VĂN HỌC NGHỆ THUẬT Liên Mạng

vhnt, số 20

8 August 1995

Bài viết về QUỐC NGỮ rất sơ đẳng  và giản lược cho hợp khuôn khổ của Internet.  Ước mong tài liệu này hữu dụng trong việc quảng bá Tiếng Việt tại nước ngoài.

This elementary and concise article about QUỐC NGỮ  is a brief summary in the Internet format.  Readers need further readings to fully understand the role of quốc ngữ in modern VN.  Some of the evolutionary efforts are happening on the Net and on other electronic media to prepare Tiếng Việt  for the 21st century, the Asian Century.

Dương Hùng

oOo

QUỐC NGỮ, MODERN WRITTEN VIETNAMESE

More than once, I have been asked to write my name in "real VNmese" and not in "English".  Most Americans expect the VNmese script to look like Chinese characters, or the written Korean, or the Japanese Hira-gana and Kata-gana.  My "English" name is actually written in the modern romanized Vietnamese - the Japanese equivalent is Romaji  (1) - without the diacritic marks above, under or by the side of the vowels.

1.  THE SPOKEN LANGUAGE:

Certain traits of early spoken VNmese are found in the Mường, Thái (2) dialects in the highland of North VN.  The modern VNmese spoken language could be the fusion of the ancient dialects of the Bách Việt tribes (3), the dialects of Thái, Mường, and certain elements of Mon-Khmer (Cambodian).

Different accents exist in the modern VNmese spoken language; three dominant accents are northern accent (giọng Bă'c Hà Nội), central acent (giọng Trung, Huế), southern accent (giọng Nam, Sài Gòn).  There is probably no greater difference between these accents than between the American, Australian or British English accents.  The central and southern speeches are more melodious and relaxed, while the northern accent is sharp, and more precise in the distinction of tones.  These accents bear the cultural and historical marks of southward expansion of the Viet race; Central VN was the land of Champa Kingdom while South VN was part of Khmer Kingdom.

VNmese is a monosyllabic and tonal language; each syllable is formed with one or two vowels followed by a tone which is part of the vowels.  These tones are represented by the diacritic marks in the romanized script (4).  Some linguists suggested that VNmese might have been originally polysyllabic (5); under the influence of Chinese the original words might have been contracted and gradually became monosyllabic.

2.  THE OLD WRITTEN LANGUAGES:

In the long history of Viet Nam, different forms of written languages have been adopted:

CHỮ NHO can be literally translated as "the script used by Confucius" (Nho Giáo: Confucianism.)  Chữ Nho or Chinese characters had been the official written language in Viet Nam until the French domination (6).  Since the 9th century, following the ten centuries of Chinese domination, the VNmese King used Chữ Nho in all official  records, correspondences, and in the national examinations (7).  The use of Chinese characters in medieval VN, Korea, and Japan can be compared to the dominance of Latin in mediaval Europe.  Chữ Nho is still used in religious banners and placards for weddings, funerals, and festivals.

CHỮ NÔM: Hàn Thuyên (8), a famous VNmese poet in the 13th century was believed to be the developer of this form of writing.  Chữ Nôm borrowed Chinese characters but altered them to phonetically represent the spoken VNmese.  Usually two Chinese characters were combined; the unaltered one represented the meaning, the altered character reflected the VNmese pronunciation of the word.  It is a cumbersome process so Chữ Nôm can be literally translated as "vulgar" or "demotic".  This term reflected the official position of the VNmese royal court toward this written language. The development of Chữ Nôm came from the historical urge of the Việt race to have its own written language  and to neutralize or to lessen the Chinese influences in the VNmese  literature and culture.

The VNmese literati wrote outstanding masterpieces in Chữ Nôm:  "Chinh Phụ Ngâm" (Ballad of a Warrior's Wife) by Ðoàn Thị Ðiểm  (9),  "Cung Óan Ngâm Khúc" (Elegy of an Odalisk) by Nguyễn Gia Thiều (10), and "Kim Vân Kiều" by Nguyễn Du (1765-1820).

In Japan, Hira-gana and Kata-gana had been developed under similar cultural environment. Unlike Chữ Nôm, Hira-gana and Kata-gana got the blessing of the Japanese Imperial Court and evolved into the official Japanese written scripts replacing Chinese.

The introduction of Christianity into Viet Nam (17th century) and the French domination in the 19th century facilitated the emergence of a new form of written VNmese: the romanized QUỐC NGỮ.

3.  THE DEVELOPMENT OF QUỐC NGỮ:

Around the 16th and 17th centuries, Catholic priests developed romanized scripts for different Asian languages in order to translate prayers and catechism for their missionary works.  In 1548, a Japanese convert Yajiro began the romanization of the Japanese language.  In Hội An (Faifoo) there was a small community of Japanese merchants and the Catholic priests used the romanized Japanese catechism to teach the Bible to that community.  Using the pattern of romaji, the Jesuit priests started a new VNmese script. Thus the Quốc Ngữ was created. Father Alexendre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit priest, was widely credited as the inventor of Quốc Ngữ when he published the Portugese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary in 1651.

While the romanization of the written languages received a token welcome in China and Japan, Quốc Ngữ succeeded extraordinarily in Viet Nam.  It ultimately replaced both Chữ Nho and Chữ Nôm, and served as the catalyst for the nationalist movements to overthrow the French domination.  Quốc Ngữ evolves into the driving force for the social, cultural and political revolutions in Viet Nam in the 20th century.

4.  THE ROLE OF QUỐC NGỮ (QN) IN MODERN HISTORY OF VIET NAM:

After nearly 03 decades of war, the French colonialist completely conquered VN in 1884.  Under the French domination, QN had been taught as an "elective language" in VN besides French since 1906. Divide to conquer, the French split VN into three separated states.  They directly ruled Cochinchina (South VN) as a colony; Annam (Central VN) remained as an autonomous kingdom under the Nguyen dynasty while Tonkin (North VN) became a French protectorate.

In 1908, the Royal Court in Hue created the Ministry of Education to implement the QN curriculum in public schools. Not until 1919, did the Royal Court recognize QN as the official national written language (the literal translation of Quốc Ngữ is national language).

The French saw QN as a suitable tool to westernize the VNmese population, to undermine the national resistance through the assimilation of French culture, and to ease their colonial rule.  The VNmese revolutionaries also considered QN as a powerful vehicle to erase illiteracy, to educate the mass, and to fight the French in the cultural front. In 1906, Phan Bội Châu - a distinguished scholar and revolutionary in exile in Japan - sent a clandestine manifesto to VN urging the VNmese people to develop an universal education system using QN.  The popular national literacy campaign was actually a nationalist political movement in disguise.  Private schools teaching Quốc Ngữ had been opened; the most famous one was Ðông Kinh Nghĩa Thục in Ha Noi.  The French closed the school a couple years later under the suspicion that the students learned more about revolutionary ideas than conventional knowledge.

Graduates from Catholic schools were the first VNmese scholars who laid the foundation for QN; the most well known were Pétrus Trương Vĩnh Ký(11) and Paulus Huỳnh Tịnh Của (12).  They converted VNmese materpieces from Chu Nho and Chu Nom to QN. They also translated a vast amount of French literary works into QN.  Paulus Của composed the first comprehensive Vietnamese dictionary.

Other scholars expanded and refined QN into a practical and effective written language.  Researches in linguistics, phonetics, grammar, sciences, and books in literature and history had been published in abundance.  QN is easy to learn; an average adult can learn to read and write in just a few months.

In the early 20th century, ideologies of the French 1789 revolution was Introduced to the VNmese at the same time with French romanticism and logics through translated publications.  VNmese writers also published a large amount of novels and books exploring all aspects of the VNmese culture and society.  Patriotic themes were disguised under love stories, folklore researches or historical novels to avoid the French censorship.

The world wide events of that era and their ramification had been quickly communicated to the VNmese mass through QN:  the victory of Japan over the Russian fleet in 1905, the nationalist Chinese revolution in 1911, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.  The modern printing technology also had facilitated the publishing of newspapers and magazines, as well as underground revolutionary literatures representing a wide spectrum of political movements from loyalist to Bolshevik communist.

At the end of WWII, QN was resourceful and robust to support the VNmese curriculum from grade school to college level.  The term Quoc Ngữ is now seldom used, it is now "tiếng Việt" (the Vietnamese languagẹ).  With the explosion of electronic publishing and communication media, the overseas VNmsese have developed successful VNmese word processing computer programs; the major hurdle still is the complex system of diacritic marks.

5.  TECHNICALITIES OF QUOC NGU:

The refined QN alphabets are quite different from the first roman alphabets used by the Catholic priests in early 18th centurỵ QN now has 27 consonnants and 12 vowels. The 27 consonnants are: b, c, ch, d (equivalent to the English Z), đ, g, gh, gi, h, k, kh, l, m, n, ng, ngh, nh, ph (equivalent to F), q, r, s, t, th, tr, v and x.  The 12 vowels are a, e, i, o, u, y (13) and these derivatives ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư.

The spoken Vietnamese is monosyllabic with six different tones.  Five diacritic marks differentiate these tones:

     flat tone            no mark

     high rising  '       (sắc)

     low falling  `       (huyền)

     falling-rising, constricted ? (hỏi)

     high-rising, broken   ~ (ngã)

     low-falling, short constricted . (nặng)

Many VNmese words are almost identical except for the marks mentioned above.  These marks are essential for the written VNmese because the words are pronounced differently, and have different meanings.  For example:

        ma              means ghost

        má              mother (southern accent) or cheek

        mà              who, which, that, whom

        mả              tomb

        mã            horse or appearance

        mạ              young rice seeding, or mother (central)

The VNmese grammar is simple and straightforward.  The words are invariable.  Special marker words preceding the nouns express plurality.  Special markers also specify genders of the noun, tenses of the verbs and the relationship of subject and object in a sentence.  Simple sentences in VNmese are built in the  order:  SUJECT + VERB + OBJECT.  Sometimes the subject or the verb is omitted when the context of the phrase or the paragraph imply them.  Verbs are not conjugated, pronouns and adjectives are not declined and grammatical distinctions are achieved through changes in words order.

There is a large amount of compound words formed by the linkage of two words that are connected by a hyphen.  Based on this observation, some linguistics maintain that the VNmese language probably comes from an ancient polysyllabic root.

Another important feature in the written VNmese is the system personal pronouns.  They indicate the subject/object relationship and reflect an unique tradition of the VNmese culture.

CONCLUSION:

Since the VNmese intelligentsia threw away the brush and learned how to handle the iron tip pen in 1920 (Tú Xương (14) : Quẳng bút lông đi cầm bút sắt).  Quốc Ngữ has played a vital role in the social, cultural and political revolution in VN. QN rose from the disgraceful "elective language" under the French domination to be the venerable national language of VN.

It can be said without any ambiguity that the history of Quốc Ngữ mirrors the history of modern VN.  The VNmese people used QN as a cultural weapon to fight the French; the French culture was formidable but the VNmese culture, like the bamboo tree, bended, rebounded but never broke.  The refined and systemized Tiếng Việt has fulfilled its mission in the 20th century.  With more than two millions overseas VNmese in America and in Europe, extensive movements are underway to use Tiếng Việt as the catalyst for the next CULTURAL and ECONOMIC revolution in the 21st century, the Asian century.

Dương Hùng

(1) register to news group soc.culture.japan; some of the postings are in romaji.

(2) Mường, Thái are a minority groups in North VN with  close ethnic characteristics to the VNmese.

(3)  Hundred Yueh, a group of autonomous states in ancient China whose territories covered the coastal areas from the Yangste River to Quang Dong, Quang Chau provinces.

(4) Romanized VNmese has 12 vowels while English has five.

(5) The languages of VN 's neighbors Laos, Kampuchia and Thailand are all  polysyllabic.

(6) The French completely dominated VN in 1884.

(7) Thi Hội ( Bachelor Exam) and Thi Hương (Doctorate Exam).

(8) Hàn Thuyên was a poet in the 13th century; his poems were the first written in chữ nôm. The development of Chữ Nôm could start as early as in the  8th century.

(9) Ðoàn Thị Ðiểm (1705-1746) translated the original "Chinh phụ Ngâm" by Ðă.ng Trần Côn from chữ Nho to chữ Nôm.  The translation is the most well known and popular version.

(10) He also hold the title of Ôn Như Hầu (Marquis Ôn Như) (1741-1788).

(11) Petrus Ký (1837-1898) was a scholar, journalist and linguist.  He served as the translator for Ambassador Phan Thanh Giản on a mission to Napoleon III court in 1863.

(12) Paulus Của (1834-1907) was scholar fluent in Chinese and French; he published the first VNmese dictionary Ðại Nam Quốc Âm Tự Vị in 1896.

(13) In many instances Y can be replaced by I, ex: qui and quy are the same but the combination of Y and I with other vowels are not interchanged, ex:  tai (ear) is very different from tay (hand).

(14) Trần Tế Xương (1870-1907) was well known for his poems voicing the frustration with life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Ðào Duy Anh,  Việt Nam Văn Hóa Sử Cương

Publisher : Bốn Phương, Saigon, 1951

Dương Quảng Hàm, Việt Nam Văn Học Sử Yếu

Publisher : Nha Học Chính Ðông Pháp, Ha Noi, 1942

Trần Trọng Kim, Việt Nam Sử Lược

Publisher : Tân Việt, Saigon, 1948

Nguyễn Đình Hoà, Vietnamese-English Dictionary

Publisher : Charles E. Tuttle, Tokyo, 1966