# What happened to the Vietnamese written language? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 5, 2015, 5:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682 "2015-11-05T05:44:10Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mangosteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Mangosteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangosteen)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 5:44am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/1 "2015-11-05T05:44:10Z")
Vietnam’s neighbors: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma all continue to use their native script. Vietnam uses “English” letters. Vietnam must have had their own writing system at some point. Why and when did they change? ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/2 "2015-11-05T05:49:39Z")
Before it used the Latin alphabet, Vietnamese was written with Chinese characters (just as Korean used to be and Japanese still is). ---
**Author:** ![Mangosteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Mangosteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangosteen)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 6:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/3 "2015-11-05T06:23:54Z")
Do you happen to know when the change over from Chinese charactors to English letters happened? ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 6:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/4 "2015-11-05T06:33:15Z")
Chữ Quốc ngữ, the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet, was introduced in 1651 by French priest Alexandre de Rhodes, but it didn’t fully replace chữ nôm (the Chinese character-based script) until the 1920s. In 1918 the Emperor of Vietnam Khải Định declared the chữ nôm to be abolished, and by 1930 the new writing system was dominant. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 7:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/5 "2015-11-05T07:00:33Z")
Chinese is something like Latin, and government and scholarly writings in Vietnam were more often written in the Chinese language with Chinese Characters, while Vietnamese was more of a spoken language during what we would think of as Medieval or Renaissance times. Having said that, keep in mind that Chinese characters are such that different languages can be written using the same character even if the word is pronounced differently. It’s never quite that perfect in practice, since languages have different grammatical structures and Chinese grammar might not quit fit other languages. You could write _woman_, in English, or _mujer_, in Spanish using the same Chinese Character without knowing how the word is pronounced in Chinese, English or Spanish. But if you want to string together English or Spanish sentences, you’re going to have to make some modifications to the way those sentences would be written in Chinese since the grammar isn’t completely compatible. ---
**Author:** ![Donnerwetter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b2d939/32.png) [@Donnerwetter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Donnerwetter)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/6 "2015-11-05T07:16:21Z")
> [@Mangosteen](#): > > […] > Vietnam uses “English” letters. > > Vietnam must have had their own writing system at some point. Why and when did they change? Which leads me to the (completely unrelated) question: Why did the Anglo-Saxons abandon their own script and switch to Latin? 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Itself](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/d07c76/32.png) [@Itself](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Itself)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 9:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/7 "2015-11-05T09:47:32Z")
> [@Donnerwetter](#): > > Which leads me to the (completely unrelated) question: Why did the Anglo-Saxons abandon their own script and switch to Latin? 😉 The influx of missionaries starting from the 7th century or so. It was already almost obsolete by the 9th century, and the Norman conquest was the final nail in the coffin. > [@John\_Mace](#): > > Chinese is something like Latin, and government and scholarly writings in Vietnam were more often written in the Chinese language with Chinese Characters, while Vietnamese was more of a spoken language during what we would think of as Medieval or Renaissance times. That’s not an insurmountable problem. Even though the Chinese languages are extremely analytic, Japanese uses Chinese characters (kanji) along with phonetic characters (hiragana) for inflections, particles, and other grammatical bits. For example, 死: ‘shi(n)’ _die_ becomes 死ぬ ‘shinu’ (plain non-past), 死ね ‘shine’ (imperative), 死にましょう ‘shinimashou’ (polite volitional), 死んで います ‘shinde imasu’ (polite progressive), 死んで ‘shinde’ (it’s complicated), etc. Like Chinese, Japanese also has particles, but they’re invariably written in hiragana: は ‘wa’ (topic marker), の (genitive marker), も (also), etc. Japanese writing is weird, historically. The language is about as different from Mandarin as you can get, and shoehorning a writing system designed for an analytic language with a very large phonemic inventory and tones into service doesn’t work very well. So, if there is an existing phonemic writing system that covers everything, why not use that exclusively? I’ve never really gotten a straight answer to that; the closest I’ve heard is the kanji disambiguate the many hononyms in Japanese (since a lot of the vocabulary comes from the Chinese languages, where the tones and different phonemes that don’t exist in Japanese were neutralized). Yet the Japanese manage to hold conversations without any problems, so that can’t be an insurmountable problem. I guess it’s some combination of ‘kanji look nifty’ and ‘we’ve always done it that way’. ---
**Author:** ![bordelond](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bordelond/32/150_2.png) [@bordelond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bordelond)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/8 "2015-11-05T15:02:54Z")
> [@Mangosteen](#): > > Vietnam’s neighbors: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma all continue to use their native script. Vietnam uses “English” letters. Of note is that Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma also borrowed their “native” scripts. They are based on the scripts used to write [the Pali language of India](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pali), in which the earliest texts of Buddhism are written. > [@](#): > > Pali died out as a literary language in mainland India in the fourteenth century but survived elsewhere until the eighteenth. Today Pāli is studied mainly to gain access to Buddhist scriptures, and is frequently chanted in a ritual context. The secular literature of Pāli historical chronicles, medical texts, and inscriptions is also of great historical importance. The great centers of Pāli learning remain in the Theravada nations of Southeast Asia: Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia. While Vietnam was adjacent to Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia, it laid within China’s sphere of cultural influence. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/9 "2015-11-05T15:10:56Z")
Ironically, China itself (main land China) has changed their own characters (starting in the 50s or 60s, IIRC)…not to Latin though, but to I think a simplified character system. I think Taiwan still uses the old characters though, which is also kind of ironic. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 3:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/10 "2015-11-05T15:52:10Z")
> [@Itself](#): > > That’s not an insurmountable problem. Even though the Chinese languages are extremely analytic, Japanese uses Chinese characters (kanji) along with phonetic characters (hiragana) for inflections, particles, and other grammatical bits. For example, 死: ‘shi(n)’ _die_ becomes 死ぬ ‘shinu’ (plain non-past), 死ね ‘shine’ (imperative), 死にましょう ‘shinimashou’ (polite volitional), 死んで います ‘shinde imasu’ (polite progressive), 死んで ‘shinde’ (it’s complicated), etc. Like Chinese, Japanese also has particles, but they’re invariably written in hiragana: は ‘wa’ (topic marker), の (genitive marker), も (also), etc. > > Japanese writing is weird, historically. The language is about as different from Mandarin as you can get, and shoehorning a writing system designed for an analytic language with a very large phonemic inventory and tones into service doesn’t work very well. So, if there is an existing phonemic writing system that covers everything, why not use that exclusively? I’ve never really gotten a straight answer to that; the closest I’ve heard is the kanji disambiguate the many hononyms in Japanese (since a lot of the vocabulary comes from the Chinese languages, where the tones and different phonemes that don’t exist in Japanese were neutralized). Yet the Japanese manage to hold conversations without any problems, so that can’t be an insurmountable problem. I guess it’s some combination of ‘kanji look nifty’ and ‘we’ve always done it that way’. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in both China and Japan, so I’m familiar with that peculiarity. But keep in mind that the kana were derived from kanji, so there wasn’t an existing syllabary. Korea, OTOH, did switch from Chinese Characters to a syllabary and has, arguably, the most logical writing system in the world. It was probably a lot easier to switch a few hundred years ago before everyone was literate, and I suspect it will be harder the longer any country continues to use Chinese Characters. Unless there is a technological solution at some point… ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 9:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/11 "2015-11-05T21:07:58Z")
> [@Itself](#): > > The influx of missionaries starting from the 7th century or so. It was already almost obsolete by the 9th century, and the Norman conquest was the final nail in the coffin. > > That’s not an insurmountable problem. Even though the Chinese languages are extremely analytic, Japanese uses Chinese characters (kanji) along with phonetic characters (hiragana) for inflections, particles, and other grammatical bits. For example, 死: ‘shi(n)’ _die_ becomes 死ぬ ‘shinu’ (plain non-past), 死ね ‘shine’ (imperative), 死にましょう ‘shinimashou’ (polite volitional), 死んで います ‘shinde imasu’ (polite progressive), 死んで ‘shinde’ (it’s complicated), etc. Like Chinese, Japanese also has particles, but they’re invariably written in hiragana: は ‘wa’ (topic marker), の (genitive marker), も (also), etc. > > Japanese writing is weird, historically. The language is about as different from Mandarin as you can get, and shoehorning a writing system designed for an analytic language with a very large phonemic inventory and tones into service doesn’t work very well. So, if there is an existing phonemic writing system that covers everything, why not use that exclusively? I’ve never really gotten a straight answer to that; the closest I’ve heard is the kanji disambiguate the many hononyms in Japanese (since a lot of the vocabulary comes from the Chinese languages, where the tones and different phonemes that don’t exist in Japanese were neutralized). Yet the Japanese manage to hold conversations without any problems, so that can’t be an insurmountable problem. I guess it’s some combination of ‘kanji look nifty’ and ‘we’ve always done it that way’. My host when I visited Japan told me that while Kana could be used exclusively, it is considered “childish”. I think he said it is used to start children reading and that explains it. He also told me that his daughter’s name is written in Kana and that is her official name. The reason he gave for that was that it was an uncommon name and, while there is a Kanji for it, most people wouldn’t know it offhand. Her name he wrote in Roman as Idumi, although he pronounced it Idzumi. He could never give me a satisfactory explanation for why he didn’t write it the way it sounded. ---
**Author:** ![Giles](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/giles/32/60_2.png) [@Giles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Giles)\ **Post date:** [November 5, 2015, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/12 "2015-11-05T22:41:07Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > … Her name he wrote in Roman as Idumi, although he pronounced it Idzumi. He could never give me a satisfactory explanation for why he didn’t write it the way it sounded. The name is usually written in English as [Izumi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izumi) – it’s not uncommon, and means spring (i.e., a source of water, and not the season). He wrote “zu” as “du” because Japanese syllables are in groups of five, with the same initial consonant. The first is a, i, u, e and o; the second is ka, ki, ku, ke and ko; and so on. However, with some consonants the sound varies according to the following vowel, so the d group is da, ji, zu, de and do. One system of romanisation (the most common) writes the syllables the way they are spoken, but another keeps the consonant the same (da, di, du, de and do) – but that di is pronounced ji [d͡ʑi in the IPA] and the du as zu. ---
**Author:** ![Pleonast](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pleonast/32/1183_2.png) [@Pleonast](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pleonast)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2015, 2:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/13 "2015-11-06T02:01:08Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Ironically, China itself (main land China) has changed their own characters (starting in the 50s or 60s, IIRC)…not to Latin though, but to I think a simplified character system. I think Taiwan still uses the old characters though, which is also kind of ironic. Speaking of ironic, North Korea stopped using all Chinese characters and switched to entirely to the native alphabet. While South Korea uses a mix of Korean and Chinese. > [@John\_Mace](#): > > Korea, OTOH, did switch from Chinese Characters to a syllabary and has, arguably, the most logical writing system in the world. It was probably a lot easier to switch a few hundred years ago before everyone was literate, and I suspect it will be harder the longer any country continues to use Chinese Characters. Unless there is a technological solution at some point… The Korean system is an alphabet. That is, each symbol represents a single sound. It’s slightly confusing because letters are written in syllabic blocks. But that simply means the writing is not linear like Western alphabets. Also, it’s really only since the liberation from Japan that Koreans have commonly used their alphabet. During the occupation, it became a symbol of Korean identity, in opposition to the assimilation attempts of the Japanese. It makes reading old documents and monuments difficult, since most everything from before the annexation is solely in Chinese characters. ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2015, 7:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/14 "2015-11-06T07:01:00Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > He could never give me a satisfactory explanation for why he didn’t write it the way it sounded. Because [kunreishiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunrei-shiki_romanization)/[nihonshiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihon-shiki_romanization)is confusing (well x-siki in those systems). The “d” part preserves the orthographic history (ず and づ (hiragana) or ズ and ヅ (katakana) are all pronounced “zu,” with the latter two in each script rarer) but has no relation to the pronunciation. When teaching English speakers, we normally use [Hepburn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hepburn_romanization) (or its slight variations) which sacrifices uniformity for phonological correspondence. And Hepburn makes more sense IMHO outside of English translation, as otherwise ツ and トゥ are both romanized as “tu.” ---
**Author:** ![Tom\_Tildrum](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e95f7d/32.png) [@Tom\_Tildrum](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tom_Tildrum)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2015, 3:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/15 "2015-11-06T15:23:53Z")
> [@Mangosteen](#): > > Vietnam uses “English” letters. English? Wouldn’t it make more sense in context to say that people in Vietnam use French letters? ---
**Author:** ![bordelond](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bordelond/32/150_2.png) [@bordelond](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bordelond)\ **Post date:** [November 6, 2015, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/16 "2015-11-06T16:00:26Z")
> [@Tom\_Tildrum](#): > > English? Wouldn’t it make more sense in context to say that people in Vietnam use French letters? English, French, and Vietnamese use Roman letters 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Siam\_Sam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/d78d45/32.png) [@Siam\_Sam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Siam_Sam)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2015, 1:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/17 "2015-11-07T01:03:23Z")
> [@Tom\_Tildrum](#): > > English? Wouldn’t it make more sense in context to say that people in Vietnam use French letters? Are those anything like French postcards? ---
**Author:** ![thelurkinghorror](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/7c8e57/32.png) [@thelurkinghorror](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thelurkinghorror)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2015, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/18 "2015-11-07T01:26:13Z")
> [@Siam\_Sam](#): > > Are those anything like French postcards? More like [Trojan envelopes](http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=french+letter). ---
**Author:** ![Greg\_Charles](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/839c29/32.png) [@Greg\_Charles](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Greg_Charles)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2015, 2:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/19 "2015-11-07T02:09:21Z")
> [@Mangosteen](#): > > Vietnam’s neighbors: Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Burma all continue to use their native script. Vietnam uses “English” letters. > > Vietnam must have had their own writing system at some point. Why and when did they change? Laos, Thailand, and Cambodia all have alphabets derived from Khmer. The Cham people in South Viet Nam also used a Khmer-derived alphabet, but they were conquered by the Viet people from the north. > [@Johanna](#): > > Chữ Quốc ngữ, the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet, was introduced in 1651 by French priest Alexandre de Rhodes, but it didn’t fully replace chữ nôm (the Chinese character-based script) until the 1920s. In 1918 the Emperor of Vietnam Khải Định declared the chữ nôm to be abolished, and by 1930 the new writing system was dominant. Wow, that’s impressive Johanna! How do you know so much about Vietnamese? It’s true that chữ nôm was based on Chinese characters, but apparently also included a pronunciation component. True Chinese characters were used in Vietnam for formal writing, and chữ nôm was used for popular writing, like poems and novels. Alexander de Rhodes is the father of quốc ngữ, but what he actually did in 1651 was write the first Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary, which could be why quốc ngữ is based on Portuguese. It’s not exactly clear to me why a Frenchman wrote a Portuguese dictionary, or if de Rhodes created the system, or if it was created by actual Portuguese missionaries before him. I do know I’m grateful, since it meant I didn’t have to learn all those f&\*%ing characters. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2015, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682/20 "2015-11-07T03:11:53Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Ironically, China itself (main land China) has changed their own characters (starting in the 50s or 60s, IIRC)…not to Latin though, but to I think a simplified character system. Not really. The simplified Mandarin script is pretty close to the one they’ve been using since the 6th century (which is pretty impressive, considering how e.g. English spelling & grammar has changed since then) although there was indeed a simplification reform in the 60s that modified some of the more pain-in-the-ass characters (i.e. those that had entirely too many brush strokes to write quickly despite being really common) and eliminated a number of characters that encoded different meanings of the same sound/word as an other. In total only some ~400 individual characters were affected, but as those characters are also part of other characters\* the “real” list of affected characters is some 1,800 long. For reference, 4 or 5,000 characters is enough to muddle through 90% of everyday Mandarin. But it’s really more akin to a spelling reform than creating a new, separate character set that works differently (as hiragana is to kanji for example). Then you’ve got the utter \*bastards \*who write in [grass script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursive_script_%28East_Asia%29#/media/File:Cur_eg.svg), which I’m still not 100% convinced isn’t a century-old prank calligraphists have kept going with a straight face all this time… but that’s another story. - (many Chinese characters are really a number of simpler characters packed together. It’s simpler than it sounds :o) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-happened-to-the-vietnamese-written-language/736682.md?page=2)