Why, in the year 2025, does the NYT still deem this to be necessary?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dictionarium_Annamiticum_Lusit...
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?
> 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.
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".
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”.
What matters is that the Vietnamese use the script to write their own language, which is not the case for (say) romanized Chinese.
At what point does something become naturalized? This feels needlessly pedantic.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
Funny thing, this is exactly the reason I always include the diacritics!
I wouldn't expect Russian newspapers to write New York instead of Нью-Йорк, either.
(Edit: I misread your comment, fixed mine, I agree with you)
Phonemic orthography should win and destroy all spelling bees.
Rather, the removal of them affects readability in a similar way to removing accents, punctuation or writing in all lowercase.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43149266