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"Eris" <vithant@nospamgmail.com> wrote in message
news:9ui5m116auchbasevr8pn65nvtnlpm3826@4ax.com...
Seems to me when I was there it was two words. Viet Nam
I always write it Viet Nam. Seems like back then it was most often written
Viet Nam, and then you had the Viet Cong, the Viet Minh, Tieng Viet, etc.,
so I never liked slurring it together into one word. It's pretty obious Viet
is a word and Nam is another word, even if you don't know what they mean.
However, there's an interesting discussion on "Vietnam" .vs. "Viet Nam" here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Vietnam.
I think maybe English-speaking people are the only ones who try so hard to
be correct about the names of other countries (not that you are, I'm just
saying). Most people call the US things like Estados Unidos, or L'Etats
Unis. The Vietnamese call us "danh tu" where the "tu" has a couple of
diacriticals. To be really correct, you'd have to spell Viet Nam with a
bunch of diacriticals too.
Still, Google gives 180,000,000 hits for "Viet Nam" against 147,000,000 for
"Vietnam". So apparently the tide is turning since one guy in the Wikipedia
discussion says the single word outnumbered the double word spelling by 4 to
1 at the time of the discussion.
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