Babel, page 2
Vietnamese seemed a good choice. Unlike most other options, such as Arabic, Hindi and Korean, it wouldn’t require learning a whole new alphabet, nor, heaven forbid, thousands of Chinese characters. And since Vietnamese was going to be the protagonist of the opening chapter, it would allow me to dip into many features of foreign languages early on in the book. An additional, private motive was that I hoped I might address Tuyet, our Vietnamese cleaning lady, in her mother tongue, preferably by surprise. So I made my choice, picked a self-study book that appealed to me* and set out on my journey. This chapter is an account of that journey.
Early acquaintance
Written Vietnamese makes a striking first impression: no other language that I know of has so many diacritics. As a young boy, I found my father’s Paris Match exotic because of the numerous é’s, à’s and î’s and endless apostrophes, yet French looks stark and unadorned compared to Vietnamese. With no fewer than nine different diacritics (á, à, ả, ã, ạ, â, ă, đ and ơ – I love the informal term ‘whiskered o’ for this last one), it’s a language for people with keen eyes. Words and even letters with several diacritics are by no means rare: I soon discover that Tuyet’s name is actually spelt Tuyết (and that it means ‘snow’).
These accents are necessary to ensure correct pronunciation, but they add considerably to the burden of memorisation. Fortunately, written Vietnamese also seems to have a plus side: nearly all words are monosyllabic. Words of up to six letters must be easier to memorise than those centipede-shaped things that German, Russian and Turkish are so fond of.
More good news: unlike English, Vietnamese spelling reflects pronunciation pretty accurately. Not that all spelling rules make intuitive sense. Why have three different ways of writing a /z/ sound – and why should the letter z not be one of them? Also, why have three different ways of writing a /k/ sound? (Though of course, in English, we write can, keen and queen rather than kan, keen and kween.) Another intricacy of Vietnamese is the distinction between t and th, the former a /t/ sound, the latter a /th/ sound – that is to say, a /t/ with a little puff of air. In English we write both as t, so we can hardly complain if Vietnamese prefers to be more precise.
On the whole, I would call Vietnamese pronunciation easy if it weren’t for the elephant in the room, the big fat singing elephant that bedevils most East Asian languages: tone. Each word must be vocalised according to one ‘tune’ from a total repertoire of six. I knew this beforehand, but I hoped that as a native speaker of a tonal regional language (Limburgish) I would take it in my stride. No such luck: six tones is very different from the paltry two I’m used to. Use the wrong tone, and ‘here’ becomes ‘there’ (ĐY, ĐẤY) and the meaning of ĐI changes from ‘go’ to ‘prostitute’ (ĐĨ), ‘scrotum’ or ‘ill-treat’ (both ĐĨ). Fortunately, Vietnamese spelling is helpful: five of the nine diacritics are there to indicate the correct tone; the sixth tone is marked by the absence of these five. The result of this is that Vietnamese writing is equal parts text and score.
There’s something insidious about the grammar of Vietnamese. On the one hand, it’s easy in all the places where experience has taught me to expect hard work. Verbal conjugation, the ordeal of most European languages? None to speak of: you just add a handful of simple particles that never change, and even those can often be omitted. Cases, as in Latin and Greek, the Slavic group and German? Entirely non-existent. Irregular plurals, as in the Slavic group,* Danish and German? Vietnam doesn’t even have plurals as we know them. All of which can be summarised as: no endings! Vietnamese words stay as they are. They never change. Hard to believe, but true.
But just when I’m beginning to hope that Vietnamese might turn out to be rather easier than I thought, several gremlins emerge.
Gremlin 1: the personal pronouns, which are … hell, where do we even start? The trouble with Vietnamese pronouns is that there are so many. You do not simply say ‘I’ and ‘you’ – there is a multitude of Is and yous to choose from, partly depending on gender, but also on respect and age. The pronoun you choose creates a specific type of relationship. Even if you use the most neutral word for ‘I’, TÔI, it’s not really neutral, because it makes you sound terribly aloof, which is no way to win friends.
Much more common than the neutral or distant pronouns are pronouns that, in literal translation, designate all sorts of family relationships. If you are somewhat older than me, I will address you as ANH (older brother) or CHỊ (older sister), while referring to myself as EM (younger sibling). However, if you’re younger, I will call you EM and refer to myself (being male) as ANH. Note that all three words may mean either ‘I’ or ‘you’, depending on who is saying them to whom. If the characters in a Vietnamese dialogue use these pronouns, the first thing to do is figure out, from context, who’s junior and who’s senior, so you can tell which pronoun refers to whom. Entirely different words again come into play if the age difference is wider. The reason why Loan and I in the above dialogue called each other BÁC and CHÁU (literally: ‘uncle/aunt’ and ‘niece/nephew’) is that I’m about the same age as her parents. Incidentally, I didn’t insert these words into the dialogue for local colour: Vietnamese people commonly use them even in English.
The second gremlin is what I will call ‘labyrinthine sentences’. Of course, when you’re starting on a new language, it’s normal to feel clueless. But with other languages, even if the meaning of words is unclear, I can usually tell what sorts of words they are. Numerous signals – endings, neighbouring articles and pronouns, et cetera – help me recognise if I am being baffled by a verb, puzzled by a noun or beaten by an adjective. That is comforting and useful, like being able to make out vague shapes in the darkness. Since Vietnamese has no endings and no articles but too many pronouns, it’s all too easy to get utterly and completely lost in a sentence.
I soon discover another complication. Many common Vietnamese words can be verbs, nouns, prepositions or yet another part of speech, with meanings that may or may not be related. CHỉ can be ‘to point’ or ‘only’. ở often means ‘at’ but can also mean ‘to be, to stay’. Là can mean ‘to be’ (‘is’, ‘are’, ‘was’, et cetera) but also ‘that’, as in ‘she said that…’ And ĐƯỢC has so many meanings and grammatical purposes, I’m warned, that one can only ever hope to develop a feel for it through lots and lots of practice.
There is yet another gremlin: word order. The basic word order is child’s play: subject, verb, object, same as in English. Adjectives follow their nouns, which is different from English, but familiar from French or Spanish. Unfortunately, other types of Vietnamese words and phrases are both fussy and fickle in their placement preferences. One word for ‘very’ precedes the adjective (RẤT LỚN, ‘very big’), the other insists on following it (LỚN LẮM, ‘big very’). KHI NÀO (when) at the end of a sentence tends to refer back to the past, whereas it eyes the future when employed at the beginning. One particle for past tense comes before the verb (ĐĀ), the other after it (RỒI). Et cetera, et maddening cetera.
Pronunciation and grammar have hard bits, but also quite a few easy ones. In vocabulary, the easy bits are few and far between. Given the European influences that Vietnam has undergone since the late nineteenth century, I expected to find numerous loanwords. If only! Barring foreign names and some rare words of foreign extraction, Vietnamese text consists of deeply alien, impenetrable gatherings of one to six letters which have to be learnt by rote. I can’t say the prospect does much to strengthen my motivation.
Nor do my first real-life encounters with the language. I’ve just given a TED talk about the individual and collective blessings of multilingualism, in which I’ve briefly mentioned my romp with Vietnamese, when I’m addressed by a friendly young man of East Asian appearance. I don’t understand a word he says. He helpfully shifts to German, explaining that he has just said hello to me in the language of his parents – a phrase from my very first lesson, actually, which I have failed to recognise. And when some time later I greet our cleaning lady, Tuyết, in Vietnamese, her reaction is one of irritation rather than pleasant surprise. I guess that the pronoun I chose suggested that she was younger than her sixty years, which in Vietnamese culture is not a compliment.
In early April, after a six-month struggle, I call a halt.
Estrangement and renewed acquaintance
Throughout the summer, while I’m working on this book, Vietnamese leaves me cold. But these months also take me to several places on the margins of Europe where relatively small languages are spoken (Bulgarian, Norwegian, Irish), and I feel my linguistic hunger returning. As the writing of this Vietnamese chapter draws nearer, I begin to hate the idea that I’ve thrown in the towel so soon. And one chilly October evening, while huffing and puffing at the gym, I make up my mind: I’m going to pick up the thread, but under more inspiring conditions. I will find myself an online teacher and plan a trip to Vietnam. That same week, I book a flight and apartment for March. And through italki.com, I contact Huyền, who describes herself as ‘an accidental polyglot’. She met her boyfriend when she was looking for a Spanish teacher, and since he’s a native speaker of Catalan, she went on to master that as well. When talking to his parents, she likes to throw in elements of their insular dialect, Menorquí. She seems right up my street.
The plan works out. Our one-on-one classes are fun and since I don’t want to make a fool of myself, I diligently revise the grammar and refresh my vocabulary. The good news is that Huyền understands what I say. I can’t say much by myself, mind you, but when I read sentences aloud, they are intelligible. The bad news is that when she speaks, it almost sounds like white noise to me. To a tiny degree, that is due to her very slight regional accent, but the real problem is me – as well as Vietnamese, I think it’s fair to say. Me, because understanding speech is my poorest skill in any language. And Vietnamese, because the obstacles to reading – all the non-existent endings and articles and the overdose of pronouns – are even more cumbersome at the moment of listening. Moreover, several groups of vowels (ơ and â, e and ê, a, o and ă) sound quite similar to me, and many word-final consonants are barely audible: pairs like BÁT and BÁC are best distinguished by lip-reading, while for BẠT versus BẠN, even that won’t do the trick.
When I’m not studying, I read about the language. I discover why so few Vietnamese words sound familiar to Westerners. In spite of eight decades of French colonialism and four decades of Soviet alliance, Chinese* remained the main source of borrowing until well into the twentieth century. This was a matter partly of 2,000-year habit, partly of phonetic affinity, which made borrowing Chinese relatively easy. Of course, Chinese words are as alien to me as Vietnamese words. With at least one exception, Huyền points out: the Vietnamese word HIỆN ĐẠI derives from the same Chinese word as the Korean brand name Hyundai. Their common meaning is ‘modern’.
But wait a sec: weren’t all Vietnamese words supposed to be short and monosyllabic? It turns out that they only look that way. Thousands of them really consist of two syllables, sometimes more. It’s just that every syllable gets written separately – a legacy of the time when the language was written in Chinese-style characters, one character per syllable. The same group of letters with spaces on either side may be a word or a syllable, depending on context. It’s as if English were to write context as ‘con text’, or protocol as ‘pro to col’.
Russian loanwords in Vietnamese are surprisingly scarce: I’ve only found internationalisms such as ‘kulak’, ‘soviet’, ‘ruble’ and ‘tsar’ (CU-LẮC, XÔ VIẾT, RÚP, SA HOÀNG – literally ‘tsar emperor’). My favourite is ‘Marxism-Leninism’: CHỦ NGHĨA MÁC-LENIN. MacLenin! The Vietnamese flag shows one golden star against the typical red background of most MacLeninist states – but whenever I see it now, the golden arches of McJunkfood superimpose themselves.
Since Vietnam has opened up to a global economy dominated by English, some words from that language have entered Vietnamese, e.g. internet, photocopy, data, blog and golf. But it’s a trickle, not a deluge. For English words like website, cyberspace and app, which are widespread elsewhere, indigenous terms are in common use. And even borrowings are rewarded with a new spelling, reflecting Vietnamese pronunciation: IN-TƠ-NÉT, ĐA-TA, BỜ LÓC (blog), GÔN (golf).
If these spelling changes make some loanwords from English hard to recognise, this is all the more true for those from French, which have had more time to blend in. In the colonial era (late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth), dozens, perhaps hundreds of words were adopted, mostly cultural novelties and technical innovations. Can you identify the following? SÔ-CÔ-LA, SM BANH, MÙ TẠC, CÔNG-TẮC, GIĂM BÔNG, XI MĂNG, KEM, KI-ỐT, LƠ.*
If Vietnamese dislikes borrowing from the West and loves to naturalise what little it does borrow, it follows that, for a newcomer to the language, building up a decent vocabulary implies starting near zero and working hard to lay just a foundation. We do not always realise what an abundance of vocabulary we are handed on a plate when we study French, Spanish or German, from organisation to hygiene and from algebra to yogurt. True, the plate is not quite as laden with gifts when we move to Europe’s linguistic margins, but neither is it empty, thanks to centuries of cultural cross-pollination: our manager and the French word PAYSAGE for ‘landscape’ are also present in both Russian and Turkish. Even in languages spoken further afield, such as Swahili, Tamil and Malay, words of European stock are far from rare. And with Arabic, which seems so outlandish to Anglophones, centuries of exchange have produced more commonality than we tend to think (see chapter 5). In Vietnamese, on the other hand, we have to make do with MÙ TẠC and SM BANH.
The grammar in particular proves to be more intractable than it had at first appeared to be. A simple sentence like ‘Do you live in this beautiful house?’ assumes a very different sort of simplicity in Vietnamese, and it takes quite a few steps to get from one to the other. Step 1: choose a form for ‘you’ that correctly expresses gender, age and respect. Step 2: place this ‘you’ word at the very start. Step 3: for the sentence to be a question, delete the English ‘do’ and add a question word at the end. Step 4: reorder ‘this beautiful house’ to ‘house beautiful this’. Hey presto: Chị sống ở nhà đẹp này không?
‘Almost correct’, Huyền says. ‘Just one word missing.’ Ah, right. Step 5 then: ‘house’ has to be preceded by a little something to turn the general concept of ‘any house’ into this specific specimen we’re talking about. In English, the determiner this will do the job just fine, but Vietnamese usually insists that the noun should be preceded by a so-called classifier, which in this case is CÁI. And so I gradually discover that some grammatical rules are complex. The one about classifiers is a prime example, because the correct choice of these pesky little words is governed by dozens of rules with even peskier exceptions. Thankfully, CÁI can be used for most concrete objects, but there are numerous other categories too, each of which requires its own classifier: one for vehicles, another one for books, one for plants. There’s also one for round things, such as eggs and balls, and okay, I can see that this should be a fitting class for most fruits – but why do bananas get the same classifier? Also, why do rivers, knives, eyes and other assorted items grammatically behave as if they were animals? And then there are some self-sufficient nouns that resist any classifier. I can’t figure out what defines this group.
Some grammatical surprises are fun (to some people anyway). For example, the Vietnamese language would use different words for ‘how’ in questions meaning ‘how long was the snake?’ and ‘how scary was the snake?’ Length can be measured, therefore the first question is rendered as ‘the snake is long how much?’ Degrees of scariness on the other hand cannot be conveyed very precisely, and therefore the correct wording is more along the lines of ‘The snake is scary like how?’ It’s reminiscent of the difference in English between many and few versus much and little. The Vietnamese realise that a snake of few centimetres has little scariness, whereas many result in much more of it.
Even after months of trying, I still don’t understand Huyền when she speaks Vietnamese. Fortunately, however, my reading skills are benefiting from her teaching. The meanings of some words are now immediately evident to me, without consciously looking them up in my mental lexicon. As a result, the structure of sentences is becoming clearer. Which isn’t to say that I understand them. When my eyes flit across a line of Vietnamese text, what registers in my brain might be rendered as follows (each number represents one word, or perhaps syllable, who knows?):
1. young male or female; 2. does something; 3. in; 4. some place; 5. already (must be past tense then); 6. because; 7. s/he; 8. wants to – or rather, wanted to; 9. được (God help me, that’s ‘được’ of the 99 meanings – passive voice here perhaps?); 10. must be a verb, but no idea which; 11. could be anything; 12. house (or family, or expert); 13. no idea; 14. no idea, I’m lost; 15. much/many.
That’s what progress looks like.
Poor show, you’ll be saying to yourself. Yet in a way, I’m doing better than Google Translate. More often than not, the software spouts pure gobbledygook. It is stumped by the pronouns, flummoxed by the grammar and wrong-footed by the many homonyms. ‘I only ever use it when I want to have a laugh,’ Huyền says. On the other hand, Google does know thousands of words, so it has that advantage over me.
At some point, I also discover how to input Vietnamese diacritics on my laptop and telephone (two different systems, unfortunately, called VNI and Telex respectively), and within weeks I’m conjuring up ể’s, đ’s and ự’s like a pro.
