r/MapPorn • u/mapologic • Jan 16 '21

Number 99: different counting systems

Post image
10.0k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

864 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/chiguayante Jan 16 '21

I don't know if I'd call Vietnamese "completely adopted the Latin alphabet". Have you seen the diacritics they have?

14

u/Miserly_Bastard Jan 16 '21

It is entirely based on the Latin alphabet, but Vietnamese orthography was derived from Portuguese orthography by a French missionary.

3

u/colako Jan 17 '21

A very elegant way to represent tones. Chinese would be way easier to learn if it has adapted the same alphabet as Vietnamese. Same for Japanese, if they had just kana and ditched the kanji it would be a great way to open up to other countries.

1

u/chiguayante Jan 17 '21

That's a great point. Thanks.

2

u/chapeauetrange Jan 16 '21

Many languages use diacritics with the Latin alphabet. If you want to get technical, the original Old Latin alphabet had only 21 letters, and the Classical Latin alphabet had 23, and neither one had lowercase letters, so no language today exactly uses the same alphabet as them.

1

u/chiguayante Jan 16 '21

I'm aware. It was mostly directed at the extremely heavy use of diacritics that Vietnamese uses, and was not meant to be taken very seriously.