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 ' (), a respelling of the French acronym "SIDA" (AIDS); ' (), a literal reading of the English initialism for Voice of America; and "NASA" (), borrowed directly from the English acronym.