Babel, page 3
A few weeks before departure, I’m going to the embassy for a visa. I decide against trying to say anything in Vietnamese, as I’d be bound to embarrass myself. While the embassy official reads my application, I try to decipher the information signs behind him, but I come up empty. The official looks up and says: ‘Language study? In three weeks?’
A few days later, a book about Hanoi written by two European expats tells me, ‘Expect your efforts in Vietnamese to go unrecognised at first. Your attempts to speak the language may well be rewarded with “Sorry, no English.’”
Can it really be as bad as that? I’ll soon find out.
Being there
As soon as I’ve shaken off my jet lag, I take a liking to Hanoi. Granted, it’s crowded, cluttered and dirty. It’s huge, almost preposterously noisy and not over-endowed with parks and historical buildings. Its streets are mostly taken up by an oozing mass of scooters and small motorbikes. The continuous din of engines, horns, building sites and telephones vibrates in an almost liquid atmospheric soup of dust, exhaust gases and water vapour. Being a pedestrian is hard work, because the pavements too are mostly taken up by motorbikes, always parked at right angles so as to better block the way. What gaps remain are filled with racks of clothes and other merchandise, street-food cooks, repairers, and the collections of child-sized furniture that pass for café terraces here.
If I enjoy Hanoi nonetheless, it’s because of its people. For starters, they don’t stare at you, not even when they see one’s tây (Western) features approaching at the rarefied height of 6 feet 1½. In Hanoi, people mind their own business as long as you mind yours. Once you approach them, they nearly always respond politely, and often in a friendly manner. (Even my least favourite Hanoi folks, motorcycle taxi drivers, try to remain friendly while working their swindles.) When there’s a language barrier, they’re patient and inventive. Whenever I say or do something clumsy or culturally insensitive, they’re discreet. In a word, people in Hanoi seem to live their public lives in the key of C, for civil, frequently modulating to F (friendly). Like everyone else, of course, they at times express anger (A sharp), blues (B flat) or desperation (D), but rather than modulating their public behaviour to these keys, they’ll just shift from C to C minor or from F to F minor. It’s all rather refreshing – I’d almost call it a tonic.
Back to the language. How’s my progress?
I’m having mini dialogues with my Airbnb hostess, He, but they’re based more on mutual goodwill than any real comprehension. On one occasion, I talk to the housekeeper, thanking her for hanging out my laundry, or so I believe. In fact, some grammatical error makes it sound – so I later understand from my host, Phong, who speaks English – as if I’m asking her to help me with the laundry.
‘Because we understand you’ reads the TPBank slogan – and for once, I understand them.
But I am learning, slowly. Most weekdays, I spend two hours or more working with Loan. In restaurants, I place orders in Vietnamese – but if I ask a question, no matter in which language, English-speaking co-workers are called upon to save the day. I have rudimentary chats with cabbies, but we sit in silence most of the time. All day long, at home, on the streets and in shops, I see Vietnamese words, and some of them put down roots in my memory: THẻ for ‘(telephone) card’, SIêU THỊ for ‘supermarket’, XOÀI for ‘mango’, RửA XE ‘carwash’, HẠT SEN for ‘lotus seeds’. It strikes me how rare English words are in public space, while French, the former colonial language, is practically absent. (More about the fate of colonial languages in chapter 9.)
I gradually discover more about the intricacies of respect and politeness. When Loan says ‘yes’ to me, the word for her to use is VNG; for me, on the other hand, the correct word to use in response to her is ờ or ừ. At the end of a sentence, she regularly adds ạ, whose only function is to express respect where respect is due – but it would be silly if I, being older, said that to her. The most common way of forming a question is by attaching KHÔNG to the sentence; I could replace the word with the more casual Hả when
asking her a question, but her doing so when addressing me would be taking a liberty. Learning these things is part of a Vietnamese education, and when children are careless or recalcitrant enough to break the rules, parents will scold them for talking trống không, something like ‘empty and plain’.
To me, as an egalitarian Western European, such linguistic etiquette is awkward and old-fashioned, and I wonder if it has any chance of surviving in a society that is rapidly modernising. Don’t young Vietnamese people hate it? One young woman tells me that, vâng, she would much prefer the language to be like English and have just one word for ‘you’, one for ‘I’ et cetera, with none of this ‘younger sibling’, ‘uncle’ and ‘grandma’ business. But I speak to other young people who value the practice. One of them is Huyền, whom I get to meet during my stay. ‘By calling you “uncle”, my friend “sister” and my Dad “father”, I feel part of a bigger whole,’ she says. ‘I have my own place. And it’s not as if my father or you can boss me about. Regardless of pronouns, I’m my own person, with my own life’ (and her own company). If an urban, well-travelled young person with a European partner feels this way about it, then people with more traditional lifestyles are likely to embrace the custom even more wholeheartedly. And while I am the product of a tradition quite different to hers, I begin to relate to at least one aspect of it. Young people calling me ‘uncle’ and me reciprocating with ‘niece/nephew’ feels weird at first, but I grow to appreciate it. It is neither needlessly remote nor too close for comfort.
The strong Vietnamese sense of respect owed to age shows in more than just grammar. One evening, I sit in a coffee shop with Loan and a friend of hers, chatting and waiting for Mike, who runs the language school that employs her. When he arrives, we shake hands, and while he finds himself a chair and orders a drink, I turn to Loan to wrap up our previous topic of conversation. Her slightly startled words and gestures, however, immediately impress upon me that I am now supposed to focus my undivided attention on Mike, as he is noticeably older than her – and her boss. I’m keenly aware that I’ve just behaved like a tây.
And thus, studying and reading, wandering around and blundering about, I feel my vocabulary grow. Even the tones are becoming inseparable parts of the words I know. Or perhaps I should say: the tonal signs, for my speaking feels a lot like reading out loud what my mind’s eye sees. Indeed, I notice that while I speak, my hand behaves like something between a prompter and a musical director, gesturing the approximate shapes of the tones.
Words of Chinese origin comprise an increasing proportion of the new words that I’m trying to learn, and many of them are compounds consisting of two syllables. Most of these syllables have a meaning of their own in Chinese, but less often in Vietnamese. Even when their meanings can be figured out, these borrowed syllables are often bothersome. CHỦ, for instance, is derived from a Chinese word for ‘owner’, ‘master’, ‘lord’ or ‘principal’. Vietnamese has borrowed quite a few Chinese compounds containing this word, in some of which this meaning is recognisable, while in others, not so much. CHỦ NHN for instance, literally ‘owner-person’, means simply ‘owner’. DN CHỦ, ‘people (being) lord’, is ‘democracy’. Much less transparent is CHỦ TỊCH for ‘president, chair(man)’, because the second part, TỊCH, from a Chinese word for ‘seat’ or ‘banquet’, does not occur as a separate word in Vietnamese. Even more mysterious is CHỦ NGHĨA: the second half stands for ‘sense’ or ‘morality’, but the compound means ‘doctrine’ – it represented ‘ism’ in the word for ‘Marxism-Leninism’ we saw above.
The Vietnamese have also created their own compounds with CHỦ. An old one is CHỦ NHẬT for ‘Sunday’, literally ‘Lord-day’. This compound follows the grammatical pattern of Chinese, which usually functions like English in this respect: day comes at the end, while the noun or adjective giving additional information about the day (Sun-, Lord-) goes before it. But more recent compounds have been coined in accordance with Vietnamese grammar, which works the opposite way: main word first, additional information second. Examples of this are CHỦ XE for ‘car owner’ (literally owner-vehicle) and CHỦ NỢ debtor (‘owner-debt’). Compounds-of-compounds may contain both orders: a TRƯỜNG CHỦ NHẬT or ‘Sunday school’, literally a ‘school lord day’.
All of this fascinates the linguist in me, but it horrifies the student. For what am I to think when I encounter CHỦ? I have to consider the option that it occurs here as a one-syllable word. However, it’s more likely to be part of a compound, either with the preceding word (as in the word for ‘democracy’) or with the following word (as in ‘Sunday’, ‘car owner’ and many others) – or with both. In compounds, the overall meaning may be completely transparent (‘owner-car’, hence ‘car owner’), easy to grasp (‘owner of debt’, hence ‘debtor’; ‘people-lord’, hence ‘democracy’) or pretty much unfathomable (‘master-seat’ for ‘president’).
Curiously, this whole complex and daunting business is paralleled closely by things that English and other Western European languages also do. Take this habit of plundering a prestigious foreign language. Just as Vietnamese has endlessly drawn from Chinese, so English has drawn from both Latin and Greek. Words like construction, instructor and structure have all come to us from Latin, either directly or through French. Few people know or care that they’ve all been derived from the Latin verb STRUěRE meaning ‘to build’, nor do they need to. And just as the Vietnamese have taken CHỦ and run with it, building new words as they saw fit, so English words such as infrastructure and deconstruct weren’t coined until modern times, even though they look as Latin as anything else with struct in it. Ditto with Greek: philosophy and democracy are classical terms, but anthroposophy and kleptocracy aren’t, even though they were formed from Greek elements.
Posters are fertile ground for language learners. This one asks us to ‘Celebrate the Reformation, Celebrate the Glorious Party, Celebrate the Spring of the Year of the Dog’.
As for disorderly compounds, just compare English bring up with upbringing, in-depth with lie-in, outrun and run out… And now imagine having to master all this while your first language is Vietnamese. (Yet Huyền has managed somehow. She’s a niece-prodigy.)
I have to face it: even when my three weeks are nearly up, I can still say very little and understand less. That’s for two reasons. Firstly, I haven’t talked enough. I’m interested not primarily in understanding language – utterances – but in understanding the language – the structure of Vietnamese. I do want to communicate, to be sure, but there’s just enough English around me to meet that need. When I was in Spain as a student, I was mostly surrounded by Spaniards whose English was worse than my Spanish, and I’m still grateful to them for it. But Loan and her friends, Huyền and her boyfriend, my admirable host Phong: while I’m grateful to them for other reasons, they speak English so well that it remains our language of choice. Many cabbies, shopkeepers and waiters don’t, but how much time does one spend with them?
The second reason is that Vietnamese is difficult. Let me add one last piece of evidence. Vietnamese expresses many things in a fundamentally different way from European languages. Information is presented by means of other formulas, with other types of words. At Hanoi Central Station, a public panel with a timetable and some legal provisions isn’t captioned ‘Information’ but ‘Dear travellers ought to know’. If you say ‘I was taken to the theatre’, the correct word for ‘was’ can be ‘got’ or something like ‘endured’, depending on whether you went gladly or reluctantly. For ‘What’s the difference?’ you use ‘Where different?’ For ‘thing’, you have to choose from a whole range of options, such as ‘story’, ‘object’ or a classifier – the correct classifier, that is. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of these aspects of Vietnamese; they all make as much or as little sense as our own phrases and formulas. But as speakers of European languages, we have to learn them, one by one.
The more I realise how pervasive these differences are, the more I tend to agree with the Chinese polyglot who once remarked that ‘European languages are a lot like dialects of each other’. Seen from afar, they really are.
Going home
The last few days before returning home I let my discipline slip as I afford myself the luxury of agonising over whether I should give up or press on. Vietnamese is tough and, let’s face it, not enormously useful in practical terms. I would like to visit the country again, but as a tourist you don’t really need the language. And outside Vietnam, it’s not much more than a party trick. Literature? More Vietnamese novels have been translated into English than I’m ever likely to read.
‘Can you think of reasons for me to continue?’ I ask Huyền. ‘Vietnam offers good economic opportunities’, she says after some thought. ‘And once you know Vietnamese, it’s much easier to learn Chinese.’ I’m not sure if that is a comforting thought.
* I’m grateful to Assimil for providing me with their Vietnamese course. In the ‘Sources and further reading’ section at the end of this book, I list the learning resources I’ve used.
* Note that the Slavic languages are in several ways the diametrical opposites of Vietnamese. For decades, the Soviet Union was Vietnam’s main ally, which drove two suffering generations to studying Russian – which is Slavic.
* I use the word ‘Chinese’ because Mandarin has not been the primary source from which Vietnamese has borrowed. Southern Chinese languages have played a more important role.
* The French sources of the Vietnamese loanwords are: CHOCOLAT, CHAMPAGNE, MOUTARDE, CONTACT, JAMBON, CIMENT, CRÈME, KIOSQUE and BLEU.
19
Korean
han’gugŏ (South Korea)
chosŏnmal (North Korea)
85 million speakers
Korean has more than 80 million native speakers and a few million second-language speakers. Significant Korean communities exist in China, Japan, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and the United States.
Korean
SELF-DESIGNATION (Han’gugŏ; South Korea); (Chosŏnmal; North Korea). The name of South Korea’s standard language is (P’yojunŏ), that of North Korea’s (Munhwaŏ).
FAMILY Korean is considered a language isolate, which means it has no living relatives. However, the variety spoken by a few thousand people on Cheju island is so different that it is considered a separate language. Historical family links with Japanese, Mongolian and perhaps other Asian languages have been proposed but rejected.
SCRIPT In the twentieth century, the fifteenth-century Hangeul alphabet finally became widespread. Previously, the Chinese character script was cherished by the intellectual elite.
GRAMMAR Korean has no gender. The case system consists of seven cases, indicated by particles, i.e. small separate words after the noun. Verbs can have several out of forty suffixes, which indicate person, formality, mood and tense.
SOUNDS Somewhat unusually for East Asia, Korean is not a tonal language. Korean used to have ten different vowel sounds, but in modern speech only eight remain. There are twenty-one different consonants. The /p/, /t/, /k/ and /ch/ sounds exist in three different varieties, together making up more than half of the complete set. The vowel (or diphthong) of a syllable cannot be preceded or followed by more than one consonant.
LOANWORDS Historically, Korean has borrowed massively from Chinese. Since the twentieth century, North Korea has adopted Russian words, South Korea English ones.
EXPORTS Two familiar Korean words are kimchi (pickled vegetables) and the sport of taekwondo. Several well-known brand names are of Korean origin, including Samsung (from SAMSŏNG, ‘three stars’), Hyundai (HYŎNDAE, ‘modern’) and Daewoo (or TAEU, ‘great Woo’, Woo being the founder).
JARGONS APART The languages of North and South Korea are drifting apart, especially in modern terminology. In the run-up to the 2018 Winter Olympics, players of the joint ice-hockey team found they used completely different jargons: English-derived in the South, home-grown in the North. The same is undoubtedly true in other sectors, such as technology and information sciences.
19: Korean
Sound and sensibility
There should be a word for words that sound like things would sound like if they made a noise, he thought. The word ‘glisten’ does indeed gleam oilily, and if there ever was a word that sounded exactly the way sparks look as they creep across burned paper, or the way the lights of cities would creep across the world if the whole of human civilization was crammed into one night, then you couldn’t do better than ‘coruscate’.
EQUAL RITES, TERRY PRATCHETT
IF ONE LINGUISTIC NOTION was hammered home by my adventures in Vietnamese, it was this: the sound of a word bears precious little relation to its meaning. Learning the basic vocab of a language is mostly a matter of brute perseverance, of memorising one damn word after another. There’s nothing about GIƯỜNG to suggest it means ‘bed’. It might just as well be ‘awake’, ‘seven’ or a swear word. In Korean, the word is CH’IMDAE, which is no more inherently beddish than GIƯỜNG, LIT, CAMA, KITANDA, YATAK (Vietnamese, French, Spanish/Portuguese, Swahili and Turkish) or indeed the word bed.
The randomness of vocabulary is a basic characteristic of human language, or at least this is what highly influential Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure claimed in the early twentieth century. He taught his students that ‘the entire linguistic system is founded upon the irrational principle that the sign [i.e. the word] is arbitrary’. Centuries earlier, William Shakespeare had Juliet phrase a similar thought rather more memorably when she mused on the rose, its name and its smell.
