The Irrationality of the Vietnamese Language and Suggestions for Improvement

Abstract

The Quoc-ngu characters known as the Vietnamese language or Vietnamese are written in Vietnamese, and the language built on the principle of recording in Latin language (Nguyen Thien Giap, 2016, Dictionary of Linguistics). The Vietnamese language is known as the language created by Western missionaries when they came to Vietnam for preaching the words from the seventeenth century. While they were preaching, they borrowed Latin letters to record names, religious names, people’s names, or words for communication for the purpose of preaching, translating, and printing religious texts. Initially, the recording of Vietnamese, in Latin alphabet, was not uniform because each cleric had their own way of writing in their own language. Later, during the first half of the seventeenth century, they built a more or less uniform writing style, and the Vietnamese language was born since then.