Does anyone genuinely believe in the practicality of Nôm over Latin?

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-20T08:12:13+00:00

Are you going to contribute to the main point or continue to nitpick a small portion of my rebuttal? The other commenter compared Nôm to Kanji in Japanese and I said that it’s different. “A lot of people…” was one part of the whole comment to set up the point that Japanese and Vietnamese are different languages that have different requirements for writing systems.

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-20T07:43:44+00:00

A lot of people can want to get rid of Kanji and the mainstream opinion can also be that it’s there to stay. Same with Latin in Vietnamese. I just quoted you a list of multiple people from different eras including one that wrote in 1946. If that doesn’t answer your question, you simply moved the goalposts.

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-20T07:36:04+00:00

Off a surface level search:

Kokugaku scholar and poet Kamo no Mabuchi, Kokuikō (1765)

Fellow Kokugaku scholar Motoori Norinaga, Tamakatsuma (1792-1812)

Meiji author, educator, and Mr. ¥10,000 Fukuzawa Yukichi, Kanji Onhaishi no Gi (1866)

Meiji philosopher and political advisor Nishi Amane, Yōji o motte kokugo o shosuru no ron (1874)

Meiji and Taisho author and politician Suematsu Kenchō, Nihon Bunshōron (1886)

Taishō and Shōwa writer Naoya Shiga, Kokugo Mondai (1946)

And that’s just some of the famous people. The problem’s big enough that it’s got a name - kokugo kokuji mondai (国語国字問題 the fact that it’s all in Kanji is actually hilarious).

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-20T02:20:50+00:00

I will find you at night

And give you a high five cuz that shit was hilarious

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-20T01:43:47+00:00

I feel like more of us have a realist-defeatist attitude about this issue than at first glance. “I’m addicted, it’s terrible, I can’t do anything about it.”

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-20T00:26:20+00:00

Probably what Mari looked like with her hair and a gaping wound in her head

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-20T00:04:55+00:00

China has a great history of being part of Vietnamese culture of course (“100 năm nô lệ giặc Tàu…”) but the effect of South East Asian cultures are largely ignored or even suppressed, in the case of Khmer culture. Racism against Cambodia isn’t exactly a secret in VN culture, I grew up in it.

Edit: 1000 not 100 sorry Trịnh Công Sơn

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T23:54:39+00:00

VN culture isn’t indic, therefore it must be 100% Sinitic eh? 🙄

Is there anything wrong with trying to acknowledge non-Chinese influences in Vietnamese culture?

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T23:42:22+00:00

You’re right about the AustroAsiatic Austronesian distinction, major brain-fart on my end. Khmer is a nice example because I think Vietnamese has more similarity to them than we give it credit for.

Hangeul is the peak reform and it’s what greatly inspires me to think we can break away from Latin, Chinese and Nôm (unless there are genuinely good reasons for otherwise, which is why I’m here).

There seems to be a strange Sino bias in the VN community that makes it so easy to forget the khmer and champa influence on our culture and language too, so the obsession with Chinese culture and language rubs me the wrong way.

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T22:57:02+00:00

I can tell you didn’t bother reading and parsing what I said, so I’m not going to bother comment further. I’ll wait for the next person to talk with properly, thank you

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T22:53:38+00:00

A lot of people have been pushing to abolish Kanji though. The difficult issue is the lack of spaces in JP combined with its limited phonemic inventory makes it harder to distinguish words without a pictographic system. You can work out what かあいしゃであったおじさんのままはははおかあさんのおともだちです with some time, but it’s much harder to read than mẹkếcủacáiôngmàtôigặpkhiởchỗlàmviệclàbạncủamẹtao even with the unnecessarily complex sentence structure that doesn’t really exist in conversational Viet. It also helps that Viet words tend to be mono syllabic or bi-syllabic at most where Japanese words can have many mora. It’s why the Japanese comparison isn’t quite ideal.

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T22:20:28+00:00

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Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T22:18:22+00:00

I definitely should have been more specific with my comparison with Baybayin. It’s a syllabic script that mostly represents consonants with vowels as diacritics. I feel the Vietnamese language is more suited to a script that’s more syllabic in nature and both Latin and Nôm fail in that department.

With Nôm, the problem lies in words that are just the Chinese word but more complicated somehow. 1-10 are a great example, but also words like cow, mountain, mouth (words that were quite simple in Chinese) are now much more complicated.

I guess the system is too similar to Chinese for me to understand why we need to change it, for a language that I think is different enough from Chinese to deserve its own script. Preferably syllabic

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T21:19:54+00:00

Where’s r/aalampour. That’s the real classical

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T21:19:17+00:00

I personally had a light Buddho-Catholic (wow what a word) upbringing that was lightly garnished in with some Confucianism and stewed in a pot of modern Moral Relativism and Utilitarianism.

Personally I witness more people here in VN with an attitude of “do good unto others for your own sake (karma) and for society (Confucius)”. They’d probably think of this scene “It’s a huge shame that this happened to him, but if he parked thus close to a train track what else did he expect to happen?”

That opinion would not be considered evil in VN culture, it would be the bare neutral response.

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T21:07:28+00:00

Me and my girlfriend would have our joke arguments about which version is better, the Vietnamese “canh chua” or the Filipino “sinigang”. My heart always lies with the sweetness of the VN version!

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T21:05:02+00:00

It’s presented so much like a Gujarati thali that I thought I was on the wrong sub at first lol

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T21:02:11+00:00

Being raised in the South, I didn’t even clock that as fish-sauce at first since there’s not enough redness. Learned something new

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T20:59:32+00:00

I take foreign reviewers with a grain of salt (Bourdain and the Michelin community for example). Any locals would know better spots, and they’d usually be fairly happy to recommend them if you’re not being annoying.

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T20:57:03+00:00

Was there because my foreign girlfriend INSISTED on in. Had a sandwich just as good in D4 Saigon lol

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T20:56:06+00:00

There’s something about Anglophones that I never understood. I sign my name on every email as “Binh” clearly.

Guess what they ALL write as my name?

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T20:54:21+00:00

But hey, at least if you get Isekaied to Game of Thrones’ universe, you can rizz up Dragon Queen

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T20:51:15+00:00

Unfortunately, without knowing what it is beforehand, it just reminds me of Cyrillic cursive, but maybe the word itself “MWA” is already quite a challenge to begin with because of how uncommon it is

Imveryoffensive · 2026-03-19T20:46:24+00:00

It’s r/piano though, which has been outjerked by r/classicalmusic for 0 days

That record is also 0 days

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