Two reasons why there is no need to change the Vietnamese writing system

Vietnamese, like other languages, is arbitrary and conventional, learners can only accept it, not explain it.

I may not be familiar with the terms “phonology”, “vowels”, “consonants”… but I would like to discuss two important characteristics of language that linguists around the world have agreed on since very early on. They are arbitrary and conventional.

Arbitrary language

Why do we write “the blanket”, “the python”, “the buffalo herder”…? The common but very correct answer that is often heard is “people say that, so just say it and write it”.

In any language, there are some things that can be explained, but many things that cannot. The question “why” cannot always be answered because language is arbitrary.

Except for words that are etymologically derived from cultural dictionaries, borrowed, derived from other languages, or from human activities, the universe, etc., most of the rest are arbitrary and automatically assigned to users. All members of a linguistic community must use the same set of “codes” in order to communicate with each other.

So there is no such thing as “why is the word buffalo written as buffalo?”. Anyone who learns to speak and write Vietnamese must know what animal “buffalo” refers to.

Conventional language

Any language in the world follows this rule. Learning a new language is like a child learning their mother tongue, or learning a foreign language is learning to accept what the community of that language has agreed upon. It defies any irrationality.

The Vietnamese-speaking community, through the process of using their mother tongue, has a convention of writing “neighbors” instead of “neighbors” to refer to people living near their house. The British write “scarborough”, which is very “extra” but sounds different. However, the Vietnamese and the British have accepted this convention as a common “code” and no one questions it. Anyone who wants to learn it as a foreign language just has to “comply with it”.

Don't forget that the Chinese once tried to improve by replacing their ideographic hieroglyphs with Latin, but couldn't for many reasons, one of which was that it was too conventional.

New alphabet proposed by Associate Professor Bui Hien.

Is Vietnamese a tonal or onomatopoeic language?

Associate Professor, Dr. Bui Hien - author of research on improving Vietnamese script.

Vietnamese is classified by world linguists as a tonal language, distinguishing it from an intranational language. Tonal languages ​​use different tones (Vietnamese has six tones) to distinguish meanings: Ma (ghost) - Ma (the ma) - Ma (father and mother) - Ma (beautiful face) - Ma (ancestral grave) - Ma (rice seedlings).

Comments like Dr. Bui Hien's that Vietnamese is an "onomatopoeic" language are not appropriate.

The term “onomatopoeia” is often used to refer to a smaller unit, which is a phenomenon that occurs in many different languages. For example, the following italicized words are onomatopoeia, that is, they imitate certain sounds: “The rain fell pattering on the porch”, “He gave the boy a quick kiss on the cheek”, “He slurped up the whole bowl of porridge”… “The vehicle skidded to a halt”, “The car splashed by”…

Languages ​​are always moving, adjusting and perfecting during use. Up to now, Vietnamese has been perfected in the view that it is a conventional product accepted and used by the Vietnamese community, expressing all old or new thoughts and concepts... of the Vietnamese people.

Perhaps in the future, when a group of Vietnamese people follow a spaceship to settle on a new planet, such as Mars, these people can improve the Vietnamese language. Similar to the English of the United Kingdom when they immigrated to North America, there were also improvements in writing to make it simpler, for example, neighbour became neighbor, theatre became theater, or even through became thru in informal transactions...

According to VNE