[HN Gopher] Read your way through Ha Noi
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Read your way through Ha Noi
Author : jxmorris12
Score : 79 points
Date : 2025-10-11 17:28 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (vietnamesetypography.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (vietnamesetypography.com)
| unkeen wrote:
| > Note: The Vietnamese words in the original version of this
| essay used diacritical marks. To comply with New York Times
| style, the marks were removed before publication.
|
| Why, in the year 2025, does the NYT still deem this to be
| necessary?
| haskellshill wrote:
| Yeah, very silly in an article specifically about language. But
| one may also ask, why do people still read NYT (and other
| newspapers) in 2025, given that they are just inferior versions
| of blogs, that you also have to pay for?
| saoh wrote:
| Read the text and judge for yourself how the diacritical marks
| affect readability.
| unkeen wrote:
| Come on. I had no problems whatsoever.
| haskellshill wrote:
| Uh yeah they don't? Unless you also have problems with words
| such as uber, facade, senor or creme brulee.
|
| Rather, the removal of them affects readability in a similar
| way to removing accents, punctuation or writing in all
| lowercase.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There are two types of diacritics, from the perspective of
| any reader: the ones they are familiar with and understand,
| and the ones that are visual noise. American and (West)
| European audiences are typically more or less familiar with
| the umlaut, accent, cedille and circumflex mark, and the
| tilde. Other diacritical marks typically fall in the second
| category for them, outside of use in their own language.
| haskellshill wrote:
| so just ignore the "visual noise" or "random scribbles"?
| i dont get why youd want to remove meaning from an
| article simply because you dont undestand it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| For the same reason you choose one font over another: the
| aesthetics of a text matter, especially to publishers.
|
| Now, I should add that for an article that is
| specifically about language, and even has some
| illustrations of the meaning of these diacritics, this is
| almost certainly a bad choice on the NYT's part. But as a
| general rule, I think it is defensible.
| haskellshill wrote:
| Well, I disagree that simpler means better looking. It's
| akin to arguing that a commie block has better aesthetics
| than a gothic cathedral.
| mavhc wrote:
| So expose the reader to them until they become familiar,
| problem solved
| galaxy_gas wrote:
| So many website that use custom font cannot render the
| diacritics. I hate to see the single letter font change
| constantly. Maybe this is related?
| haskellshill wrote:
| This really shouldn't be a problem for a newspaper with 2.5
| billion USD revenue to figure out in 2025 though.
| keane wrote:
| https://rd.nytimes.com should be able to handle it
| ragazzina wrote:
| Because the NYT readers value simplicity more than
| authenticity.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Not directly related, but to avoid another thread on
| diacritics: I wonder if any other language chose to use so many
| diacritics for its official transliteration to a Latin
| alphabet. As someone who doesn't read it, Vietnamese text often
| appears as if it's randomly scribbled over.
|
| On to your main topic: diacritics are only really useful for
| people who speak a language. To everyone else, such as the vast
| majority of the NYT's audience, they are purely a distraction.
| My own language uses some diacritics, and we basically never
| use them in international contexts. For example, if I have to
| write my address on a paper form outside my country, I won't
| ever write Bucuresti, I will write Bucuresti, because it makes
| no difference to the reader and it may even confuse them. For
| example, if someone wrote their address on paper as "Dinh Le",
| I wouldn't be surprised if it got copied over as "Inh Le"
| street, with the person doing the copying assuming that the
| striketrhough was a correction, not a diacrtic.
| haskellshill wrote:
| I disagree, but your opinion may come from your ignorance
| (sorry, lack of knowledge perhaps) of Vietnamese. First, it's
| not a transliteration, it's their native alphabet. And the
| diacritics mark tones, which is a very important part of the
| language. An example from the article itself:
|
| > In the case of Hoa Lo Prison, for example, "hoa" means
| "fire," and "lo" means "furnace": the Burning Furnace Prison.
| Without the marks, "hoa" means "flowers," and "lo" means
| "worry," rendering the term "Hoa Lo" meaningless.
|
| Your example doesn't work because (a) it's an address, not
| text meant for reading and (b) turning s into s only alters
| the pronunciation, while the meaning is still intelligible.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I didn't know this is the official writing system of
| Vietnam. This explains why they have so many diacritics
| then, if it's their only writing system.
|
| Even so, I don't think that changes my point. Sure,
| diacritics serve an important purpose in a language. Many
| words in Romanian are only differentiated in writing by
| diacritics (for example, "in" means in, inside, while "in"
| means linseed; "sa" means "to", while "sa" means his/her).
|
| However, this is only relevant for a Romanian audience: an
| international audience will not understand the words either
| way, and will usually not even be able to differentiate
| them from a list based on the presence or absence of the
| marks. If Hanoi had both a Hoa Lo Prison and a Hoa Lo
| Prison, non-Vietnamese speakers will have no idea which to
| go to. Even less so if they had a Hoa Lo Prison in addition
| to the others.
| haskellshill wrote:
| I still don't understand this attitude of "I can't be
| bothered to try to understand it so it's useless".
| Vietnamese is actually one of the more easy tonal
| languages for westerners to understand, given that the
| tone marks are literally pictograms of the pitch (and
| it's not a transliteration like Ni Hao -> ni hao). Why
| are you so allergic to actually making use of that
| feature?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I'm not saying its useless, not at all - not for people
| who speak Vietnamese. I'm saying it's not relevant for
| people who don't.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| As a fellow Romanian, I don't see how Vietnamese is that
| different from Romanian in its writing system. They both
| overlay information onto the Latin alphabet, Vietnamese
| merely does a lot more of it.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's not, that's my point. And yet, I don't often use
| Romanian diacrtics when writing English, and I certainly
| don't feel an international audience loses something if
| we talk about driving down the Transfagarasan instead of
| the Transfagarasan.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| I feel differently, I always write the diacritics. There
| are fewer ambiguities than in Vietnamese, but enough to
| matter. And everything has Unicode support now.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Handwriting definitely doesn't have Unicode support. And
| neither does people's reading. It may even be easier to
| guess what someone is mispronouncing if you see exactly
| what they read (i.e. the letters without diacritics) than
| if you see the diacritics and forget they mean nothing to
| the other person.
| realusername wrote:
| So first, almost all words in vietnamese are only
| differentiated by diacritics, it's just not a case of one
| word here and there, removing them makes vietnamese text
| mostly unreadable. So they are necessary even if you
| don't know the language, just to translate it, even with
| a computer.
|
| And then no, diacritics are also relevant outside of
| Vietnam, Vietnam isn't the only tonal language in the
| world, some other nearby countries like China or Thailand
| might get a better (but imperfect of course) idea on how
| to pronounce these words.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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
| Hoa Lo from Hoa Lo.
| realusername wrote:
| > 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
| Hoa Lo from Hoa Lo.
|
| At a first glance probably not but it should be very easy
| to teach them that.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| > 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.
| realusername wrote:
| 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.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| 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.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I think the argument here is that Vietnamese script is so
| extremely reliant on diacritics that it cannot possibly
| make sense without them, despite looking legible to non-
| speakers. Similar argument could be made about Chinese or
| Japanese, but phonetic transcripts of those languages are
| actual gibberish to everybody that nobody cares.
| Vietnamese is on a such marginal point that frustrations
| can be expressed.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Even if this is true, it is irrelevant. The reality is
| that the vast majority of the NYT's audience will not get
| any extra information from including those diacritics
| than excluding them. If the article is not intelligible
| without diacritics, then it won't be intelligible with
| diacritics either, because people who don't know the
| language, nor any similar language, can't see a
| difference between Hoa Lo and Hoa Lo and Hoa Lo.
| unkeen wrote:
| You will die on that hill, won't you.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| I dislike this general trend of rejecting the need for
| adaptation/transliteration and pretending that it's a
| moral failing or a rejection of diversity.
|
| Like people who insist it's a good idea for a European
| website of a European business to accept any Unicode
| input for names, as if an employee who speaks Italian and
| English could be expected to know how to process a
| request for a customer named Tian Zhong who claims their
| correspondence was mistakenly sent to Dong Jing instead
| of Jing Du .
|
| There is generally too much linguistic diversity in the
| world to be able to expect people to know even the most
| basic facts about some other culture's language. There's
| nothing wrong with adapting your message to your
| audience, even if it loses a lot of nuance that they
| could theoretically get if they spent just a little bit
| of time on studying, say, Vietnamese writing.
|
| And I want to emphasize that I'm saying this who is
| neither American nor English, and who is personally
| fascinated by language, and who has taken the time to
| study a little bit about quite a few languages. But I'm
| also someone who has understood that you can't expect
| people to be able to, say, pronounce your name correctly,
| or spell it correctly, and that there's nothing offensive
| about that.
| unkeen wrote:
| I've stopped saying "hi mom" to my mother when I visit
| her. After all, my mother /knows/ that I love her. Hence,
| it's just so much more practical not to greet her every
| time, no? Surely no one can dispute this incorruptible
| logic.
| sosborn wrote:
| The reality is that the vast majority of the NYT's
| audience will not lose any information from including
| those diacritics, and some people will gain quite a bit.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There's another angle here as well: I doubt NYT editors
| are familiar with Vietnamese spelling. If there are
| errors in the diacritics, they will not be able to spot
| them, and may end up with a text that appears more
| precise than it actually is. If they just remove all
| diacritics, no reader will be confused they avoid this
| potential for errors altogether.
| rdlw wrote:
| The vast majority of readers won't get any information
| from anything in the article. Why not pseudonymize
| everything and scramble the place names? I at least
| appreciate that in principle, I could research the people
| mentioned. Romanian happens to be intelligible with
| diacritics removed, but I bet you'd feel differently if
| you read an article about Mr Ccsrtr and Em Cnr.
| walthamstow wrote:
| Perhaps I am also ignorant, but I thought the
| Latin+diacritics system was invented by a Frenchman in
| modern times, rather than being native to Vietnam.
| pcardoso wrote:
| Close, it was actually portuguese missionaries.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
| walthamstow wrote:
| Right, so then it is a transliteration and it is not
| native to Vietnamese, despite what GP says.
| Loughla wrote:
| >early 17th century.
|
| At what point does something become naturalized? This
| feels needlessly pedantic.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Almost every writing system was imported from somewhere
| else, including something like half a dozen evolutions of
| the one we're using now (which was Latin, which was
| Greek, before that Phoenician, before that Egyptian).
|
| What matters is that the Vietnamese use the script to
| write their own language, which is not the case for (say)
| romanized Chinese.
| mFixman wrote:
| The Latin alphabet is not native to English, and it's a
| much worse fit for that language that it is for
| Vietnamese.
| rdlw wrote:
| It's not a transliteration. What supposed writing system
| are Vietnamese originally writing in, before they
| transfer it to Latin script?
| refactor_master wrote:
| The term is actually a Chinese loanword, Huo Lu . One could
| then argue that without writing it with characters it just
| becomes meaningless sounds, which could have originated
| from any number of characters, if given no context. So
| therefore, your example doesn't work so well either.
|
| I would argue that the loss of characters work for the
| Vietnamese because the intelligibility is "good enough", in
| the same way that writing Vietnamese completely without
| diacritics for an English-language newspaper is also "good
| enough".
| munificent wrote:
| _> First, it 's not a transliteration, it's their native
| alphabet._
|
| Then what the New York Times is doing is correct. If they
| write "Hanoi" instead of "Ha Noi", they are not writing
| "Hanoi" using the Vietnamese alphabet incorrectly. They are
| writing "Hanoi" using the English alphabet correctly and
| idiomatically. The fact that those two alphabets happen to
| share some glyphs is coincidental.
|
| One can write "shchi" in English and all of those
| letterforms also happen to exist in Cyrillic. But that is
| _not_ how a Russian would spell their word for cabbage
| soup. It 's a coincidence that the letterforms exist in
| both alphabets.
|
| If your argument is that the New York Times should use the
| native alphabet for words related to that region, then it
| would be a fair criticism. But I don't think most English
| readers would expect an article about Moscow to say
| "Moskva", or an article about Tokyo to say "Dong Jing " or
| even "Tokyo". By that same logic, an article about Hanoi
| should say "Hanoi" not "Ha Noi".
| thanhhaimai wrote:
| I wouldn't say the Vietnamese alphabet is "transliteration".
| Vietnamese is one of the most, if not the most tonal language
| in the world. The same word, speaking with different tones
| will convey different meanings.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)
|
| The modern Vietnamese alphabet was developed in 17th century
| (so it's not a transliteration) with tonal marks as a core
| feature. The writing language is very phonetic. Within a
| region with similar accent, if you hear a word, you can write
| it. And if you see a word, you can pronounce it.
|
| The tonal marks are very important to the language. It allows
| for rich poetic rules that makes Vietnamese poem fun and
| musical to read:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%E1%BB%A5c_b%C3%A1t
| tsimionescu wrote:
| Yes, I had never looked into this and had assumed
| Vietnamese uses a Chinese-inspired writing system natively,
| like other languages in the region. Knowing that this is
| the only writing system immediately made sense of why this
| is necessary.
| hashmush wrote:
| Ehm, like in Vietnam's neighbors Laos (phaasaalaaw) and
| Cambodia (khmaer)? Sure Vietnamese used to (a long time
| ago) be written in its own version of the Chinese script,
| I'll give you that. But most languages in the region do
| not use a script derived from Chinese.
| tasuki wrote:
| > For example, if I have to write my address on a paper form
| outside my country, I won't ever write Bucuresti, I will
| write Bucuresti, because it makes no difference to the reader
| and it may even confuse them.
|
| Funny thing, this is exactly the reason I _always_ include
| the diacritics!
| keiferski wrote:
| I don't really fault the NYT for writing Hanoi and Vietnam, not
| Ha Noi and Viet Nam. It's a newspaper for English-speakers, at
| the end of the day. It calls Warszawa _Warsaw,_ Praha _Prague,_
| Moskva _Moscow_ , and hundreds of other places by their English
| names.
|
| I wouldn't expect Russian newspapers to write _New York_
| instead of N'iu-Iork, either.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| I like how Serbian is completely fine with Njujork or Majkl
| Dekson.
|
| Phonemic orthography should win and destroy all spelling
| bees.
| rkomorn wrote:
| This seems homonymphobic.
|
| Edit: homophonephobic, technically.
| decimalenough wrote:
| Hanoi and Vietnam are sufficiently well known to be
| anglicized. What's less excusable is stripping names like
| Nguyen Phan Que Mai of their diacritics.
| electroly wrote:
| Nguyen Phan Que Mai is the one name that the NYT did not
| strip the diacritics from. Every other Vietnamese term and
| name has been stripped (including the names of the other
| authors in the reading list), but the article author's
| name, alone, retains its diacritics in the NYT article.
| They do seem to have gotten the diacritics subtly wrong in
| the article subtitle vs. the byline (which is correct and,
| I assume, generated automatically).
|
| https://archive.ph/Gi1HX
| antonyh wrote:
| They do this, only using the Latin alphabet for brand names
| etc. For example, pravda.ru spells Finland as Finliandiia
|
| (Edit: I misread your comment, fixed mine, I agree with you)
| keiferski wrote:
| Here's a related article about Vietnamese graphic design:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149266
| antonyh wrote:
| The irony that this is an article about reading and literature,
| and yet the NYT butchered it for stylistic purposes. Changing
| peoples names I find unforgivable.
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