnect the language from its roots. The Kanji used add a layer of meaning to the language that isn't there in languages with phonetic alphabets, and help guessing at the meanings of unknown words.
You could probably argue that making it easier to learn to read and write would outweigh the loss of those benefits, but I'm not so sure. Japan has a high literacy rate, so it does seem to work alright.
Assuming that homophones are simply going to exist in the languages, there's probably other alternatives. For example, in the case of modern Korean readers, the Hanja can supposedly used to help clarify the meaning of a homophone where context doesn't provide clarity. But in practice, most Korean readers don't use Hanja enough to remember more than a small percentage of what they learn in school, so they work in effect as an index into a lookup table, where they look the Hanja up in a dictionary, find the definition written in Hangul, and use that to determine the meaning.
Support Japanese was reformed to entirely use one or both Kana in the way that modern Koreans use mostly Hangul. Then Kanji would be used to help determine meaning in the same way. As most people wouldn't encounter Kanji with enough frequency and distribution to remember the bulk of them, only the most common would be remembered. These are unlikely to be the difficult to discern homophones as contextual clues would clarify. So the Kanji would again also end up as indexes for looking up standardized definitions. In modern Japanese, this doesn't happen because Kanji is still used with enough frequency and variety that most people sustain some level of memory about the system. The question is how well do they remember it? [1][2][3][4][5]
1 - https://youtu.be/sJNxPRBvRQg 2 - https://youtu.be/IARguDQIGVs 3 - https://youtu.be/cpAnrVYMJho 4 - https://youtu.be/PhtOewdIxII 5 - https://youtu.be/-E6vHCT0wpw
So for non-Sino CJK languages, instead of spending so much time in education learning what amounts to a very complex lookup table indexing scheme, why not just standardize the definitions and use the numbers of the definitions as post-fixes to ambiguous homophones with Chinese origins?
And I think your lookup table thinking is halfway there to a deep understanding of the matter, it does work like a forward lookup from ideograms to meanings and pronunciation cues. sure you can sub:4 idea:5 wit:1 phne:2 Alph, and homo:7 dis:32 with num:2 idx for std:6 def:3, but I wonder if us humans are really good with that data model.
Spacing is hardly standardized in languages using Latin script; French typography, especially in older books is notably different from English or German, with spacing between sentences or certain punctuation being different. Then again phrases or terms which in English or French would be multiple words are written as single “words” in German („Straßenkehrgerät“ == “Street Sweeper”). And I find Russian spacing rules disturbing.
And look at Arabic which does have spacing but in calligraphy can grossly violate the bounds of what you might consider “running text” coming from a European background.
I feel it's a missed opportunity. Vietnamese writing could have been a lot cooler. The ideal would have been a specially crafted writing system designed for the language, much like Hangeul is tailor-made for Korean; but even if adopting Latin letters were somehow a requirement, it could have been more thought-out than the French-imposed hodgepodge that we got.
How so? There are some phonetic systems for Mandarin that adjust spelling to indicate tones, and IMO they’re terrible. Fortunately they’re also obsolete. I don’t know much about Vietnamese, but it seems to use 5 diacritics for tones, which seems just fine.
The real issue seems to be that Vietnamese has too many vowels for the Latin alphabet, and that was also’solved with diacritics, so there are tone diacritics and vowel diacritics.
English also has too many vowel sounds, and it’s, ahem, solved by being ambiguous. Mandarin has too many vowels and Pinyin uses (somewhat ill-conceived IMO) pairs of vowels. But that means that all the diacritics [0] are tones, which is nice.
[0] As a sort of exception, Pinyin occasionally needs an apostrophe as a word/syllable break, which is a side effect of the aforementioned vowel pair issue and the fact that Mandarin doesn’t actually need spaces to be readable, so spaces are kind of optional except when they aren’t.