Yeah, it has been my impression that the tones of Vietnamese aren't unique to Vietnamese and learning them I'd expect is a transferable skill as the important part of the skill to me is hearing and recognising the subtle differences in sound that we take for granted in a language like English, the concept itself is super simple to learn because it's only 6 tones (5 in the south) and how they modify a sound is not that hard to understand, that is...from an intellectual standpoint, not a practical one. And the listening skill isn't just for the tones either, but subtleties between sounds as per my previous post, and even with "tôi" (I) and "thôi" (stop) the only difference is breath and if somebody says something with extra breath in English we just don't think anything of it. And it's why I am glad the other parts of Vietnamese are kinder.
And of course China does play its role in its history and influence parts of its language, but my knowledge of Chinese languages is so slim that I'm not going to easily draw direct comparisons beyond knowing about tones (and similarities there) and knowing there's a share of loan words. And it manages to keep its uniqueness and identity despite its share of loan words.
And I do like how Vietnamese handles loan words, it makes the effort to make them more Vietnamese-like and less recognisable as loan words. Like how all of these are French loan words: phô mai, xì líp, kem and sơ mi.
And because loan words tend be made up of existing Vietnamese words that sound the same or similar, you can get double meanings, like "Đức" can both mean "Germany" and "virtue" (which I am sure any Germans may say "damn straight it does") and you have "Mongolia", which gets the short end of the stick, which is "Mông Cổ" or "neck butt". And because of this, trying to create Vinglish words to help yourself be understood when you don't know a word is risky, as a guy on YouTube did for comic effect when trying to buy "slip ons" and used "xì líp hồng", which means "pink underwear".
Though in real speech its obvious what you mean, especially thanks to Vietnamese's classifier words and words they like to stick together, so you can more easily derive specific meaning, like "nước Đức" it's obvious you mean Germany not "Virtue Water" and "tiếng Đức" you mean "German (language)" not "virtuous language" and "người Đức" you mean "German (person)" and not "Virtuous person". If you wanted to say "virtuous person" you'd say "người đức hạnh".
And funnily enough it's things like this about Vietnamese that Toki Pona reminds me loosely of, because it has to use a similar principle in reusing words to cover a larger scope of meaning. Given some of Vietnamese's minimalism in places, and it's why I wonder if it makes a case of Toki Pona being a useful springboard into the language, though it's only 1 feature I am focusiing on. But I know cognitively I ended up treating them more like compound words, because I am familiar with that from German, like Krankenhaus, or "sick house" for "hospital" and the Vietnamese is "bệnh viện" or "sick institute".
Cainntear wrote:When I asked it about promoting equality, it mentioned gender inclusivity. Zamenhof suggested using the Esperanto for "it" as an inclusive pronoun, which hardly seems great. I believe I've hear of one or two languages in the world which have no difference between he and she, but I have no recollection of what they would be, and ChatGPT can't help me with that, because it can't produce obscure facts as they are by definition statistically insignificant.
This is a fair point. And with things like gender neutrality, it is something some languages adapt for and I suspect also something Esperantists have to adjust for if they are to accommodate it and we also needlessly have arguments over whether the word "they" can be used as singular in English (though we've long done it). But if "it" in Esperanto is like "it" in English, then you would never use it on a person without it being dehumanising aside from in the context of things like "who is it?"
Whereas you are right there are languages that have this covered, where no pronouns are gendered , because it's true in 2 of my target languages, in Mongolian you'd use "ter" as a 3rd person pronoun for everyone, in Tuvan you'd use 'ol'.
If you need to specify male or female, you can communicate that meaning with an extra word.
). What's more, Vietnamese in particular has been influenced by Classical Chinese literary culture so strongly that a huge chunk of its vocabulary 
