Huh, Vietnamese really is a very space-efficient language compared to Russian.
The Vietnamese sentence has 8 syllables but only 4 words:
- 8 syllables: “đời”, “đời”, “nhớ”, “ơn”, “lê”, “nin”, “vĩ”, “đại”
- 4 words: “đời đời” (eternally), “nhớ ơn” (graceful), “Lê-nin” (Lenin), “vĩ đại” (great)
What about the Russian sentence?
The Russian says:
Вьетнамский народ вечно благодарен великому Ленину
Or in the Latin alphabet:
“V’yetnamskiy narod vechno blagodaren velikomu Leninu”
That’s 18 syllables if i’m not mistaken.
Translates to “The Vietnamese people are eternally grateful to the great Lenin”
I guess the Vietnamese leaves out the first two words, but even without that part the Russian is still 50% longer.
Of course Chinese wins on character efficiency over both of them: 永远感谢伟大的列宁
But that’s not really a fair comparison because in Chinese every character is a syllable.
If Vietnamese still use Chữ Nôm then every character would also be a syllable.
But then again, a CJKV character (Hanzi, Kanji, Hangul, Chữ Nôm) is technically a character according to unicode, but it is not a unit of writing. A CJKV character have components and strokes, and the components may have components of their own. OTOH, nobody actually thinks of a latin character as having components (seriously, what are the components of the letter “A”?)
