> 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•10h ago
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•10h ago
Read the text and judge for yourself how the diacritical marks affect readability.
unkeen•10h ago
Come on. I had no problems whatsoever.
haskellshill•10h ago
Uh yeah they don't? Unless you also have problems with words such as über, façade, señor or crème brûlée.
Rather, the removal of them affects readability in a similar way to removing accents, punctuation or writing in all lowercase.
tsimionescu•9h ago
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•9h ago
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•9h ago
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•9h ago
Well, I disagree that simpler means better looking. It's akin to arguing that a commie block has better æsthetics than a gothic cathedral.
mavhc•7h ago
So expose the reader to them until they become familiar, problem solved
galaxy_gas•10h ago
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•8h ago
This really shouldn't be a problem for a newspaper with 2.5 billion USD revenue to figure out in 2025 though.
ragazzina•10h ago
Because the NYT readers value simplicity more than authenticity.
tsimionescu•10h ago
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 București, 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 "Đinh Lễ", 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•9h ago
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 Hỏa Lò Prison, for example, “hỏa” means “fire,” and “lò” 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 ș into s only alters the pronunciation, while the meaning is still intelligible.
tsimionescu•9h ago
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, "în" means in, inside, while "in" means linseed; "să" 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 Hỏa Lò Prison and a Hoa Lo Prison, non-Vietnamese speakers will have no idea which to go to. Even less so if they had a Hòa Lỏ Prison in addition to the others.
haskellshill•9h ago
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 你好 -> nǐ hǎo). Why are you so allergic to actually making use of that feature?
tsimionescu•7h ago
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•8h ago
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•7h ago
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 Transfăgărășan.
dontlaugh•5h ago
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•4h ago
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•6h ago
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•4h ago
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.
realusername•3h ago
> 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.
tsimionescu•1h ago
> 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•12m ago
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.
numpad0•4h ago
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•4h ago
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 Hỏa Lò and Hòa Lỏ.
unkeen•3h ago
You will die on that hill, won't you.
tsimionescu•47m ago
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 田中 who claims their correspondence was mistakenly sent to 東京 instead of 京都.
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.
sosborn•1h ago
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•1h ago
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•46m ago
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•8h ago
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.
Right, so then it is a transliteration and it is not native to Vietnamese, despite what GP says.
Loughla•6h ago
>early 17th century.
At what point does something become naturalized? This feels needlessly pedantic.
decimalenough•6h ago
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•5h ago
The Latin alphabet is not native to English, and it's a much worse fit for that language that it is for Vietnamese.
rdlw•55m ago
It's not a transliteration. What supposed writing system are Vietnamese originally writing in, before they transfer it to Latin script?
refactor_master•5h ago
The term is actually a Chinese loanword, 火爐. 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•40m ago
> 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 "Hà Nội", 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 "Москва", or an article about Tokyo to say "東京" or even "Tōkyō". By that same logic, an article about Hanoi should say "Hanoi" not "Hà Nội".
thanhhaimai•9h ago
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.
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:
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•6h ago
Ehm, like in Vietnam's neighbors Laos (ພາສາລາວ) and Cambodia (ខ្មែរ)? 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•8h ago
> For example, if I have to write my address on a paper form outside my country, I won't ever write București, 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•10h ago
I don’t really fault the NYT for writing Hanoi and Vietnam, not Hà Nội and Việt Nam. It’s a newspaper for English-speakers, at the end of the day. It calls Warszawa Warsaw, Praha Prague, Москва Moscow, and hundreds of other places by their English names.
I wouldn't expect Russian newspapers to write New York instead of Нью-Йорк, either.
vjerancrnjak•7h ago
I like how Serbian is completely fine with Njujork or Majkl Ðekson.
Phonemic orthography should win and destroy all spelling bees.
rkomorn•7h ago
This seems homonymphobic.
Edit: homophonephobic, technically.
decimalenough•6h ago
Hanoi and Vietnam are sufficiently well known to be anglicized. What's less excusable is stripping names like Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai of their diacritics.
electroly•3h ago
Nguyễn Phan Quế 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).
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.
unkeen•10h ago
Why, in the year 2025, does the NYT still deem this to be necessary?
haskellshill•10h ago
saoh•10h ago
unkeen•10h ago
haskellshill•10h ago
Rather, the removal of them affects readability in a similar way to removing accents, punctuation or writing in all lowercase.
tsimionescu•9h ago
haskellshill•9h ago
tsimionescu•9h ago
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•9h ago
mavhc•7h ago
galaxy_gas•10h ago
haskellshill•8h ago
ragazzina•10h ago
tsimionescu•10h ago
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 București, 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 "Đinh Lễ", 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•9h ago
> In the case of Hỏa Lò Prison, for example, “hỏa” means “fire,” and “lò” 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 ș into s only alters the pronunciation, while the meaning is still intelligible.
tsimionescu•9h ago
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, "în" means in, inside, while "in" means linseed; "să" 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 Hỏa Lò Prison and a Hoa Lo Prison, non-Vietnamese speakers will have no idea which to go to. Even less so if they had a Hòa Lỏ Prison in addition to the others.
haskellshill•9h ago
tsimionescu•7h ago
dontlaugh•8h ago
tsimionescu•7h ago
dontlaugh•5h ago
tsimionescu•4h ago
realusername•6h ago
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•4h ago
realusername•3h ago
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.
tsimionescu•1h ago
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•12m ago
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.
numpad0•4h ago
tsimionescu•4h ago
unkeen•3h ago
tsimionescu•47m ago
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 田中 who claims their correspondence was mistakenly sent to 東京 instead of 京都.
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.
sosborn•1h ago
tsimionescu•1h ago
rdlw•46m ago
walthamstow•8h ago
pcardoso•6h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet
walthamstow•6h ago
Loughla•6h ago
At what point does something become naturalized? This feels needlessly pedantic.
decimalenough•6h ago
What matters is that the Vietnamese use the script to write their own language, which is not the case for (say) romanized Chinese.
mFixman•5h ago
rdlw•55m ago
refactor_master•5h ago
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•40m ago
Then what the New York Times is doing is correct. If they write "Hanoi" instead of "Hà Nội", 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 "Москва", or an article about Tokyo to say "東京" or even "Tōkyō". By that same logic, an article about Hanoi should say "Hanoi" not "Hà Nội".
thanhhaimai•9h ago
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•9h ago
hashmush•6h ago
tasuki•8h ago
Funny thing, this is exactly the reason I always include the diacritics!
keiferski•10h ago
I wouldn't expect Russian newspapers to write New York instead of Нью-Йорк, either.
vjerancrnjak•7h ago
Phonemic orthography should win and destroy all spelling bees.
rkomorn•7h ago
Edit: homophonephobic, technically.
decimalenough•6h ago
electroly•3h ago
https://archive.ph/Gi1HX
antonyh•1h ago
(Edit: I misread your comment, fixed mine, I agree with you)