Topic summary
Initialisms
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Acronym.
Vietnamese
Initialisms are purely a written convenience, being pronounced the same way as their expansions. As the names of many Vietnamese letters are disyllabic, it would be less convenient to pronounce an initialism by its individual letters. Acronyms pronounced as words are rare in Vietnamese, occurring when an acronym itself is borrowed from another language. Examples include SIĐA (pronounced), a respelling of the French acronym SIDA ('AIDS'); VOA (pronounced), a literal reading of the English initialism for 'Voice of America'; and NASA (pronounced), borrowed directly from the English acronym.