Read your way through Hà Nội
86 comments
·October 11, 2025antonyh
jhbadger
How far do you want to take it? Should we write Chinese names in characters and Arabic names in their writing system? And of course, historically Vietnamese used Chinese characters -- the Romanized form was introduced under colonialism (although granted, there seems to be no desire to go back after independence)
bobbylarrybobby
Whereas rendering Chinese names with Chinese characters would make the names entirely unintelligible to an audience of English speakers, the nice thing about the diacritical marks in Vietnamese is that they can simply be ignored by those familiar with the Roman alphabet but not Vietnamese. I would similarly expect an article about Spain or Spaniards to include the accents and the ñ character and an article about France or the French to include accents and the ç. (I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to writing out Chinese names in Chinese, then putting the pinyin in a parenthetical, either. Obviously there would be no point to this with Vietnamese, Spanish, or French.)
keiferski
Here’s a related article about Vietnamese graphic design:
unkeen
> 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?
tsimionescu
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
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.
munificent
> 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".
refactor_master
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”.
walthamstow
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.
tsimionescu
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.
bobbylarrybobby
The latin alphabet was designed for atonal languages. When you need to also indicate tone, you've gotta put the marks somewhere. You could do a lot worse than diacritics whose shape roughly reflects a graph of pitch over time. (In Mandarin, pinyin uses diacritics that exactly graph pitch over time. Very helpful.)
thanhhaimai
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:
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tsimionescu
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.
rodrigodlu
I think it's quite the opposite, diacritics teach me how to speak a language that I'm not native.
Portuguese don't use as many as Romanian, but they are very useful. After all what's the difference between avó and avô and just avo?
We don't use in very informal settings, like Whatsapp chat, because a native reader can infer from the context. And that's how English without them works, right?
Actually I wanted the English language to have some, so the tiny differences in certain constructions would be more obvious.
rawgabbit
You can blame a Jesuit priest for the diacritics. He published a Vietnamese-Portugese-Latin dictionary in 1641 and invented the modern Vietnamese script.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionarium_Annamiticum_Lusit...
tasuki
> 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!
nsonha
> To everyone else, such as the vast majority of the NYT's audience, they are purely a distraction
in the same sense that any foreign word you can't pronounce is a distraction. I thought the point of reading is to learn new things? Words and pronounciation are unremarkable now?
keiferski
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.
decimalenough
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
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).
vjerancrnjak
I like how Serbian is completely fine with Njujork or Majkl Ðekson.
Phonemic orthography should win and destroy all spelling bees.
rkomorn
This seems homonymphobic.
Edit: homophonephobic, technically.
antonyh
They do this, only using the Latin alphabet for brand names etc. For example, pravda.ru spells Finland as Финляндия
(Edit: I misread your comment, fixed mine, I agree with you)
galaxy_gas
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
This really shouldn't be a problem for a newspaper with 2.5 billion USD revenue to figure out in 2025 though.
keane
https://rd.nytimes.com should be able to handle it
saoh
Read the text and judge for yourself how the diacritical marks affect readability.
haskellshill
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
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.
unkeen
Come on. I had no problems whatsoever.
ragazzina
Because the NYT readers value simplicity more than authenticity.
haskellshill
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?
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.