Vietnamese2020 Writing Reform Proposal

Vietnamese2020 Writing Reform Proposal
By dchph

NOTE: Tàihènsứcmọn. Bạnnào tìmđược lỗi hay có đoạnvăn nào bạn nghĩ là bạn cóthể viết hayhơn, xin sửachữa giùm. Xin cảmơn trước. dchph

Table of Contents

A note on this English version
Abstract
Introduction

The present state of the Vietnamese writing system

Vietnamese and Chinese commonalities
A Sino-Tibetan connection: to be or not to be?
Vietnamese: an isolated language? Garbage!
The politics of polysyllabics
Why does the current system need reform?
The weakest links
The other pictures
Polysyllabics fosters an ability to think abstractly and collectively
Accuracy facilitates data processing
How to reform the current Vietnamese writing system?
Polysyllable correctness
Setting the mindset
No old-fashioned hyphenation -- get rid of this once and for all!
Spring into action
Conclusion
Appendices
x X x

A NOTE ON THIS ENGLISH VERSION:

This English version of "Sửađổi Cáchviết TiếngViệt" is to address the subject matter with a perspective for the Vietnamese readers. However, it is also intended for those English speakers who may be interested in Vietnamese language issues, not know much about the Vietnamese language, and unaware that the Vietnamese words cited in this writing are actually written in a proposed combining formation. After all, this is what it is all about.

This version is more descriptive than what is discussed in the Vietnamese propsal since certain facts may appear so obvious to the Vietnamese, but not to non-native speakers. In ad***ion, some viewpoints are intentionally left out in the Vietnamese version because, though they may appear to non-native readers by and large as supportive arguments, those matters can become emotionally offensive to Vietnamese readers. They, indeed, touch on some sensitive issues that make up a person's national pride in his or her own cultural heritage. Native readers may react unfavorably and not accept certain arguments regarding the genetic composition that has made up both the Vietnamese people and their language as we know today. Consequently, those very issues may have negative effects on other arguments which are good and worthwhile otherwise.

Therefore, the author of this writing is asking for the understanding that the main point raised in this propsal does count, that the current Vietnamese writing system is in an urgent need for a new polysyllabic system reform and that this is not an academic thesis or scientific research after all since some hypotheses need futher studies. In any cases, this is an elaborate analysis of the needs for reforming the current Vietnamese writing system and a serious proposal of how to make it better.

ABSTRACT

Why Vietnamese2020? Vietnamese2020 is a new Vietnamese writing system in the years to come and that should be the way Vietnamese will be written in the year 2020. This is a proposal and analysis of the needs to reform the current Vietnamese writing system, which will have a slightly different appearance from what it is known today.

This proposed writing reform, above all, ideally would expose monolingual native learners to symbolic patterns that would have positive effects on abstract and collective thinking by means of a polysyllabic way of writing, i.e., writing all syllables of a word in a combining formation. This cognitive process can be achieved via, one among other things, its pre-defined text strings of whole words appearing with peculiar shapes in their entirety, which would resemble much more of a graphical representation of concepts rather than syllabic spellings. In a polysyllabic word formation its meanings are tightly bound to its symbolistic shape of combined syllables, which is to achieve the same effects as those of ideographs. In English or German writing systems polysyllabic words show that type of symbolistic characteristic and, in a way, they are usually perceived abstractly through shapes of respective long text strings.

On the contrary, with the Vietnamese monosyllabic writing system, readers have to, mentally, go through the process of, firstly, recognizing each one of those separately written syllables, making sense out of it individually, and only then, lastly, being able to comprehend meanings of the final mentally assembled words. Polysyllabic scripts, in the meanwhile, enable readers' brain to absorb larger batches of continuous text strings, which will render a similar visual effect as those of ideograms. We will recognize the conceptions of words right away simply just by catching the sight of strings of polysyllabically combined words. Those who have already possessed advanced knowledge of a foreign language, especially German, might have already experienced such highly visual effects.

Being an inferior form, a monosyllabic writing system can only represent one syllable at a time as in the case of the present Vietnamese orthography. It is not hard to see that if all databases had been built the way as a monosyllabic "Vietnamese dictionary" is structured in a monolingual native Vietnamese speaker's brain then the world might have come to know different kinds of databases far less ideal than what the computing world has achieved to date!

As a matter of fact, Vietnamese is no longer a monosyllabic language, but, in writing, syllables which make up a polysyllabic word are still written separately, just like the way the Vietnamese had handled block-written Chinese characters before the end of 19th century. For example, in today's Vietnamese orthography words like "học bổng" (scholarship), ''bâng khuâng" (melancholy), "bâng quơ" (vague), "ma tuý" (narcotic), and thousands of others, obviously dissyllabic in nature, are still written in separate syllables as such. Writing that way is exactly the same as breaking those polysyllabic English words into separate syllables as "scho lar ship", "me lan cho ly", "va gue", or "nar co tic", etc.

It does not matter in what language, monosyllabic writing is illogical and unscienific. The cited dissyllabic Vietnamese words above should be accurately written in combining formation as "họcbổng", ''bângkhuâng", "bângquơ", "matuý", respectively. That polysyllabic way of writing will precisely representing the true dissyllabic characteristics of today's Vietnamese. Again, if English had been written the way Vietnamese is, it would have never become the technical language tool in the modern computing technology with such popularity worldwide as it is enjoying today.

A society progresses if its language progresses. Stagnance of Vietnamese monosyllabic way of writing, as a result, has hampered Vietnam's advancements in many ways including those of developments in computing fields. It is painful to reform, but we have to do it.

This new proposed writing system, ideally in a sense, will lay out a foundation for building blocks of polysyllabic principles. Its final results will lead to the development of new guidelines to build a standardized polysyllabic writing system. In the long run, this new Vietnamese polysyllabic orthorgraphy purposedly will foster children's ability to learn things abstractly and collectively. At the same time, this will also create a favorable con***ion for data processing fields to progress properly, which, in return, will stimulate economic development.

Please join us in this writing reform effort NOW by starting to write Vietnamese in the combining formation of syllables for each word-concept. For now emails and internet postings are a few good places to begin with. In practice, while awaiting official orthography guidelines, hopefully, from a governmental body such as a national language academy, the easiest way for those who already know a foreign language, when in doubt, is to think of an equivalent word in English or in another common foreign language since all of them is totally written in polysyllabic formation as having been known to the world as of the present day. For example, for "although" we have "mặcdù", for "blackboard" > "bảngđen", "faraway" > "xaxôi", and so on. With regard to building a successful polysyllabic writing system, the German writing system is highly recommended as a good model to serve as a referent framework or building blocks to devise a new Vietnamese script.

Let's be the first pioneers of a new Vietnamese language reform to set new polysyllabic standards in the years to come! Do not think that you are going to waste time on something unrealistic. It is a noble cause that will benefit our nation in terms of stimulating our children's abilities to think abstractly and collectively, which is the foremost reason behind this proposed Vietnamese writing reform. If we all go for it or simply just say "yes" to the peoposed reform, our voice will be heard and our dream will become a reality. All you need is to act, quickly.

INTRODUCTION
A striking characteristic of languages is their enduring existence over the time and they are the least likely succumbed *****dden changes. In its long history of progress a language must have undergone changes in certain ways, especially its writing system, at certain time. Writing reform has been in many a case a necessary phase in the course of societal development that many countries have gone through.
It is time for us all to come to terms that today's global internet does, in fact, require the current Vietnamese writing system be changed in order to not only become more precise in writing for effective communication, but also create a favorable con***ion to accommodate logical structural changes in Vietnamese data processing areas.
Today's Vietnamese writing system does not truely reflect dissyllabic characteristics of its spoken language. As a result, it is no longer adequately suitable for today's increasing demands in data processing. This is one of the imminent and main reasons behind this proposal. The other reason, equally important, is that a new polysyllabic Vietnamese writing system will facilitate and foster our children's ability to think abstractly and collectively.
In terms of Vietnamese data processing, this new proprosed writing system will put forward a foundation for a reform framework. Its new writing structure will help build more accurate data schemes for electronic representations and analytic contextual language databases. Translating algorithms will be simpler and more accurate. A translation machine, a much needed tool to translate English webpages for Vietnamese momolingual speakers, as a result, will be possible since codings will be structured and indexed around more logically built databases. That is how a polysyllabic reform will certainly bring about with its uniform and accurate semantic language codes. Consequently data sorting, spelling, lexicographical categorizing and indexing, header tagging for searching and many other computing aspects in Vietnamese will become easier.
All of these areas have been formidably difficult to implement given the current way of writing Vietnamese. In Vietnamese dissyllabic words constitute a majority in the Vietnamese lexicon. This new reformed Vietnamese writing system will be based on a dissyllabic principle, that is, all two-syllable words shall be written only in a combining formation to represent truely dissyllabic characteristics of the spoken language. This new polysyllabic way of writing will be able to address some problems in computing fields, such as those caused by the old monosyllabic way of writing , by reducing as few as possible the number of concepts or meanings associated with each dissyllabic word through the combination of two related syllables in writing within their word boundary as demonstrated by their vocal expressions.
On the other hand, writing reform is also much needed for another even more pressing reason, equally important and not the least, that is, to help monolingual Vietnamese speakers, starting with native-speaking youngsters, develop mental abilities to acquire academically cognitive intelligence. The new polysyllabic way of writing Vietnamese suggested in this proposal will foster children's collective and abstract thinking skills through a highly symbolistic writing system, namely multi-syllable words written in combining formation. Just imagine, with a quick glance at large batches of continuous text strings and by simply catching the mere overall sights of those symbolic shapes, we will immediately be able to absorb and process the concepts that those polysyllabic written words convey without intermittent delay as we do in our current way of monosyllabic writing system. This cognitive process of linguistic acquisition, undoubtedly, will help us read faster and think more abstractly.
Given those factors, writing reform is deemed as a necessary and urgent matter since it will ultimately benefit the country scientifically as well as economically in the long run. In the past, matters of writing reform have never been considered as a national issue partly because many obstacles in its implementation are seemingly overwhelming, especially when it comes to changing people's writing habit of the whole nation.
If a majority of us has recognized the shortcomings and weaknesses of the current writing system as to be pointed out later, we all should join in this reform initiative to build up momentum for a popular movement. Only then we can raise awareness and voice demands to prompt the Vietnam's government for actions such as putting that matter on a state's agenda, at least to initiate the first phase to establish a language academy reponsible for devising a reform master plan. Only then our goals in a writing language reform will be no longer a dream.
With these ideas in mind, the following sections are to examine the writing reform matter in a more detailed analysis covering some aspects of the present state of the Vietnamese writing system, why it needs reform, and how to reform it.
THE PRESENT STATE OF THE VIETNAMESE WRITING SYSTEM
In this section we will examine some of characteristics of Vietnamese and forms of its scripts that have been changed through the ages to help us understand better about shortcomings and weaknesses of the present Vietnamese writing system.
1) Vietnamese and Chinese commonalities
The section below depicts an overall picture of Chinese immigrants' full integration into Vietnamese society, which will help explain the reason why there exist so many Chinese words in the Vietnamese language, including those of basic lexicon. The main point is to establish a linguistic affinity or, at least, similarities between the two languages. The logic behind this argument is, in terms of historical evolution and linguistic characteristics, if Chinese has already been classified by the world's large universities' renown linguistic circles as a polysyllabic language, then Vietnamese should be considered as such, too.
The historical fact that Vietnam had gone though a millennium of Chinese domination, from 111 BC to 936 AD, is one among prominent factors which had played an active role in the integration of Chinese vocabularies into the Vietnamese language. In its evolution Vietnamese has absorbed thousands of words from ancient to contemporary and dialectal variations of the Chinese language (to be mentioned only as "Chinese" in general thereafter) throughout different ages by way of both borrowing and localizing a great number of Chinese vocabularies.

That linguistic influence was a direct result of waves after waves of Chinese migrating population from China. Their immigrating path is a southward movement that had continuously taken place in any given period over the past 2000 years of Vietnam's history. During the span of one thousand years of Chinese domination of Vietnam prior to her independence from China in 936 AD, those Chinese migrants, generally, had been of a mixture of poor peasants fleeing from ravaging wars and hunger back in their homeland, exhausted long-march soldiers on endlessly conquering missions, and a great number of disgraced political exiles along with their accompanied family purged and punished by temperamental dynasties that they had served. Many of them, probably mostly men, had chosen to settle or be married into Vietnamese families and they never returned to their homeland. Over the years and many generations later most of them had emerged as dominant ethnical groups and many of them had further totally assimilated into the distinct Vietnamese society and been identified as Vietnamese.
This assimilation process must have been occurring rather slowly and gradually. That is why today's Vietnamese could not be considered as a Chinese dialect like Cantonese or Fukienese since it shows a local grammatical order prominently and dominantly, i.e., adjectives being placed after nouns, while its vocabularies are mostly in par with those of Chinese. On becoming a majority, the new racially mixed population later called themselves "NgườiKinh" (literally meaning "the metropolitans"), whose dominant presence and establishments had further pushed and isolated displaced indegenous and aboriginal inhabitants farther into remote mountainous regions who later on became minorities in their own land. This rather controversial hypothesis of the Chinese racial integration on into the then Vietnamese, i.e. an ethnic branch of peoples being also called by today's terminology as BaiYue or BachViet people in ancient times, society helps explain why all contemporary Vietnamese carry Chinese surnames and have physical traits quite different from the indegenous people.
How do we build that hypothesis? In Vietnam's contemporary history, the fact that the colonization of the country by the French colonists from 1861 to 1954 had produced a nouveau class of intelligentsia and the Vietnam's last King, Bao Dai, who could only converse in French "seulement" would not be a surprise to anybody when it comes to with the same Chinese analogy. The problem here is that the historical records that we still have coming into existence only from the 10th century until now do not cover that and we are back to the square one where we have started with our biological traits and our language to fondle. That mutational reconstruction is highly plausible if we compare that hypothesis to the fact that in Vietnam's recent history from 1967 to 1975, the presence of Americans soldiers on the Vietnam's soil had produced nearly 50 thousand Amerasians mothered by Vietnamese women in such a short period of time. Elsewhere in the world, in modern time, we can still find the transformational similarity in the biological and linguistic compositions which make up the peoples currently living in all the South America's countries.
While most others have successfully blended themselves into the local general population, many of the more recent Chinese migrants from Canton, Fukien, and parts of other China's southern provinces who had migrated to Vietnam later in the past five hundred years since the fall of the Chinese Ming Dynasty might have still remained distinctively Chinese and have been identified as of several different Chinese ethnic groups, namely the "Minhhương" (descendants of the Ming's subjects), Cantonese, Hakka, Tcheochow, Hainanese, and Fukienese.
Ad***ionally, the linguistic penetration of vast Chinese lexicons into Vietnamese vocabulary stock is also the results of forceful imposition of the use of the Chinese language on the local people by Chinese invading authorities during their one thousand years of occupation of the then Vietnam. That Chinese influence had gradually found its way into all layers of the Vietnamese language permanently, from an upper scholarly vocabulary stock down to a basic linguistic stratum, which have been used widely in all walks of daily life up to the present time.
This liguistic adoption process had been spreading long before and after Vietnam's having victoriously gained independence from China in the tenth century. From that time Vietnam had also voluntarily adopted the Chinese writing system in full at first as the official written language of the land. Later on, the creation of Nôm characters based on Chinese block writing system with modifications had been put into unofficial use until the end of the 19th century. Consequently, there had emerged in Vietnamese two common vocabulary stocks, widely known as the HánViệt (Sino-Vietnamese) -- mostly appearing in dissyllabic usage -- and HánNôm (Sinitic-Vietnamese or Vietnamese lexicons of Chinese origin, including those older loanwords from ancient Chinese). (See more in Appendix B).

2) A Sino-Tibetan connection: to be or not to be?
Chinese is a language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan language family. Isn't Vietnamese a language also a descendant from the same source? This is indeed a controversially interesting topic that needs to be re-examined with further research in order to re-establish that long old reckoned connection. It is because the two languages share most of the linguistic attributes including those unique characteristics, e.g. basic vocabulary stock, morphemic compounds, dialectal and colloquial expressions, grammatical markers, classifiers, and functional words. Those are something so linguistically specific and peculiar, commonly believed to be found only in the languages belonging to the same language family. A comparison of Cantonese with Mandarin along with the composition of the population of speakers of those two "languages" -- both being two Chinese dialects descended from an original "Chinese" spoken by the "Chinese" -- will reveal this concept profoundly. For instance, obviously Cantonese common vocabularies of basic stratum deviate somewhat from those of Mandarin while in Vietnamese they somehow are in par even with those basic "Chinese" vocabulary.
To say the least traces of the Vietnamese basic lexicon seem to have originated from the same linguistic roots as those of Chinese. The influence of the Chinese language on Vietnamese was dated as far back as to China's Qin-Han Dynasties started in 221 BC or might even have been earlier. In fact, culturally inundated words of ancient Chinese origin such as "đủa" 箸 (chopsticks), "bếp" - (kitchen), "canh" 羹 (broth for soup), "bàn"^ (table), "ghế" . (chair), "tủ" Y (cupboard), "vuquy" Z' (bridal wedding ceremony), "thángchạp" .So^ (December), and the like are still being in use in the Vietnamese language while they are no longer in use in the modern Chinese language. Specifically in this cultural context, there is no doubt that Vietnamese has adopted most of Chinese words for its own use.
The vocabulary list grows densely if it is to include more of old-time words that both Chinese and Vietnamese are still using now. Some of those words are "thánggiêng" (January), "Tết" (Spring festival), "TếtÐoanngọ" (Late Spring Festival), as well as those of numerous basic ones which might have originated from the same roots such as "cha" (father), "mẹ" (mother), "anh" (older brother), "chị" (older sister), "canh" (broth), "thịt" (meat), "ăn" (eat), "uống" (drink), "lúa" (whole rice grains), "voi" (elephant), "trâu" (water buffallo), "cọp" (tiger), "lửa" (fire), "lá (leave), "đất" (soil), and the list continues on. (See more in Appendix B).
This language absorbing process had been continuously going on long after Vietnam's gaining independence from China. Recent evidences carved on tablets, unearthed in Vietnam in the late 1970's, show many Sinitic-Vietnamese words originated from the lexicon usages of China's Ming Dynatsy in the 16th century. The linguistic influence in this respect has continued all the way to the modern time with those up-to-date words such as "khôngdámđâu" (it's not so), "baxạo" (be all mouth), "tầmbậy" (nonsense), "bạtmạng" (risky behavior), "phaocâu" (chicken's butt as a delicacy), "dêxồm" (lecherous), etc. Pending a substantial proof of a linguistic genetic affinity, these underlined commonalities purposedly raised here are to attempt to establish a relationship of the two languages. They both have long been sharing the common linguistic roots that actually had started hundreds of years before the first Han Dynasty's Chinese invading armies ever set their feet on the then Vietnam's soil. (See more in Appendices)
The historical development of Vietnamese has also seen the adoption of Chinese ways of coining new vocabularies for its own use, especially in creating dissyllabic words, or words that are comprised of two syllables. Just like those of Chinese, the Vietnamese syllables, in most cases, can be used independently with each individual syllable as a word itself with its own meaning. Those syllables can be treated as independent words just like the original Chinese characters which have given rise to them. Today's Vietnamese vocabulary stock consists of a great number of two-syllable or dissyllabic words and dissyllabics has become dominantly one of the main characteristics of present-time Vietnamese. However, dissyllabic romanized words are not clearly and accurately presented because they are actually written in separate syllables with a white space in between. Except for many composite two-syllable words, the Vietnamese compounds are made up with meaningful syllables, each of which can be used as an independent word as well.
Throughout this transformational process, many dissyllabic words have emerged as whole words of one unit to be used only in their entirety. Those pairs of syllables have become more dependent on each other to render a whole concept and cannot be further re-divided into smaller meaningful parts. That is because composite words formed with those combined syllables have permanently become dissyllabic and morphemic in nature, each of which might have lost its original meaning if separated, for example, "càgiựt" (ill-behaved), "càlăm" (stammer), "cùlần" (unworldly), "càmràm" (whining), "lãngnhách" (nonsense), "xíxọn" (talkative), "dưahấu" (water melon), "basạo" (be all mouth), etc ... and numerous other words amounted to the thousands in number. (See more in Appendix A)
Samplings of randomly picked multiple pages from a Vietnamese dictionary will show that dissyllabic words accounted for well over two thirds of its contemporary vocabulary altogether. Vietnamese is certainly no longer a monosyllabic language, but, as a matter of fact, it has become more and more dissyllabic and polysyllabic in nature.
The Vietnamese vocabulary stock had evolved from monosyllabic words, then developed into dissyllabic words, which were written with a hyphen in between in the early days to signify their entirety. For the last 40 years or so those dissyllabic words have been scribed unhyphenated. The implication of this fact is that Vietnamese has transformed itself from a monosyllabic to dissyllabic language vocally while its written forms has evolved from simplicity to sophistication and then stepped back to its original state where it has originated.
However, some Vietnamese linguists have argued that, as a matter of fact, historically, Vietnamese has evolved from polysyllabics to monosyllabics and then finally emerged as dissyllabics -- i.e. containing characteristic of multi-syllabic, uni-syllabic, and bi-syllabic word language, respectively -- thanks to a great deal of influence of Chinese that had exerted directly on the Vietnamese language during a long span of over one thousand years under the Chinese domination in Vietnam's history.
Were Vietnamese originally a polysyllabic language as suggested as such? That could have been the case at certain point of time in history. Vietnamese, since its earlier stage as demonstrated in many earlier form of Nôm scripts, had already had forms of complex consonantal initials and polysyllabics -- containing a characteristic of multi-syllabic words -- just like some other regional languages in the Mon-Khmer language family.
Their viewpoint is notable due to the fact that the Vietnamese language itself might have not been solely a monosyllabic tongue originally. Evidences can be found in the so-called pure Vietnamese lexicon of which the two syllables always go together in pairs, for instance, màngtang (temple), mỏác (crown of head), đầugối (knee), khuỷtay (elbow), bảvai (shoulder), cùichỏ (elbow), mồhôi (sweat), cùlét (tickle), etc. and one even finds some polysyllabic words also in the "pure" Vietnamese vocabulary (the examples cited here are meant for illustration only because some of them could be partly mutations and alternations of Chinese loan words) : xấcbấcxangbang (in tatters), bảlápbảxàm (talking nonsense), (gió)heomay (breeze), (ngủ)libì (sleep soundly), (cờ)bayphấtphới (flying flag), (mưa)lấtphất (drizzle), (nhìn)chămbẳm, (nhìn)chằmchặp (gaze steadily), lộnxàngầu (in chaos), mêtítthòlò (totally attracted to), (thở)hồnghộc (breathe shortly), bađồngbảyđổi (temperamental), lộntùngphèo (in chaos), tuyệtcúmèo (it's fabulous), bachớpbanháng (absent-minded), bãithama (graveyard), etc. All of those words plus many others cannot be separated into meaningful separate syllables.

Polysyllabic nature can also be taken into account as there had also existed a few complex consonantal initials as in bl- of "blời" (the sun), "blăng" (the moon) which had been still in use until the 17th century as recorded in the ancient Nôm characters themselves with two separately written characters and earlier romanized Vietnamese-Latin or Vietnamese-Portugese dictionaries. The case of "blời", "blăng" could have later evolved into "mặttrời" and "mặttrăng" by way of b > m, then m [m] sound became vocalized into "mặt". If this is the case such sound a change is just like the case of "khlong" that had evoled into "khủnglong" (dinosaur) in Chinese. In this specific illustration, in historical phonology, the possibility of bl- to have evolved into a simple consonant retroflex tr- (not completely the same as English complex tr-) is very high.
On the other hand, in a farther path Vietnamese might have evolved from monosyllabics to polysyllabics, then, again, to monosyllabics, and lastly, back to dissyllabics. The reason for this hypothesis is that we can not absolutely ascertain that many "characters" transcribed in the ancient Nôm had actually been polysyllabic words or monosyllabic words started with complex consonantal initials!
However, it should be taken into consideration that the patterns that make up those cited words tend to show the developing trend of dissyllabics in nature. The implication of this phonetic development shows that Vietnamese might have evolved from monosyllabics to dissyllabics, that is, from simplicity to sophistication.
The notion of dissyllabics in Vietnamese is also based on the fact that many dissyllabic words are composed of synonymous syllables. This characteristic is opposed to that of monosyllabics of a large number of stand-alone one-syllable words existing in the Vietnamese vocabulary stock.
The very reason for those dissyllabic words having come into existence is that they have been meant to avoid homonyms in monosyllabic words which may means many thing and have become more and more specific and specialized in concrete meanings. The same is true in modern Chinese dissyllabic words with two synonymous syllables, which have been coined the same way as those of Vietnamese. In fact, today's Vietnamese appears to show clearly that it is a language of dissyllabics in nature as found in this kind of composite words, that is, many of these words are comprised of two elements, or syllables, which are almost synonymous with each other, e.g., tức|giận (mad/angry), trước|tiên (firstly/initially), cũ|kỹ (ancient/old), kề|cận (by/near), gấp|rút (urgently/quickly)...
Why do all these matters have to do with this Vietnamese language proposed reform? It is further to prove that Vietnamese is a solid pollysyllabic language since it shares all attributes and characteristics of the Chinese language, which is considered largely as a polysyllabic language by most of the world's large research institutes regarding the true nature of Chinese language. This issue appears simple and straightforward, but for some people it is not easy to see that Vietnamese is a dissyllabic language. That is why it is so Chinese about the Vietnamese language, both so intertwined with each other that reaearch on one language would be incomplete without relating to the other.
3) Vietnamese: an isolated language? Garbage!
Characteristics of dissyllabic synonymity as described above have somehow misled some specialists of Vietnamese into considering Vietnamese as an isolated language, i.e., structurally both word and sentence compositions are merely made of separate syllables called words. What they might have meant is that Vietnamese is still in its earlier stage of development, which has not fully evolved into a structurally mature language in which word forms change to reflect tenses and cases to indicate time and syntactical relation.
That concept is opposed to that of a composite language, a newly coined concept used in this writing. Composite language is a notion parallel to the concepts of inflectional languages where word and sentence structures are based on derivative forms like those used in English. In Vietnamese composite words syllables function as integral components in word formations, not much different from English radicals and affixes, for example, for "vănsĩ" we have "writer", "nghệsĩ" "artist", "quốcgia" "nation", "quốctế" "international", and so on.
We can also treat many Vietnamese composite elements, i.e. "affixes" and "radicals" or roots and suffixes, exactly the same way as what those terminologies mean since they effectively render similar compositions in English. Those "affixes" are used as materials to build complete word-concepts. In ad***on, in Vietnamese we also have particles that make words such as "maulên" "(be) quick", "bànvề" "talk about", "ăn đi", "go ahead and eat", adverbs "nhấtlà" "especially", "chonên" "therefore", unique classifier-words such as "bầutrời" "the sky", "quảđất" "the globe", and reduplicatives "bànghoàng" "being stunt", "bồihồi" "being sorrowful", "bẻnlẻn" "being timidly shy", "bộpchộp" "in a hasty manner", etc. These types of words brings Vietnamese even closer to Chinese than any of the Mon-Khmer family of languages.
For those who have naively said that Vietnamese does not have "grammar" simply because it does not indicate cases and tenses by way of inflectional affixes (a notion that has given rise to the opposite concept of an isolated language), let's point out that "grammar" is what constitutes particular sets of internal rules in a language. In the case of Vietnamese, the composite linguistic charateristic is a unique grammatical function that also encompasses a notion of structured sentences which are built with grammatical markers and particles, e.g. "rồi" "already", "sẽ" "will", "đã" "have", "bị" passive voice of "is", "are", "vìvậy" "therefore", "chodù" (though)...
As a matter of fact, the way Vietnamese "complete" sentences are built today has been strongly influenced by French grammatical structures. Earlier Vietnamese writings indicate quite clearly how Vietnamese sentences were built. Interestingly enough, until the present time, Vietnamese word orders are still perfectly legitimate with an absence of implied subjects or objects. This syntactical feature is quite relatively unique. It demonstrates that usages of both words and sentences set a "tone" to indicate the exact meanings which composite sentences are supposed to convey. The following examples will give you an idea what all these linguistic notions are about:
"Ðã biết vậyrồi saocòn mắcphải?" ("If you've already known so, how come you still did that?"),
"Chodù thếnào đichăngnữa, cònnuớccòntát." ("No matters what, let's give it a best shot.")
"Thậtlà ngu thấyrõ, cơhội đếntay chẳnghiểusao lạiđể vuộtmất?" ("That's really stupid! How could he let that opportunity slip away?"),
"Ănno rồi chỉbiết ngủ thôi. Chả làmnên tíchsự gì! ("He just eats and sleeps, good for nothing!")
The illustrations cited here are those made with connotatively structured sentences, where particles play an important role in delivering the intended messages. We can clearly see that the manipulation of words has effectively rendered a particular tone for each sentence, which in turn sets forward the connotative implications of the absences of a grammatical subject, object, or tense.

Another way to look at one of the composite characteristics of the Vietnamese language is to examine the following examples of word structures in Vietnamese as in artist = nghệsĩ, singer = casĩ, writer=vănsĩ .... Hypothetically if suffix conventions like -sĩ = -s as that of English -ist, -er, -or..., exist in the Vietnamese language then we will have:
nghệs (artist), văns (novelist), hoạs (painter), nhạcs (musician),
or -gia = -z, then we will have:
tácz (writer), luậtz (lawyer), sángchếz (inventor),
or sự- = s- then we will have:
stình (circumstance), scố (incidence), sviệc (matter), sthể (situation),
or -thuật = -th then we will have:
kỹth (technology), nghệth (arts), math (magic), mỹth (art),
or f- = phi then we will have:
flý (illogical), fquânsự (demilitarized), fnhân (inhuman), fliênkết (non-aliance), fchínhphủ (non-governmental)...
Therefore, -s, -z, s-, -th, f- in a way could be treated as suffixes which can function exactly as those same elements in the English language. The implications of this analogy tell us that Vietnamese vocabularies with composite nature have in parallel some of the derivative characteristics of an inflectional language just like English or French. After all written languages as they appear in present forms are just products of symbolic conventions.
In ad***ion, modern Vietnamese is highly dissyllabic in nature even in those sentences of which single words seem unrelated but they are vocally said as if they were paired syllables in two-syllable words, which are supposed to convey a complete notion along with adverbal particles, for instance:
"Ăn lẹ | cho xong | rồi đi!" ("Finish eating then go!") or
"Chờ mãi | không thấy | nó tới | tụi nầy | mới đi!" (We have been waiting, but he didn't show up, then we go!)
Not much particular about that way of saying since that kind of connotatively structured sentences are quite common in Vietnamese daily conversations. In folkloric lyrics, that kind of structurally dissyllabic rythm is quite populous, such as
"Yêu nhau | cởi áo | cho nhau |, Về nhà | dối mẹ | qua cầu | gió bay!"
"To love is to give [my cloth to you] even though I had to tell lies to my mom [that I had lost my outfit because the wind blew it away over the bridge on my way home.]"
In this kind of sentences, all pronouns and tenses are totally implied within a dissyllabic-oriented boundary.
Again, to make this point clear, these connotative sentences are not formed simply by just having syllables or words put together as "isolated language theorists" suggested. This kind of composite structures is actually built with a series of connotative composite words or word-concepts that have synthetically blended together, with or without grammatical markers, to denote the messages clearly enough without being mistaken to whom they are addressed and when actions have taken place.
In a highly inflectional language such as Russian, we have cases, i.e., nominative, accusative, dative..., in which order of words can be shuttled around anywhere in a sentence and the intended meanings do not change and will be understood. In Vietnamese words cannot be manipulated in the same manner, but implications of composite sentences, which are built mostly with composite words, deliver the same message effectively that speakers have in mind to without the need to specifically and explicitly identify any subjective and objective pronouns, or tenses.
That composite words and sentences are impartible syntactical features of the Vietnamese language, spoken casually and naturally by any native speakers on any occasions, makes Vietnamese a composite language, not an isolated one, since the composition of those sentences are not simply a total or combination of individual words. Good examples of "isolated language" sentences are those made by young kids who start picking up the language, any languages, forming childish phrases or sentences by simply assembling separate words without regards to any grammatical or semantic connotations whatsoever. "You got the ideas?"
If you, especially non-native speakers, are still unclear what all these composite concepts are about, it is not surprising because they actually require a good command of Vietnamese of a native speaker's level of fluency to appreciate that kind of connotatively built sentence structures, for now just take our words for that. How many non-native speaking specialists in Vietnamese have ever mastered the Vietnamese language to this sophisticated native level in order to be able to utter that kind of sentences in a natural way as Vietnamese do, let alone just doing superficial research with a conclusion that Vietnamese is an isolated language? They are all wrong -- garbage in garbage out! Can anyone name the most renown specialists in Vietnamese who are truely fluent in the language at a native level?
It is time now to remind those Vietnamese linguists who are still tailgating western "experts" of their wrongful side by mirroring their ideas that Vietnamese is an isolated language, and a monosyllabic one as a result for that matter. If their level of mastery of Vietnamese is good enough to make any judgment about it, that must be the last territory for them to venture into. This viewpoint will further emphasize the urgent need for changing the way Vietnamese is now being written as if it actually were what they have wrongly been saying all along!
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4) The politics of polysyllabics:
Surprisingly, while the dissyllabic nature of Vietnamese is obvious to most non-native learners of Vietnamese, specialists in Vietnamese always get it wrong the first time and keep insisting that it is a monosyllabic language. In studying Vietnamese, foreigners will have to learn not only monosyllabic words but also dissyllabic ones. Mere knowledge of individual syllables may barely help them recognize and pronounce most of available syllables in Vietnamese, but to be truely proficient in the language they have to study dissyllabic words in their entire form. For them, just simply putting syllables together to form two-syllabe words will not help much in mastering the language. Just like studying Chinese, for non-native speakers, an ability to recognize a supposed minimum of two thousand individual characters doesn't make them intelligently comprehend thousands of other dissyllabic words which are within the range of those characters. Just like us non-native speakers of the English language, the mere recognition of Latin roots in this language may give us some clues for meanings of words of the same origins, but surely it is insufficient to master usages of those words. We have to learn words in their polysyllabic entirety, not just portions of their radicals or syllables.
The dissyllabic characteristic in Vietnamese can be also easily observed by non-native speakers with a little bit knowledge of the language or linguistics. On listening to a series of complete Vietnamese sentences, they will be able to tell apart the boundaries of words in continuously spoken sound strings as commonly used in daily conversations or news broadcasts. That is because in speech the Vietnamese dissyllabic words are obviously uttered with a pairing pattern in a chained text string. Let's say if X represents a syllable, then their sound patterns will appear to those non-native speakers as something rythmic like XX XX X XX XX X XX.... being said in a continuous manner which shows a clear pattern of unbroken paired sounds.
To Vietnamese speakers, actually, this pairing pattern, configuratively speaking, has long been melodious rythms in their ears through popular poetry and folk songs where paired syllable words are best reflected naturally. Unfortunately, this is not exactly what they look like in writing since Vietnamese words have long been always written separately as X X X X X X X...., syllable by syllable. This way of writing certainly has already done harms to native speakers' brain and, consequently, obstructed the natural evolution and progress of the Vietnamese language in whole as well.

In the past centuries prior to the 20th century, the sole writing form of Vietnamese known so far had long been the Chinese script itself. Development of Chinese vocabulary has been a referental framework and its vocabularies become the raw materials for creation of new Vietnamese dissyllabic words. Since the 10th century afterwards, the Vietnamese people felt they need to express themselves in colloquial Vietnamese, i.e., its own unique sounds and expressions, so they had created the Nôm scripts, or Vietnamese block writing scripts, by using Chinese characters as sources with some modifications to compose Nôm words.
Around the 16th century when western missionaries came to spread their gospels, they must have encountered difficulties in having had to deal with both Chinese and Nôm scripts at the same time in order to translate their religious bibles into Vietnamese. So it was not a surprise that they had cleverly invented an ealier form of Quốcngữ (the then romanized Vietnamese orthography) to serve their preaching purpose. In the process of transcribing Vietnamese speech they had recognized the dissyllabic characteristics of Vietnamese words for which they had inserted hyphens between two syllables of a word to create a dissyllabic word-concept, for instance, gia-đình, đồng-bào, ăn-năn...
As a new romanized writing system began pitching in at the turn of the 20th century, hyphenation in writing dissyllabic words had been the norms and put into active use all the way towards the end of the 1960s. At present time, nevertheless, except for its usage in mostly academic work, most of native speakers write dissyllabic words with their associated syllables separately with a white space in between as we all know. As a result, today's Vietnamese orthography appears illogical and unscientific and no longer reflects the true nature of the spoken language any more.
The fact that with the existence of a large amount of dissyllabic Sino-Vietnamese compounds such as "tổquốc" (country), "phụnữ" (woman), "giađình" (family), "cộngđồng" (community), etc. , plus two-syllable Sinitic-Vietnamese composite words such as "sinhđẻ" (give birth), "dạydỗ" (educate), "lạnhlẽo" (cold), "nhờvã" (depend on)... in ad***ion *****ch a large number of so-called pure Vietnamese words existing in the language today such as "mặccả" (bargain), "bângkhuâng" (melancholy), "ngọtngào" (gently sweet), "mồcôi" (being an orphan), "hiuquạnh" (deserted and tranquil), etc.... (See more in Appendices) it is more than enough to designate Vietnamese as a dissyllabic language, absolutely so.
In real world, any languages on earth nowadays are downright polysyllabic. It is easy to reach that conclusion because in a monosyllabic language we will have a limited number of vocabularies. How many are there possible combinations of consonants and vowels to create sensible one-syllable words? A quick calculation can tell us that. At our last count in Vietnamese they number at about 24,000 combinations, but not all "sounds" are utilized, for example, tưp, nhửng, cunh, lẻp, phèp, tac, etc... therefore, only an estimate of 12,000 "sounds" appear in today's Vietnamese one-syllable words. If tones are not accounted for as those in the Mon-Khmer language family and let's assume an imaginary "monosyllabic language" exist, that language may have only 6000 vocabularies to live with. In comparison, in English the total number of meaningful words can reach well over 500,000 terms. Just only in the last two decades alone in the computing field there have been thousands of new words being coined and added to the English vocabulary. So in general, if there still exist a "monosyllabic language on earth", it must have been a dead or a nearly extinct language! We hope this statement will kill the idea that Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language once and for all.
For the purpose of gaining more understanding the dissyllabic characteristics in Vietnamese, we can further compare it with English. In some respect, Vietnamese and English share somewhat similar characteristics in terms of functional radicals, which appear as syllables in Vietnamese. It is nothing new about the English language as a polysyllabic language. However, if we filter out all loanwords of Latin and Greek origins, we will be able to identify a great number of words of Anglo-Saxon origins which will suggest their monosyllabic roots, for instance, "go", "keep", "run", "walk", "eat", "sleep", "morning" (< morn), "evening" (< eve) "before" (be+fore), "forward" (fore+ward)... With those basic vocabularies, we can easily equate pure Anglo-Saxon words to those of "original" Vietnamese lexicons with common monosyllabic characteristics -- comparatively speaking because each cited Vietnamese word below might have had a Chinese origin -- such as "ăn" (eat), "ngủ" (sleep), "đái" (urinate), "ỉa" (to ****), "đi" (walk), "đứng" (stand)... (See more in Appendix B)
Someone may say we cannot compare the two languages of different kinds, just like oranges and apples, since English is an inflectional language that has the word formation made up of radicals plus affixes such as eater, keeper, walker, sleeper... while Vietnamese is an "isolated language" (again, this is an incorrect notion that needs to be corrected as "a composite language" with the new whole ideas behind this term)? Why not? As we have discussed in the foregoing section, the Vietnamese equivalents to those cited English words above are the solid cases of words such as artist = nghệsĩ, singer = casĩ, writer = vănsĩ , etc., of which, interestingly, "sĩ", "giả", or "gia"... for that matter, cannot be independently used, exactly as in the cases of "er", "ist", "or"... in English! In its history of development the English language has readily absorbed foreign elements and, at the same time, their way of forming compound words has given rise to many compounds such as "therefore", "anybody", "however", "nevertheless", "blackboard", "gunship", "eyebrow", etc. This English word formation is completely the same as the composition of Vietnamese compounds of "vìvậy", "bấtcứai", "tuynhiên", "bảngđen", "tàuchiến", "chânmày", respectively.
When we write those English words we never separate them into smaller syllables, but we do so in writing Vietnamese, even though many cut-off syllables of dissyllabic words themselves no longer convey the initial meanings as they are originally with associated syllables.
Let's examine a few more of other kind of dissyllabic words of composite nature for illustration: bâng/khuâng, hồi/hộp, mồ/hôi, tai/tiếng, mặc/cả, cù/lét.... (meaning "melancholy", "breathing taking", "sweat", "infamous", "bargain", "tickle", respectively.) and thousands of other words of the same nature. Have you ever wondered what exactly each of those cut-off syllables means in Vietnamese? They, indeed, do not make any sense at all, at least in today's usage. Nevertheless, all of them have been mercilessly broken into separate syllables in writing! These words do have meanings only when they go together in pairs in the combining formation of completely associated syllables which make up those words. This significant proof firmly shows that Vietnamese is a dissyllabic language.
In any cases, this illogical and unscientific way of writing has incapacitated the normal functions of a multi-syllabic language which can be utilized to serve as powerful tools for abstract and collective thinking and data manipulation effectively. If the legitimate designation for a pollysyllabic language is to base on the fact that its vocabulary stock contains a large number of polysyllabic words, then only with the existence of all dissyllabic words of Sino-Vietnamese and Sinitic-Vietnamese of Chinese origins in Vietnamese alone, which are undoubtedly innumerable, we can easily classify it as a dissyllabic language.

WHY DOES THE CURRENT WRITING SYSTEM NEED REFORM?
As a matter of fact, nothing is new about this proposed reform. In the past several renown Vietnamese scholars such as Lãng-Nhân Phùng Tất-Ðắc (now living England), Trịnh Nhật (Australia), Dương Ðức-Nhự, Ðào Trọng-Ðủ, Phạm Hoàng-Hộ (the later two authors both actually had books published in dissyllabic writing form), and other supporting advocates such as Hồ Hữu-Tường, Nguyễn-Ðình Hoà, Bùi Ðức-Tịnh, etc., had voiced their opinions about the polysyllabic nature of Vietnamese and pointed out shortcomings and weaknesses in the current writing system. However, as time had gone by their viewpoints seemed to have lost in vain during Vietnam's period of the most ferocious wartime in the 20th century.
Fortunately, today's progress in the computing technology and emergence of global internet have given us a new window of opportunities, once again, to raise the ideas of reform by means of the web and in other electronic forms like emails and internet postings to spread the words and to actually experiment a new and better way of writing.
Below are some of other reasons why Vietnamese writing needs a reform as, in fact, have been repetituously pointed out here and there in this paper so far. Here we go again to discuss these matters further more in details, this time to focus on the point that how the replacement of current writing system with the one that conforms with a polysyllabic principle, i.e., writing multi-syllable words in combining formation, will help process informaton faster and efficiently, both mentally and electronically.
1) The weakest links
The present state of Vietnamese is a result of continuous evolution over the time with some inevitable changes along the way in order to have gained a prominent position as it appears today. As we all may have known, for hundreds of years before the beginning of the last century, the Chinese script had been used to conduct official businesses, record history, and compose literary works. Even though the Nôm script was created to transcribe the Vietnamese language, but its limited usage had been confined virtually within literary circles only. It seemed natural having been that way before because, historically speaking, there used to exist a belief, that might be true, that Chinese and Vietnamese both are descendants from the same Sino-Tibetan language family instead of the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family as suggested by some new theories initiated by André Haudricourt 50 years ago or so.
So, alas, one would say, our language is seen as not genetically affiliated with Chinese and now we even have our own script of even more superior romanized orthography, so why should we be bothered with the long-gone past? Some others may also argue that spoken languages might have changed phonologically over the time, but their writing system needs not to change at all, for example, English has been spoken differently to a certain degree from its actual spellings and it has survived all turmoil times anyway. Therefore, the need for writing reform does not exist and is not an urgent and necessary matter anymore.
Just a quick look at some of opponents' anti-reform reasons will reveal that none appears substantial. (See some pro and con debates in Bìnhluận về "Sửađổi Cáchviết TiếngViệt" - Critiques on Vietnamese writing reform) This kind of resistance to change will appear in force for sure as in any reforms, but it seems to come mostly from some conservative wings other than from those who appreciate and understand the core matter of reform with an abstract and collective perspective.
For such large magnitude of reform with its far reaching impact on society, anticipation of such resistance to reform is not hard to foresee. One could imagine centuries ago how strong the resistance had been from an opposing camp of elderly scholars against those Nôm inovators who had broken tra***onal roles to go about their own businesses in recording sounds of the past. The Nôm reformers had been rediculed for their ideas of advocating an unconventional forms of writing un-Chinese characters which were regarded so sacred by those diehard Vietnamese confucianists.
Their comrades in arms in our contemporary time are also having all the very same reasons for not reforming. They will probably fight to their death to preserve the backward way of writing as we are having today. It is oddly enough for us just to imagine in the next hundred years down the line our descendants would wonder how could we still have had such a retrograde writing system having been in use until the 21st century? The opponents argued that writing reform will create chaos in many related areas. This short view on this matter has obstructed a broader sight of many more long term benefits that associate with the writing reform.
Go out and ask any reform opponents and they may be able to give you enough reasons for not going with the reform and you will find out furthermore that their excuses are mostly unsubstantial and sentimental ones. Someone would say the new way of writing does not look good and people will be confused and misunderstood. The first reason seems so subjective and the latter certainly unfounded. This change-resistant mentality and reserved attitudes towards reform are the weakest links in the progressive chain where all destructive harms, such as backwardness in sciences and lack of an ability to think abstractly and collectively among our children and monolingual adults alike, break in with full force.
Of course, if we wish to realize a radical reform, we can revolutionize a new way of writing by revamping the whole existing system completely to include cases of "derivatives" and even eliminate the diacritical marks being utilized in the current Vietnamese orthography altogether once and for all.
However, that is not exactly what this proposal is all about. If that kind of total reform succeeds learners of Vietnamese as a second language will welcome it whole-heartedly. They will find it easier to learn only full concepts in their whole logical and meaningful entities presented as completely formed words instead of those individually written with separate syllables. Specifically for this matter it is obvious with Vietnamese classifiers, for instance, "conđường" (road), "bầutrời" (the sky), "quảđất" (the globe)... "con" goes together with "đường", "bầu" with "trời", and " quả " with "đất". Non-native learners would not wonder again why sometimes we use the classifiers "con-", "sự-" and sometimes "bầu", or "quả"... They may ask why we couldn't simply just use one classifier "con" or "cái" for everything for the sake of convenience? Of course, we could not since this is one of the main characteristics that makes up our language.
In reality, there are not so many classifiers in Vietnamese, but it is because the way all those classifiers are cut off from their accompanied words fails to indicate clearly which classifier should go with which word. Our illogical way of writing has confused them greatly. This is also another reason to be taken into reforming consideration because Vietnamese classifiers are ones among major characteristics that set the Vietnamese language apart from others in the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic language family distinctively. In the meanwhile, Chinese, a neiboring language associated closely with the Vietnamese language in most aspects, is recognized as a polysyllabic, or dissyllabic for this matter, language, so with all the similarities the two languages share Vietnamese should be considered as a polysyllabic one.

As a matter of fact, our actual goal of reforming today's Vietnamese writing system is not of the matter of convenience for foreigners to study the language or for similar insubstantial reasons. We also do not advocate reform with total changes in transforming modifiers and classifiers in the Vietnamese current writing system in*****ffixes, e.g., -s, -z, f-, con-, sự- etc. or dropping diacritical marks altogether and the like.
What has been discussed so far is all about the inaccuracy in the current transcription of dissyllabic words in Vietnamese, which has been unfaithfully scribed and shouldn't be so because that is not precisely the way dissyllabic words are spoken in real world. That is, in spoken Vietnamese, pairs of syllables in dissyllabic words are vocally delivered only in one complete utterance of chained sounds with each word pronounced continuously as a whole unit.
So, why are the words broken apart in writing? Someone would say it is because of our habit, and using a language is a habit, so it is best to go with the norms. Also, the way we write Vietnamese now have been understood and widely used by all people from North to South, all books from the old days till now being printed in the monosyllabic form, all street signs being written as such, etc. Changes would only complicate the matters even worse. The newly suggested combining forms do not make the scriptings look pleasing to the eyes aesthetically. The dissyllabic words written in combining formation are difficult to read and write, costly to implement and so on.
We must recognize that the way we are scribing the Vietnamese language as if it were monosyllabic and "isolated" in its current writing form is apparently unscientific and illogical and it relects a retrograde mindset of us as native speakers of Vietnamese! We all may feel indignant at that statement, but unfortunately, it is the truth and seems to be an understatement.
Let's get some concensus and capitalize on the shortcomings and weaknesses of the current writing system so that we all can understand the matter fully. Only then we altogether will be able to find acceptable ways to reform it accordingly. If we let this matter go its own way, the natural development of the current writing system will be the avoidance of the reform matter altogether and that will do more harms than good. We must understand that the worst are those invisible harms through the way we perceive things with only monosyllabic materials in our brain. If our people continue thinking the same old way, we are indeed fortifying an already formed gene ready to pass down to the next generations. Inevitably, years after years, this biological con***ion will mold our youngsters' brains knowing to think only in concrete terms, unsuitable for forming abstract and collective thoughts. In the real world all high achievers and performers later in life seem to point to those kids who have been well equipped a polysyllabic foreign language started in an earlier age. (See more in Ngônngữ và Trítuệ - Language and intelligence - by Nguyễn Cường)
Let's ask ourselves a question: why do we have to write our language in an inferior way while we are having all the capacities on earth to do that in a better way? Answer this question in honesty and compare all possible benefits and disadvantages with regard to writing reforms, then you will be able understand one of the pressing reasons why changing the current monosyllabic writing system into a polysyllabic one is better course for the country to follow.
Again, it is no doubt that the current writing system of Vietnamese is not adequate enough in its express form to reflect the true nature of dissyllabic words as they are delivered in paired sounds in real time to denote a whole, complete, and unique concept. Once we accept the fact that the way we write now is inadequate for modern needs, then we should look into this matter seriously with an open mind and devise a way to fix it.
2) The other pictures
Let's take a look over our shoulders to see what our culturally close neighbors have done about that matter.
China, in the past, had very much wanted to change her block writing system into a Latin-based script, but due to certain peculiar and understandable circumstances the Chinese could not implement their ambitious plan. One of main reasonings for not implementing the script reform was that the Chinese National Putonghua (also known as mandarin) contained so many Chinese homonymous characters, and also homophones for that matter. If the Chinese characters were to be romanized then the confusion caused by those homonyms would be worse than the way it had been written in block characters before.
As a matter of fact, Chinese and Vietnamese share so many phonological similarities and the Vietnamese language has been successfully romanized, so can the Chinese language.
Interestingly enough, those missionaries who went to China at approximately the same period of time and for the same purpose had completely failed to catch on the Chinese with a new romanized writing system. What was the reason? One of the main reasons was that they failed to recognize Chinese as a polysyllabic language. At that time the notion of "polysyllabicity" was still outlandish and irrelavant even to the minds of Chinese linguists who were so used to the way block Chinese characters are separately written. In their contacts with western linguistic ideas they were told Chinese was a monosyllabic, so nobody had ever figured out a better way to transcribe the language. When they, both western missionaries and Chinese linguists, transcribed Chinese characters with Latin letters they had created so many homonyms by having transcribed syllables of each word individually, that had certainly caused great confusions to Chinese native believers and leaners. They might have succeded if they had written dissyllabic Chinese words in combining formation or at least with a hyphen in between dissyllabic words as they had done with the Vietnamese orthography! Also, the failure to have the Chinese romanized writing system reformed can be explained that it is probably that deep inside the Chinese subconsciousness with over 5000 years of history since the emergence of their "Middle-Kingdom" state, the same writing system of the language has been used extensively by the Chinese people one after another generation. In other words, it has become the soul of their nation.
When Mao Zedong was still alive, he actually had had a plan to reform the Chinese writing system into that of romanization. However, he was so fond of enjoying ancient Tang poems that he became so reluctant to do so. Needless to say, he was the only one in modern China's history who could have done this kind of reform, but he failed to.
For China, the golden opportunity has long passed and history will probably not repeat again. Instead, China has already put forward the standardization of the Latinized writing called "pinyin" for formal use in transcribing the putonghua into Latin letters as we often see words such as Beijing or Guangdong in news media instead of Peking or Canton. Interestingly enough, in doing so they recognize polysyllabic nature of their language by writing all polysyllabic words in pinyin in combining formation.
For the Japanese language, writing reform had also encountered similar obstacles met by the Chinese putonghua. As a matter of fact, the Japanese language contains even more homonyms if they were to be romanized! For example, when the Japanese transcribe "to", which is variably represented in many different Chinese characters, but in Japanese those words are pronounced almost the same and they would appear in identical romanized letters. In the meanwhile, this "to" can be written in Vietnamese equivalents as "đông", "đôn", "độc", "độn", "đồn", "đốc", "đống", "động", "đồng"... As a result, the Japanese had had to settle by having added two more national scripts into the current writing system, that is, Katagana and Hiragana, respectively. These systems are used in parallel to the long adapted Chinese characters in their writing system, for one, to transcribe western words and, for the other, to scribe peculiar Japanese polysyllabic sounds.

That is not to say the writing system of those two countries have not been reformed. They have done it in a special way, that is, the tra***ional Chinese characters used in these two countries have undergone a great deal of simplification and the block character-based script is written from left to right horizontally as officially mandated. In short, Japan and China wanted very much to change their current writing systems and they have implemented a partial reform of their writing systems though it has not been completely romanized as they had initially planned.
Here is an interesting question worth mentioning: supposedly those two large countries in East Asia had succeeded in reforming their writing systems with romanization, do you think their existing sciences and technology and economy would have advanced much more than what they have actually achieved thus far today? It is certainly so. If that were the case, they might have achieved much more advancement in those areas.
A fair explanation for that reason is that if their writing had been converted to romanization earlier, popular education for over one billion people in China must have been quickly widespread and more successful and the process of computerization in informatics might have picked up speed faster and farther. There is no need to say final results would have been positive results for the economy of both nations. In fact, the way that the Chinese writing system is being used in these two countries had caused many obstacles in the process of industrial modernization in the 80's of the last century. For now, it seems too late for them to return to starting points to undo things because their present Chinese writing systems have been fully integrated into the process of computerization in most areas. If new writing reforms were going to occur in those two nations anytime soon, the earliest timeline would be in the range of a hundred year unit.
Someone will suggest that Taiwan also has been completely using the tra***onal Chinese writing system all along the way since 1949 and that it has been able to achieve remarkable progresses in the field of computing technology. That is right, but it is still lagging behind Japan and, as a matter of fact, its advancement in that field has been accomplished not through the Chinese language, but by means of using English as a medium in information processing.
Here arises another argument: reforming writing system is, supposedly, to progress technologically, but in the case of North Korea, the Chinese writing has been completely replaced by Korean national writing system and that her people have been still living in backwardness. In the meanwhile, South Korea has become undeniably one of the most developed countries in the world; yet, it is still using Chinese characters in its writing system without the need for writing reform.
In fact, the richness of Chinese vocabulary in the Korean language is an integral part of Korean, a unique characteristic of that language -- just like the roles of Sino- and Sinitic Vietnamese vocabularies in Vietnamese -- which has been used by the people of S. Korea who recognize the existence of Chinese elements in their language. In the meanwhile N. Korea had totally eliminated the use Chinese characters in its writing system, which might, otherwise, have helped this nation tap in and grow along with the advancement in Chinese information technological fields all the way as they were developed and implemented in its neighboring allied country.
Someone may also argue that today English is a de facto computing technological medium for data processing which has enabled not only Taiwan, S. Korea, Japan, and China to have achieved remarkable advancement in their information industries (today China is one of a few countries that have the capacity of sending commercial satellites into the space) but also western countries such as Germany, France, or any other countries for that matter. Therefore, a latecomer like Vietnam that is still trying to catch in the latest development in computing fields may actually only need to focus solely on utilizing technological English language tools to advance rather than wasting time reforming her own writing system. In the end, Vietnam will still use technical English anyway to process information. English has becoming so dominant a world's language that it will be the key to open all the technological doors, so what is the point for doing differently?
That is a good argument, but not all countries which use English as an official language are able to achieve the same advanced scientific progress, for instance, the Philippines, Suriname and Jamaica, to name a few.
It is interesting to note that it is not a coincidence that all developed countries including Singapore, S. Korea , Malysia, Thailand... are those which have gone through language reforms. An overall characteristic of those reforms is that those countries have recognized the existence of polysyllabic words in their languages and that has helped faciliate overall process of computerization.
How is about Vietnam? What do you think of Russia and the Russian language or French and the French language? How is it about the long-gone Roman Empire and the Latin language?
Vietnam would say that it has done that before for the Vietnamese language, for example, many scientific terminologies have been stadardized such as "ốcxíthoá", "cạcbônnát", "canxum", "nitrơát",... the long "y" dropped for short "i", etc. However, obviously this kind of minute "reform" has done more harms than good. What we all have seen is the inferior writing forms has taken place of superior ones, adding unnecessary confusion and burden on learners to study to different sets of lexicons at the same time.
However, inside Vietnam today a prevailing tendency in handling foreign proper names and nouns is to keep original spellings in writing. For fairly educated Vietnamese speakers, with no knowledge of English, in fact, they can still pronounce adequately an approximate sound of foreign and English words employed in Vietnamese texts.
The retention of original foreign spelling practice has been in an opposing position against an approach that has been offically adopted as a mandate until the late 1980's that required all foreign proper names be spelled out in Vietnamese orthography, such as "Oátsingtơn" (Washington), "Ốxtơralia" (Australia), "Nicơxơn" (Nixon)... As we can see that way of transcription should be not used at all simply because of the approximate closeness in Vietnamese way of pronouncing foreign spellings which can be mimicked vocally by monolingual individuals. For the purpose of popular education, keeping original proper names will help native speakers acquaint themselves with foreign spellings to go about daily business efficiently. However, for those foreign words that have long been completely localized such as xàphòng (soap, from French savon), kem and càrem (ice cream, from French crème), càphê (coffee, from French café), free, sale, ápphe (affair, French affair), xinê (movies, from French cinéma) and so on, of course, they should not be changed at all. (See more in Appendix A)