Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 448- Could Chữ Nôm Be Considered the Premodern Vietnamese Hip Hop? Viet Origins with Professor John Phan

Transcript

448- Could Chữ Nôm Be Considered the Premodern Vietnamese Hip Hop? Viet Origins with Professor John Phan · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:00
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back, everybody.
0:01
[SPEAKER_02]: We have John today, back with our series, our sub-series.
0:06
[SPEAKER_02]: We finally came up with the name and I think this name works.
0:10
[SPEAKER_02]: It's the origins series.
0:14
[SPEAKER_02]: We're not sure if it's the origins of Vietnam or Vietnamese origins, but I think the word origins is out for the series.
0:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I think, you know, we're thinking maybe we can talk about where different types of things in Vietnamese culture or language come from.
0:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So not necessarily the ultimate origins of everything.
0:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
0:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But, you know, the roots of many different things that we see in Vietnamese culture today, Vietnam origins.
0:42
[SPEAKER_02]: So today we're going to talk about the writing side, the writing aspect.
0:47
[SPEAKER_02]: But before we talk about the writing, I know John spent a lot of time researching this, and if it wasn't at a coffee shop, it's been collectively his whole career, and he's pouring up his time here on the podcast.
1:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So we'd like to ask anybody who can to donate to the sub series.
1:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, first, thank you so much for if you are one of those people, those kind generous people who already have, please do help us out a little bit.
1:17
[SPEAKER_00]: I bought an ice club before 425 this morning.
1:19
[SPEAKER_00]: So let me just tell you, I do need that copy money, so please help us out a little bit.
1:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you everybody.
1:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Let's get started.
1:25
[SPEAKER_02]: I think we are going to go over some of the AMAs, some of the questions that we have from last week, from the last week's course.
1:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, just a quick correction that we won't do a full AMA because this is a content episode.
1:41
[SPEAKER_00]: We're going to go on to a new topic today.
1:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the heat of the moment, sometimes I say something that's exactly right.
1:48
[SPEAKER_00]: So I just want to make sure to correct just a couple things.
1:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first thing I want to correct is that sometimes I said Austronesian or Austro-Aziotic language.
1:59
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I meant was language family.
2:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Just remember that Austronesian and Austro-Aziotic
2:03
[SPEAKER_00]: are big language families, they're not single languages.
2:07
[SPEAKER_00]: the ancient ancestor of those families is called Proto-Australian or Proto-Australianic.
2:12
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's just a small one.
2:14
[SPEAKER_00]: The next one is when I was talking about the three phases of Chinese loan words, Chinese borrowings into the Vietnamese language, I called them early-signed of Vietnamese, late-signed of Vietnamese, and recent-signed of Vietnamese.
2:31
[SPEAKER_00]: If you didn't listen to that episode, go listen to it, it's really interesting.
2:35
[SPEAKER_00]: But when I talked about early sign of Vietnamese, I think I was a little unclear.
2:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Early sign of Vietnamese are borrowings that are any time before the medieval period.
2:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So before maybe around, we can't date it precisely, but before maybe around 5, 6, 700 BCE.
2:55
[SPEAKER_00]: So first half of the first millennium or before, and then we have different,
3:01
[SPEAKER_00]: phases of that.
3:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So it includes Han Dynasty era baroings as well as early medieval baroings.
3:06
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a small one for those of you who are paying attention.
3:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Last one, this was a dumb mistake.
3:12
[SPEAKER_00]: I used Bua and Fua as examples.
3:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Bua does mean, I said it means acts and it does, in fact, have the meaning of acts, but probably the meaning that most of you are more familiar with is hammer.
3:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are related meanings in the original borrowing, but just in case you were listening, you were confused.
3:31
[SPEAKER_00]: There is a meaning of that word, which is hammer.
3:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So three small things I'm sure there are more, but just want to make sure nobody's confused when they're listening to that first.
3:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
3:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that first AMA.
3:42
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, I think we are swirling around this idea of thinking in Vietnamese and thinking in Chinese and what kind of thoughts our ancestors had because of trickles down to culture.
3:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And this brings us to the role of Han Van which is literary Chinese and how it played its part in video is culture today.
4:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so I wanted to start there because our last content episode was really about the origin of writing in the area of Vietnam and what we talked a lot about was that, well, the first language and script that our ancestors used was cynidic was what we call literary Chinese and Chinese characters.
4:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Han Van is the name of the language.
4:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And today, we're going to talk about something completely different, which is the development of what we would call Vietnamese proper Vietnamese language writing in the form of do the gnome, do gnome is something that maybe you've heard of.
4:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the character script that was used to write the Vietnamese language before the modern Roman alphabet.
4:53
[SPEAKER_00]: But before we get to do gnome,
5:00
[SPEAKER_00]: the precedent for writing in Vietnam or in the area of Vietnam or in Vietnam for hundreds and hundreds of years before the development of known over a thousand years in fact before the development of the first version of known was in hanban was in Chinese characters do Han
5:19
[SPEAKER_00]: writing the literary Chinese language, which is what we call Han Van or Van Moun.
5:23
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, we usually just say to Han for both of them, but they are actually two separate minutes.
5:27
[SPEAKER_00]: For over a thousand years then, the people in the area of northern Vietnam were used to reading and writing in literary Chinese.
5:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we talked about in that last content episode, they thought of literary Chinese as the native literary language that they wrote
5:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we talked about one example, which is, now, books it has, there's the famous poem that's written in the Dury of Chinese, but I want to emphasize that many things that we think of as very near and dear to us are also written or originated in the Dury of Chinese.
6:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And this continued even after what we call the period of Northern Domination, which is the first thousand years during which Northern Vietnam was part of China.
6:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So Vietnam becomes an independent kingdom.
6:12
[SPEAKER_00]: only in the really the 10th and 11th centuries, and then from then on it is a separate political entity from China, right?
6:18
[SPEAKER_00]: But even after that transition, the people of those kingdoms, what we could call the Vietnamese are still thinking of literary Chinese as their native written language.
6:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So think about all the characters, you know, from quote-unquote Vietnamese mythology.
6:32
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about, um,
6:34
[SPEAKER_00]: the Hume Kings, for example, Hume Kings, La Clonquin, Oka, all of those stories are rich, were rich, the first version of them were composed in literary Chinese.
6:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Also the one-night swamp, if you know that story, or many of those types of myths.
6:54
[SPEAKER_00]: If you know the story of
6:59
[SPEAKER_00]: or is a beetle leaf and a wick and that I never know which one.
7:03
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, I tell you as the beetle, is that not you, okay?
7:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But that story also, we think of it as a fundamental Vietnamese story.
7:10
[SPEAKER_00]: It or the first version of it was composed in literary Chinese.
7:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
7:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Not necessarily because it was imported from China, but because for so long,
7:21
[SPEAKER_00]: the presumed language of literary expression was literary Chinese, not any form of Britain Vietnamese.
7:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the first thing we need to think about.
7:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and that's sort of like the I think the issue that some of my friends who have reached out to me and said, you know,
7:42
[SPEAKER_02]: The idea of Chinese seeping so deep into the culture is this idea that Hanban is so prevalent.
7:50
[SPEAKER_02]: It's there.
7:51
[SPEAKER_02]: How can we deny it from being part of the way we are encoded to think?
7:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
8:00
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I kind of like this habit that we have, uh, at least in academic circles of calling hand run or to hand, we just call it run mode, which is actually what they call it in Chinese one yet, you know, one yet is the same word, and it just means the literary language because,
8:15
[SPEAKER_00]: I think we really ought to think of literary Chinese as literary as one of at least two literary Vietnamese languages.
8:23
[SPEAKER_00]: We should think of it as Vietnamese because so many things were originally composed in there.
8:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And we, you know, it was our native literary language for solo.
8:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a kind of situation that is more common in the world than we think, you know.
8:38
[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, most societies in the world, at least in premodern times, the literary expression occurred in a language that was distinct from the language that you spoke.
8:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Even when they were related, even what, for example, if you're from the premodern era world, you spoke a dialect of Arabic that was probably super, super different than classical Arabic, the Arabic you were composing
9:03
[SPEAKER_00]: same with, you know, if you think about it this way in Western Europe, we use that metaphor, that analogy a couple episodes.
9:09
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are in medieval Europe, you speak French, but for a long time you're writing and reading in Latin, which is it, it's a related language, but it's quite distinct.
9:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So the fact that Vietnamese is not genealogically related to Chinese is one of the lessons we learned, you know, all along.
9:25
[SPEAKER_00]: That's important here, but it's actually not, it doesn't make that much of a difference when you think about a person in China speaking some Fujini's dialect and then writing in literary Chinese.
9:36
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so, so different those languages.
9:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So, very similar to the situation of someone in Vietnam, or the lead dynasty of Vietnam, speaking a form of Vietnamese, but then writing in literary Chinese.
9:48
[SPEAKER_02]: And that is the hard part to wrap our minds around.
9:51
[SPEAKER_02]: I think as
9:53
[SPEAKER_02]: for so many years growing off as a Vietnamese person.
9:56
[SPEAKER_02]: I think Vietnamese American, we're just so...
10:00
[SPEAKER_02]: program to think that, you know, for example, yesterday I was out of meeting and these guys were talking about Bernie men, right?
10:07
[SPEAKER_02]: These Chinese guys, talking about Bernie men.
10:10
[SPEAKER_02]: And they're like, we have this sound stage of this, they have this DJ mobile DJ booth.
10:17
[SPEAKER_02]: And they called it something and they were two or three of them and they were looking up this word.
10:24
[SPEAKER_02]: They were looking up this DJ,
10:28
[SPEAKER_02]: mobile thing, and they are like, oh, type in love, love home.
10:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And then, and then, I was like, oh, the dragon Phoenix, you know, like, yeah, it's the same word.
10:40
[SPEAKER_02]: And so how can I, as a,
10:42
[SPEAKER_02]: person, a modern person separate the fact that we're using the same word.
10:47
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean in modern times we're talking about Burning Man and these Chinese guys are talking about Lumpfong and I'm like, yeah, that's the same words that we use in good means.
10:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Exhausts hard to separate.
11:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's okay.
11:01
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the point.
11:01
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we are trained.
11:03
[SPEAKER_00]: to think that we have to, if you're on team A, you are not anti me.
11:08
[SPEAKER_00]: That if something belongs to A, it does not belong to B. We talk about that in our pilot episode, which I strongly recommend everyone listen to, because these seizures keep on coming up.
11:17
[SPEAKER_00]: If something is quote and quote, Chinese, it can't be Vietnamese, but obviously that's not true, you know?
11:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And it gets more complicated than just the words, because long for, okay, these are like mythical creatures that we think of.
11:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I see it all the time in Instagram,
11:33
[SPEAKER_00]: mythical creatures of Vietnam, but you've never heard of it.
11:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like Fu Quang, you know, and then it's long and it's gay.
11:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm like, well, yes, that is true.
11:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But like, nowhere in that Instagram post, do they say that these are also mythical creatures shared with China, Korea, and Japan, because nobody wants to admit that.
11:48
[SPEAKER_00]: But that is the truth, you know?
11:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And
11:51
[SPEAKER_00]: this idea of thinking only in terms of national culture is really a blind spot.
11:57
[SPEAKER_00]: It really it distorts the truth.
12:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, of course, there's a there's a regional flavor.
12:02
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, the Kielan is not the same thing as a chilling or a kidding.
12:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Not really, but it is also at the same time the same thing, right?
12:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have to really be comfortable with that.
12:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And that actually brings with, yeah, it's hard.
12:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It's hard.
12:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Two things can be true at once.
12:19
[SPEAKER_00]: More than two things can be true
12:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But it does bring me to like one of the issues I want to bring out in this episode as sort of opening Salvo to talking about, you know, and that is the concept of what we call Cosmopolitan and vernacular.
12:36
[SPEAKER_00]: These are two words that we use a lot, but we describe situations like the one we're talking about, where there's this shared culture, and then there's like the local culture that's participating in it.
12:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So when we say cosmopolitan and we're talking about language, we're talking about language and also the culture that that language carries that transcends regions.
12:55
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why it's called cosmopolitan.
12:57
[SPEAKER_00]: This is coined by my senior colleague at Columbia, a man named Sheldon Pollock, who works on South Asia, he works in India.
13:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And in South Asia, the cosmopolitan language is Sanskrit.
13:10
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, there are other ones like Pauli, but Sanskrit is the main one.
13:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So Sanskrit is a language that you read and you wrote and that this classical corpus of literature was written that all across the South Asian continent, people are reading and writing, no matter what they're speaking, right?
13:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Same thing, you guess what the cosmopolitan language of Europe is gonna be, like in medieval times.
13:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, well, if you're speaking Spanish here, you're speaking French there, you're speaking English here, what language are you reading and writing it in early medieval times?
13:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Think about Roger.
13:41
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, Latin or Italian?
13:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly, Latin.
13:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like too easy of a question, but it's Latin for most of the medieval period.
13:50
[SPEAKER_00]: It's Latin until those local languages start to get written down, right?
13:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So when you think of a cosmopolitan language, think about Latin in medieval Europe,
14:00
[SPEAKER_00]: Arabic is also a cosmopolitan language.
14:03
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, I just went to Egypt this spring.
14:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone speaks Arabic there, you know, and reads right Arabic, but that is a language that replaced the local language, which was Coptic once upon a time.
14:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So the question is, if we've got Arabic in the Middle East, we have Latin, in medieval Europe, we have Sanskrit, in South Asia, what is the cosmopolitan language of East Asia?
14:25
[SPEAKER_00]: It's obvious, it's literary Chinese.
14:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Han Van, right?
14:28
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's why you think of people in China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan.
14:33
[SPEAKER_00]: over the second millennium, they're all reading and writing in Hanvan, they're all reading the same text, in fact, they're reading Confucius, they're reading Manches, they're reading Trongs.
14:42
[SPEAKER_00]: They're also reading poetry from the Tang Dynasty, what we call Tadu or Latif, if you're fancy.
14:49
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, those are the same poets writing in the same language, and it's cosmopolitan because people all over Asia.
14:57
[SPEAKER_00]: are reading and writing in that language.
14:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only are there reading original Chinese works, but they're composing original works in their kingdoms.
15:07
[SPEAKER_00]: In that language, hence, we get, for example, a legend of the homo kings, we are the legend of Ogo, Lachlomkwon, et cetera.
15:13
[SPEAKER_00]: The early histories of Vietnam, all written in literary Chinese.
15:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Because once again, literary Chinese, as the cosmopolitan language, was thought of as,
15:23
[SPEAKER_00]: the native literary language.
15:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Also because there was no alternative, right?
15:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Vietnam, Vietnamese, the spoken language had no form in which it could be written.
15:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the point.
15:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So the cosmopolitan language is opposed to the vernacular language.
15:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And when we say vernacular, we mean the local regional language.
15:42
[SPEAKER_00]: That at least for a long time is only spoken.
15:45
[SPEAKER_00]: It will eventually get written down.
15:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the beginning, it's only spoken.
15:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have a situation in Vietnam, say in the 12th century, 13th century, where people are speaking the vernacular Vietnamese language out loud, but they're reading and writing only in literary Chinese, the cosmopolitan language.
16:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are two concepts.
16:03
[SPEAKER_00]: Cosmopolitan and vernacular, I agree.
16:06
[SPEAKER_00]: I do have a question.
16:09
[SPEAKER_02]: You brought up Sanskrit before, but I think I have questions
16:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yes, it's one of the classical languages of India when I first started the podcast There is a person in Lace from Kwa and using his 90s.
16:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, he's famous.
16:28
[SPEAKER_02]: He's famous.
16:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Lace from Kwa said to me that
16:38
[SPEAKER_02]: the Vietnamese culture came from and he was generalizing, he emphasized that he's just generalizing, but he said it's 50% Indian from India and 50% from China.
16:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And at the time, I couldn't wrap my mind around what that meant.
16:54
[SPEAKER_02]: But I asked him, I was like, so what does that actually mean?
16:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And he said, you know, well, like curry and Buddhism, you know, uh,
17:01
[SPEAKER_02]: It was very, you know, a very general, our language or traditions, weddings, you know, who's come from China, you know, kind of bringing it down that way, but today I want to actually get an issue about Sanskrit because you said it's South Asian, but does that mean it goes to Southeast Asia to Vietnam and how deeply is Indian culture part of Vietnamese culture?
17:27
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a good and complicated question.
17:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is an idea that's after I think about the name of the French colony, Indo-China, like the Europeans thought also of the area of Vietnam is kind of, they were like, well, it's sort of Southeast Asia, but it's also sort of like East Asia, so they're like, okay, we're just going to call it Indo-China.
17:48
[SPEAKER_00]: actually called it that because it's between India and China, right?
17:52
[SPEAKER_00]: But that that idea is out there.
17:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And Lace Winquay is a very eminent historian.
17:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, like what he's saying is it, I think a generalization, he's kind of, he's like packaging it in a sort of consumable way.
18:07
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's, but he's not wrong, they're Indian or Indic elements are everywhere in our culture.
18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think we talked about it once, but the routes by which they enter into Vietnamese culture are
18:18
[SPEAKER_00]: are complex, and there nowhere near is direct as the routes by which Chinese or Sunitic culture entered into the area of Vietnam.
18:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Because remember, there can be no competition.
18:29
[SPEAKER_00]: The area of northern Vietnam was the southern perimeter of the Chinese empires from the hands with the Tang Dynasty's, for over a thousand years, right?
18:38
[SPEAKER_00]: No Indic Prince, no Indic Kingdom ever colonized the nucleus of the ancient kingdom.
18:46
[SPEAKER_00]: create kingdoms in Southeast Asia that led to places like indigenous, well, they led to local index style kingdoms like on-core, the Cambodian kingdom, and of course, Champa.
18:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Champa, the great kingdom of central and central southern Vietnam.
19:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So in that sensibility, they have a very direct influence on Vietnamese culture.
19:08
[SPEAKER_00]: because charm, the charm people's going back to causing pause in vernacular.
19:12
[SPEAKER_00]: The charm people's red and road in Sanskrit as well until they started writing and reading in charm.
19:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you go to Mesa or those places today, you'll see many, many Stella that are written in Sanskrit.
19:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Side note, if you go there and you look at it and you are wondering, the one that looks earlier, the one that looks rounder, that's generally speaking that's charm.
19:33
[SPEAKER_00]: But the other ones are Sanskrit.
19:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Sanskrit was definitely the more elevated language, and you know, the religion and the culture of
19:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Champa was definitely Hinduistic, you know, Hinduistic for until they converted to Buddhism and then ultimately Islam, much later in history.
19:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But fundamentally, they're Hinduistic, the way in which the ancient Vietnamese kingdoms were quote-unquote confusion, right?
19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So there is that element of modern, it's a constituent of modern Vietnamese culture, the legacy of Champa.
20:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And that has direct roots, connections to South Asia.
20:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And then there's everything that comes via Southeast Asia from South Asia, everything that comes through maritime trade up into Vietnam.
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And Lation Quas is, of course, correct things like curry come that way.
20:24
[SPEAKER_00]: you know, a lot of the sort of like spice trade and things goes through Southeast Asia up into Vietnam in that sensibility.
20:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And so there are a lot of things that happened that way and and to a certain extent, we might have even elements of Buddhism and other beliefs that come from South Asia through the maritime route up into Vietnam.
20:46
[SPEAKER_00]: But Buddhism is a good example for why they says complicated, because you might think, oh, Buddhism comes from India.
20:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And you would not be wrong.
20:54
[SPEAKER_00]: Or it comes, you know, the Buddha lived in what is now modern in Nepal.
20:58
[SPEAKER_00]: So even that isn't really true, but the generally South Asia, right?
21:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But where does the preponderance of Buddhist culture come from in Vietnam?
21:07
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes through China.
21:08
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes through the land of Silk Road.
21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So you want to think about the Silk Road is having two roads, the land one and the C one.
21:14
[SPEAKER_00]: So things that come from India directly come via the C Silk Road, the maritime Silk Road.
21:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And then things that go over the land have to go through China before the enter into Northern Vietnam.
21:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And what's interesting about northern Vietnam, the area around modern-day Hanoi, is that it was a kind of terminus of both the land silk road and the sea silk road, which is why it was so important to the Chinese empires for so long.
21:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But most of our tradition of Buddhism comes over land.
21:43
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why it's Mahayana.
21:46
[SPEAKER_00]: It comes overland through China and it
21:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And so even though you have Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhist monks reading,
21:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Sanskrit, that tradition of reading Sanskrit is not directly from India, you know, it is actually a tradition that grew up as part of cynetic Buddhism.
22:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Now that doesn't mean there aren't direct connections, that doesn't mean there aren't Vietnamese Buddhists throughout history going straight to India and coming back.
22:15
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you think about Indian Buddhism or when you think about Buddhism and Vietnam, you do want to think of most of it coming actually through the cynetic route.
22:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a complicated question, you know?
22:27
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
22:28
[SPEAKER_02]: But I mean, that's so much insight given because it is
22:33
[SPEAKER_02]: coming from India, but not coming from India.
22:37
[SPEAKER_02]: It's coming from India, but through hundreds of years of Chinese sort of filters, right?
22:46
[SPEAKER_02]: Like, exactly.
22:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And you don't even want to think of like the Chinese as being in between the Vietnamese and India.
22:52
[SPEAKER_00]: You want to think of the ancient Vietnamese or those peoples as part of the cynetic,
22:58
[SPEAKER_00]: their landscape.
22:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Like we are all part of a kind of very diverse ascended empire and all of those different peoples of that empire are experimenting with Buddhism coming from the West, coming from India.
23:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's how you want to think about it.
23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
23:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but you know, it's getting back to the topic today like,
23:16
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't want to compare the traditional reading and writing in Sanskrit to the traditional reading and writing in cosmopolitan literary Chinese.
23:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Sanskrit is the cosmopolitan language, and it is present in ancient Vietnam or medieval Vietnam, but within the realm of Buddhism, within the realm, specifically of largely synetic style Buddhism.
23:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas literary Chinese is not confined to a particular religious belief.
23:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It is the native,
23:44
[SPEAKER_00]: presumed language of expression.
23:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So everything from court documents, memos to the king, tax forms, poems, novels, all those things are written in literary Chinese, as well as of course our Vietnamese histories are written in the very Chinese.
24:03
[SPEAKER_00]: They've always been written in the
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And then something happens, which is what we're going to get to.
24:09
[SPEAKER_00]: But go ahead.
24:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, before we move on, I just want to kind of clarify and just make it more stronger in my mind when I think about the two words vernacular and cosmopods.
24:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And yeah, I think when we use word vernacular traditionally, it's always like, uh, this is what we speak here in just like the local sort of way we speak it right.
24:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
24:31
[SPEAKER_02]: I think most people think
24:36
[SPEAKER_02]: But when I think about cosmopolitan, I think about, and I remember asking you this, because when I think about the more cosmopolitan, I think about city, I think about sophistication, I think about like the way somebody dresses, you know, the way they're attire, the what they
24:53
[SPEAKER_02]: I think it's very hip or it's very city-like and but I can't connect why your field has adopted this word cosmopolitan to ancient languages like Latin and and old Chinese to describe something that is on paper and so I'm trying to wrap my mind around and understand why the word cosmopolitan was a
25:20
[SPEAKER_00]: because ladness totally unhapped.
25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'm just kidding.
25:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I see what you mean.
25:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
25:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, first of all, the way you thought about it is totally correct.
25:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the meaning of basic meaning is the same.
25:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you think about like,
25:32
[SPEAKER_00]: in our world today, like we think about the vernacular is like, maybe that's the way we say it on our street, right?
25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: That's all word for it.
25:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, that's the way we say a particular thing.
25:41
[SPEAKER_00]: But like when you go to the city or when you go to a place like college where you have people from many different places, you don't necessarily talk like that.
25:49
[SPEAKER_00]: You talk in a different way.
25:50
[SPEAKER_00]: You learn to talk in a more being way because that's the universal language, right?
25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So that contrast is exactly correct.
25:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's not that, well, literary Chinese was hip in a sense.
26:02
[SPEAKER_00]: But the main idea here is that like, the cosmopolitan language is the universal language, the one that everyone learns because it is thought of as the more refined one, right?
26:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And then the vernacular language is the one that is yours personally.
26:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you think about a modern analogy like,
26:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, say you're from the Deep South, you know, I, I love this, um, this comedian who's having a moment where our name is Leanne Morgan.
26:30
[SPEAKER_00]: She's got a special in Netflix.
26:32
[SPEAKER_00]: She's got a very darling multi-campside comment at Flakes.
26:36
[SPEAKER_00]: I highly recommend her.
26:36
[SPEAKER_00]: She's hilarious.
26:37
[SPEAKER_00]: She's got a very Tennessee accent, right?
26:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And she's unashamed about it.
26:41
[SPEAKER_00]: So she speaks.
26:43
[SPEAKER_00]: in a strong Tennessee dialect of English.
26:45
[SPEAKER_00]: She uses words like Walleron.
26:46
[SPEAKER_00]: She says things like, I took to the bed.
26:49
[SPEAKER_00]: I took to the bed.
26:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's like a Tennessee way, apparently, of saying, I got depressed and I couldn't get out of bed.
26:55
[SPEAKER_00]: But the point is she has a strong Tennessee vernacular.
26:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine you're from a place like hers, and you speak that way.
27:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you go to college in Chicago.
27:05
[SPEAKER_00]: People are not going to understand you, right?
27:06
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to change your language to a more universal language.
27:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to change to the cosmopolitan.
27:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Now the difference between Tennessee dialect of English and Chicago dialect of English is pretty small in the grand scheme of things.
27:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And you just got to amplify that difference out to complete mutual unintelligibility where Vietnamese has nothing to do with literary Chinese.
27:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So you're really learning a totally different language.
27:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And I also want to emphasize that by the 12th, 13th centuries,
27:34
[SPEAKER_00]: we are no longer speaking Chinese in the area of northern Vietnam.
27:38
[SPEAKER_00]: So we are really only speaking Vietnamese by the 13th, 12th centuries, and we're only reading and writing in literary or Chinese.
27:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So we're not speaking any cosmopolitan language really.
27:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make sense?
27:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's simply sort of a sense.
27:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, and now I think you hit the point when you said it's universal.
27:57
[SPEAKER_02]: Like you're Cosmo Cosmic University.
28:01
[SPEAKER_02]: So yeah, now I'm kind of getting, I just keep getting confused when I hear the word Cosmo Pots and I'm like, well, if that's the word on the street, Cosmo Pots and yeah, so it uses me until I really drill down to the details of why that words.
28:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I know, because you're thinking, oh, like, you're thinking sex in the city.
28:21
[SPEAKER_00]: And like, like, the cocktail, and actually that part is also a little true because remember the universal language is universal because it's thought of as refined.
28:30
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you want to prove to other people that you're educated, that you have culture, you know, then you're going to prove to them by or proving your capacity and literary Chinese.
28:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And to be honest, especially in the more in the south and in the north, I would say,
28:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Even today Vietnamese people will do that, like you truck out your handwheel, and then people like, oh, you're an educated person, because you can, you know, say, go, go, go, handwheel.
28:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you kind of impress people, right?
28:58
[SPEAKER_00]: It goes back to exactly that speaking of origins.
29:01
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the origin of that, because it was once the cosmopolitan language of Vietnamese culture.
29:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, love it.
29:09
[SPEAKER_02]: So we are next point is, why begin writing in the vernacular and you know, I'd love to hear like what, like how, we're all this all turns part.
29:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
29:20
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's a good question, right?
29:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Like if this is the cosmopolitan language, everybody is like reading and writing in literary Chinese, why would you ever start reading and writing in Vietnamese?
29:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, if you've already got a language, that is fulfilling that function.
29:34
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first thing to note is that it doesn't happen for a super long time.
29:38
[SPEAKER_00]: People in the area of northern Vietnam are presumably reading and writing in literary Chinese since like the first century or even earlier.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So over a thousand years of literacy, from that perspective, the area of Vietnam, northern Vietnam, is has an older history of literacy than either Korea or Japan by far, right?
29:56
[SPEAKER_00]: In literary Chinese.
29:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But at the same time,
30:00
[SPEAKER_00]: they develop a vernacular tradition of writing later than either of those kingdoms.
30:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you are interested in why that might be, you can ask, but I want to skip to the point of what impel them to start writing in Vietnamese, right?
30:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the first thing to note is that there is a difference between what you speak in what you're reading and writing.
30:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine if in America,
30:26
[SPEAKER_00]: everything we read or wrote was in French, not in English.
30:28
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet we spoke in English every day, right?
30:32
[SPEAKER_00]: That's annoying.
30:32
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, it's a little annoying, right?
30:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's difficult, because you have to, it's like an intellectual burden to learn a whole other language.
30:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And then to switch, you know, into what you speak.
30:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And most importantly, the burden of learning that language, when you learn that language so that you can read the classics so you can write a letter.
30:54
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to learn it through your own language.
30:56
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no way for you to learn a foreign language except through the language that you speak natively.
31:03
[SPEAKER_00]: So people in pre-modern Vietnam are learning to master literary Chinese through the Vietnamese language, at least at a certain point in history.
31:14
[SPEAKER_00]: After Chinese, spoken Chinese says died out.
31:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you've ever taken a foreign language, which I'm sure most people who are listening have, you know that you use your language all the time to learn that language.
31:25
[SPEAKER_00]: If I'm learning French, I'm like, I'm gonna write in the margin.
31:28
[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, Ciel means heaven, right?
31:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Tair means earth, and I'll just write that out.
31:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And especially if you've ever had the experience of learning a dead language, learning a language that only is red and written like Latin or Greek, you do that a lot.
31:43
[SPEAKER_00]: You really gloss.
31:44
[SPEAKER_00]: The word is gloss.
31:45
[SPEAKER_00]: You gloss.
31:46
[SPEAKER_00]: the literary language as a way of trying to learn it.
31:50
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got to imagine all these little kids and these little teenagers and then these young man, mostly men, they're struggling to learn literary Chinese because it is the written language of the kingdom, right?
32:04
[SPEAKER_00]: But as they do it, they're like, okay, what does what does T and mean?
32:07
[SPEAKER_00]: What the hell is T and mean?
32:08
[SPEAKER_00]: A T and is joy, right?
32:10
[SPEAKER_00]: What does, you know, D, I mean, D, I mean, not,
32:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're going to start writing in the margin.
32:16
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to write a kind of hint to themselves that this word, Tian, which is written like this and literature in Chinese characters, it means the word that I say chai when I speak.
32:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And how are they going to write down chai?
32:29
[SPEAKER_00]: They only have one writing system available to them.
32:32
[SPEAKER_00]: That's Chinese characters, right?
32:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're going to take Chinese characters.
32:35
[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to manipulate them to express the spoken word in their Vietnamese language.
32:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So they're going to make up a character that they can read as joy based on Chinese characters.
32:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So that is the beginning of June home.
32:49
[SPEAKER_00]: and it originates as a way of trying to help you learn or master literary Chinese.
32:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is in fact the same process that we see in Korea and in Japan.
33:00
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the beginning of writing in the vernacular Korean and Japanese language as well.
33:04
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, in most every culture that has this system where they're speaking one language, but they're reading and writing another, the way in which you start to write the language you speak is through this process, where you're glossing.
33:18
[SPEAKER_00]: You're giving yourself hints in the process of learning that that a very language.
33:23
[SPEAKER_02]: John, that is fascinating.
33:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And I can't help but think if it's one person doing the glossy when they're learning, that's one thing.
33:33
[SPEAKER_02]: But how do you get hundreds, thousands of people as young kids growing, growing into young men?
33:41
[SPEAKER_02]: And then how does it shift
33:46
[SPEAKER_02]: big vocabulary now called the Vietnamese language like that transition is just mind-blown to me.
33:52
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not like one guy said, you know what?
33:54
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm going to take charge of this whole process and yeah, everybody needs to fall in line with the way I did it.
34:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
34:01
[SPEAKER_02]: All these people coordinate the characters tin or joy or you know, how does this happen?
34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
34:09
[SPEAKER_00]: That is the right question to ask.
34:12
[SPEAKER_00]: And when you think about the process, we call it the process of vernacularization, right?
34:16
[SPEAKER_00]: The process where the vernacular becomes a written language, or people in a society start to use the vernacular language for more than just, you know, speaking to the butcher, right?
34:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
34:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is very grassroots.
34:33
[SPEAKER_00]: It starts not as a unified thing.
34:36
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is subversive for most of its history.
34:39
[SPEAKER_00]: It is kind of underground thing.
34:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a habit.
34:42
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, I do want to note that your question is really good in the history of Vietnamese because very famously or infamously, do you know him is not really well-systematized?
34:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you learn to know, like I learned it by my teacher was a man in Windkwang home and I I make this joke a lot, but I'll make it again now.
35:02
[SPEAKER_00]: I was probably his worst student.
35:05
[SPEAKER_00]: But one of the things he always said is that basically everything you read, the gnome in every text is different.
35:13
[SPEAKER_00]: because it's very individual.
35:15
[SPEAKER_00]: It was never, as you say, there was never someone who took all the writings of no one said, okay, we've got to clean it up, we've got to systematize it.
35:23
[SPEAKER_00]: We'll talk about that a little bit later.
35:24
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's one thing to note because it proves your point.
35:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It did kind of develop in a very ad hoc fashion, just sort of like as a habit, different people were having learning literary Chinese.
35:38
[SPEAKER_00]: Now,
35:40
[SPEAKER_00]: At the same time, it becomes widespread.
35:42
[SPEAKER_00]: And why does it do that or how does it do that?
35:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got to think about it.
35:46
[SPEAKER_00]: If everyone is, if it's a natural process to use your spoken language to learn the vernacular,
35:53
[SPEAKER_00]: That also means that in every classroom, every kid is doing that, right?
35:56
[SPEAKER_00]: And then think about how your own notes, especially in this day and age, how like everyone is sharing notes and everyone is like, you know, is trying to make the burden of learning lighter, right?
36:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So that that exchange of the habit or the process of glossing is what starts the trend of writing in vernacular as more than an individual.
36:21
[SPEAKER_00]: an individual habit and then there's another thing that happens.
36:24
[SPEAKER_00]: So not only in the educational space where students are trying to learn literary Chinese and they're using more and more Vietnamese words to do it and they're writing more and more Vietnamese words down, but obviously there's a parallel pressure on society which is writing is very useful.
36:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Writing is super useful.
36:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It makes everything easier, right?
36:43
[SPEAKER_00]: think about what you can do when you have writing and what you can do when you cannot.
36:46
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, if you're just a normal person, you're not studying for the exam to get into a high position of government or you're not going to be a poetic master.
36:54
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, if you're a woman and you're even barred from that type of education.
37:00
[SPEAKER_00]: You are still, you still have to organize the household.
37:03
[SPEAKER_00]: You have to make sure everything gets, especially if you're a wealthy woman, you have to make sure that all the orders come in on time, that all of the servants are paid, et cetera, et cetera.
37:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And maybe just maybe you want to write a letter to your mother, because you live with your father, your husband's family.
37:17
[SPEAKER_00]: But you are barred from literary Chinese.
37:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Well,
37:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Once we have this habit of glossing literary Chinese with Vietnamese words, written in Chinese characters in the atmosphere, it very quickly gets appropriated.
37:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So that people can just use it in a daily way, right?
37:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Sort of use it for their own purposes.
37:39
[SPEAKER_00]: So we have, we don't have very much evidence of this because no literature does not survive very often because it's, you know, Vietnam is humid.
37:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of the paper disappears, but, but we presume that part of what, what, what drove people to write more and more known was a very practical reason.
37:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe they just wanted to write down their menu.
38:02
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, or maybe they just wanted to write a little letter or a short memo, and this was, you know, this was a habit that people were using.
38:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So then, num starts to be used.
38:11
[SPEAKER_00]: Go ahead.
38:12
[SPEAKER_02]: John, I promise I'm not going to do these things.
38:14
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, you should have on fire.
38:17
[SPEAKER_02]: If so many, and we were so limited on time sometime, okay, so when you're telling him, describing this process, I'm thinking about vernacular as it now today pertains to this huge body of just English and at the internet and the globalization of English, the words,
38:39
[SPEAKER_02]: that are bleeding into Vietnam and Portugal and Brazil and the word is riz that we see on TikTok all the time, right?
38:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's now becoming the vernacularization of a global English.
38:54
[SPEAKER_02]: Do you predict that English
38:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And you can argue that raises the doubt that in the same way all across the internet, right?
39:05
[SPEAKER_02]: We look at the word R-I-Z-Z as a short hand for charisma, but there's so many words like that that are being established in the tick-top sphere.
39:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
39:18
[SPEAKER_02]: So is there a branch of study and
39:27
[SPEAKER_00]: conduct induced language change, you know, words of the first things that are really borrowed in language contact there, they're traded.
39:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think you're, you're touching a really interesting point because originates as a vernacularism, right?
39:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a kind of slang, slang is vernacular language.
39:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But what we're seeing today were it's writing across languages, that's the definition of cosmopolitan.
39:49
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is the important point, a thing does not stay vernacular.
39:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Like once a thing kind of starts to become hot or trending, then it transforms into its own vernacular, own cosmopolitan.
40:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a function of the prestige that it commands.
40:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So the dialect of people speaking with this word
40:14
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's a prestigious, it's a prestigious group of people, at least in the internet space, at least in the influencer space, and therefore as a function of that prestige, their lexicon, their vocabulary is spreading.
40:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can think about that as happening in history, because go back to medieval Europe.
40:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Latin was the cosmopolitan language.
40:33
[SPEAKER_00]: French was the vernacular language.
40:35
[SPEAKER_00]: French starts to get written down.
40:38
[SPEAKER_00]: and transforms as a result of that process.
40:40
[SPEAKER_00]: That transformation, something we should talk about.
40:43
[SPEAKER_00]: But at a certain point,
40:46
[SPEAKER_00]: French becomes prestigious enough that it kind of replaces Latin, and not only does it replace Latin within the French kingdom, but the French kingdom in medieval Europe was so powerful or the different French kingdoms became really one French kingdom that then French becomes the new cosmopolitan language everywhere.
41:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And as we talked about last episode, that's where we get that term lingua franca, right?
41:07
[SPEAKER_00]: The, which means cosmopolitan language, what really means the
41:14
[SPEAKER_00]: A once-for-knack of the language has become the new Cosmopolitan language.
41:18
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, that will not happen to Vietnamese.
41:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it will not, in a smaller, on a smaller scale, because the Vietnamese language will come, especially in the 20th century, to be the national language of the state of Vietnam.
41:29
[SPEAKER_00]: So maybe you're among, maybe you're a zal, maybe you're a thai, but you will now be learning to read and write and speak Vietnamese as a function of that.
41:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So it is the new national language.
41:40
[SPEAKER_00]: But in the history of gnome, gnome never becomes, it doesn't get exported to Japan and Korea and China.
41:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But it does become super popular as a kind of subversive art form and form of literary expression within Vietnam alongside a continually predominant literary Chinese.
41:59
[SPEAKER_02]: and to follow up with what you said about Nome, the next point is really the structure of it.
42:05
[SPEAKER_02]: If it's all over the place, how does this become a structure?
42:10
[SPEAKER_02]: Or is the integrity of the structure?
42:13
[SPEAKER_02]: If it's now just all over the place and we're trying to figure out what each word means here.
42:20
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I got to say, at first of all, know is way easier to learn than you think it is.
42:26
[SPEAKER_00]: So anyone out there who's interested in learning know, especially with AI tools today, you can learn it.
42:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And you should learn it.
42:31
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fun.
42:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you can write all sorts of dirty things in Vietnamese, you can do the movement openable.
42:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can hang it on your wall like it's a, like it's a Tom Poem, but it really says something nasty.
42:42
[SPEAKER_00]: So you should learn it.
42:44
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not, it's not so hard, but it is hard and the sense that it is not systematized.
42:47
[SPEAKER_00]: So how does it work?
42:49
[SPEAKER_00]: what is the structure of Nome?
42:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So Nome is based on Chinese characters.
42:53
[SPEAKER_00]: As we just talked about, it comes from using Chinese characters just to like to gloss literary Chinese, right?
43:00
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first stage of Nome development is just taking whole Chinese characters and using them mostly just for their sound or their meaning.
43:07
[SPEAKER_00]: So like this this Chinese character sounds a little bit like
43:12
[SPEAKER_00]: like me or nigh.
43:14
[SPEAKER_00]: Something like that.
43:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to use it to mean person.
43:18
[SPEAKER_00]: It means something totally else, but I'm just going to use it to mean person.
43:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Or this word means this word means earth.
43:27
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to use that.
43:29
[SPEAKER_00]: It's pronounced totally differently, but I know I mean the Vietnamese word when I write that.
43:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to write it down.
43:34
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to read it out as that,
43:37
[SPEAKER_00]: So those are two different ways we start getting known characters.
43:41
[SPEAKER_00]: And the earliest examples of known are actually characters, single characters like that that are used for play names or people's names, mostly play's names.
43:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Like the word, how pond is one of the earliest known characters we have because it's not a Chinese word.
43:59
[SPEAKER_00]: But it was an element in a lot of place names.
44:02
[SPEAKER_00]: So people created a character for that.
44:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And then, because the Vietnamese intellectuals were trained in the Senate tradition, and also, this is very crucial, also because the Vietnamese language structurally is so similar to the Chinese language.
44:17
[SPEAKER_00]: For reasons we've talked about in the past, it's monosolabic, or mostly monosolabic, it's tonal at this point in history at least.
44:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Vietnamese intellectuals start creating new characters based on the same principles that Chinese characters are created.
44:39
[SPEAKER_00]: And we don't need to get into the weeds, but there's a set of principles of how Chinese characters are created.
44:45
[SPEAKER_00]: One example is that you can split them into what are called radicals, right?
44:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Bullshow and Chinese, right?
44:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Bottle and Vietnamese.
44:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So sometimes, not always, but sometimes there is an element of a character that expresses the meaning, and then there's an element of the character that expresses the pronunciation.
45:02
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, in Vietnamese we call that a hing-tang character.
45:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Hing means form, tang means sound, so hing and tang together.
45:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So then Vietnamese intellectuals will start creating characters, like that, based on all these different principles, including some special principles that are unique to know, to fill out
45:22
[SPEAKER_00]: the Vietnamese vocabulary.
45:24
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is not happening in a planned way.
45:26
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like they are writing and they're like, oh, snap.
45:28
[SPEAKER_00]: There is no way to write this word that I want to write.
45:31
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm just going to create a character.
45:33
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they do that.
45:34
[SPEAKER_00]: And then someone reads it.
45:35
[SPEAKER_00]: And then they will reuse that character.
45:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Or maybe someone independently will have the same problem and come up with the same solution.
45:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Or they'll come up with a different version of that character, which is why no miso diverse from text to text to text.
45:47
[SPEAKER_00]: But this is the reason why when you look at Nome, if you don't know Chinese, it just looks like Chinese because architecturally it's really indistinguishable.
45:56
[SPEAKER_00]: If you do know Chinese and you look at Nome, you will feel like you've had a stroke or something because it doesn't really make sense, but visually it looks the same.
46:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's mind blowing to think about, you know, I think on the internet today, if I come up with the word and it's cool and it takes off, then you can kind of trace it like, I wrote that, I like, yeah, with that.
46:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And then yeah, we started adopting that.
46:21
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think in like,
46:23
[SPEAKER_02]: hundreds of years ago, how do you get this mass adoption, especially when it comes to, well, this is the way I want to write this, and then this is cool, but then everybody else, you guys should write this.
46:35
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
46:36
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, it's so easy to trace today, especially because we have a digital record of where things come from.
46:41
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
46:42
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the process is not so different.
46:43
[SPEAKER_00]: Like what I always think of is not necessarily new vocabulary because that that is very similar.
46:50
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's slightly different in that it's like changing the actual language, which which also happens in the history of known.
46:55
[SPEAKER_00]: That's something I really want to get to if we have time.
46:58
[SPEAKER_00]: But think about, for example, like texting culture in Vietnam and how like southern texting has invaded the north.
47:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, DZO for yo, like the yo, like things like that, like those those types of spellings that think that that for it's a specifically SIGON or southern dialect of Vietnamese, in when you know nothing.
47:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that has, I've seen like 100% Northern Halloween friends be texting me like that and I'm like what and it's because it's spread across the texting space.
47:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, on the one hand, it's true that with digital technology things spread more quickly, but the process is the same.
47:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got to think about.
47:42
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, somebody writing out say a word that you've never seen written before and then another person reading it and they're like, Oh, that's a good idea.
47:49
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I will write that, you know, or maybe they will come up with their own, but, but it spreads through social networks like that.
47:56
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true that it will never spread as fast because there is no digital social network, but we're still talking about a social network and also we're talking about a much, much smaller population.
48:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Right.
48:07
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, think about the number of people who are even trying to learn to read and write literary Chinese.
48:12
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a small number of people in the grand scheme of things.
48:15
[SPEAKER_00]: So within, say, the environments of Hanoi, if someone is using a particular set of cliff notes to learn their literary Chinese, that's probably going to spread pretty quickly.
48:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And if another person writes, say they write a really clever poem, you know, in, in, in, nom, it's going to spread.
48:32
[SPEAKER_00]: And then people are just going to reproduce that and reproduce that.
48:34
[SPEAKER_00]: It suits.
48:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the third thing I want to
48:37
[SPEAKER_00]: in the history of known, when we get to the 15th century, especially, and then especially, there's one moment in the 15th century, and then another moment in the 17th, 18th centuries, where known gets really popular, and there are phenomena, there are kind of like hits that are responsible for those like jumps in the popularity of.
48:58
[SPEAKER_00]: but generally speaking, across a social network, like the very grassroots.
49:02
[SPEAKER_00]: And also it's grassroots because it's a little bit dirty.
49:06
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you're like, it's supposed to help you learn literary Chinese, right?
49:10
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the only proper use for known for most of history.
49:13
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, if you actually write a piece of literature, you know, at least in the early times, people will be like, what the hell are you doing?
49:19
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, what are you a peasant?
49:21
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, are you unable to write properly?
49:22
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that the reason why, you know, you're writing a gnome?
49:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's the attitude, right?
49:27
[SPEAKER_02]: That eerily sounds like hip hop and agonics.
49:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly 100%.
49:31
[SPEAKER_00]: I knew you were going to go there.
49:33
[SPEAKER_00]: That is correct.
49:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, go ahead.
49:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
49:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And so if we kind of figure out that parallel journey, you've talked about, you've sent me the bullet point of a masterpiece or this idea of diversity and masterpieces.
49:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So if it's a subversive language or subversive way to communicate, how do you have a masterpiece?
50:01
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh my god, that, let's like saying, Jay-Z wrote a masterpiece, but you know, that's in the realm of music and we can all kind of wrap our minds around it, but like, yeah, in no literature, like, how do you have a masterpiece?
50:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but it's true, right?
50:17
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, we think of the word masterpiece as only meaning a certain type of thing.
50:22
[SPEAKER_00]: But when you think about the fundamental meaning of a masterpiece, which is like a brilliant piece of art,
50:28
[SPEAKER_00]: absolutely there are hip-hop masterpieces right and you and you give me go before hip-hop and think about jazz like jazz also was like oh jazz is for the street but it's not for the orchestra hall and then Duke Ellington came along and wrote a jazz orchestra you know and and it changed what jazz was and it also invaded the space that was reserved for western classical white music you know and so so this is
50:54
[SPEAKER_02]: This black culture, a history, music, a literature, all of it, a lot of it you could see because when we think of Duke Elington and Quincy Jones also comes from the orchestra space, but then he crosses over and then pretty soon all of that becomes down water down to like Michael Jackson and street culture.
51:16
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
51:18
[SPEAKER_00]: exact sweet parallels and there's that type of tug and pulled right because something will become what we're really talking about going back to our earlier conversation is what we're talking about is a vernacular exceeding its vernacular space becoming a little kind of a little bit cosmopolitan in the history of hip-hop for actually cosmopolitan like compare the status of hip-hop in 1985
51:41
[SPEAKER_00]: with not hip-hop today, but with the effect or the presence of a hip-hop sound in global pop music.
51:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's everywhere, there's no such thing as pop music that doesn't have an echo of hip-hop somewhere in it, you know?
51:56
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's become cultural-palled, and then there are people who are like, oh, hip-hop's ruined, you know?
52:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And they're not wrong, but they're speaking from that vernacular space and they're seeing that that sound has now changed, right?
52:08
[SPEAKER_00]: So this is something similar going to happen in Vietnamese, but your question is, how do we get masterpieces written when it's this dirty little secret, right?
52:18
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first thing to note is that for the first few centuries of usage, it was really like beyond, when I say usage, I mean beyond an individual just glossing one or two words in their, in their like notebook.
52:30
[SPEAKER_00]: It's used in a genre that we very confusingly call Zai in Vietnamese, Zai Neo or Zai.
52:37
[SPEAKER_00]: Zai just mean like a Zai to yet, like it means to explain.
52:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a Chinese word, by the way.
52:45
[SPEAKER_00]: So that genre refers to bilingual texts, usually Buddhist texts.
52:52
[SPEAKER_00]: So you'll have like a line of the original literary Chinese, whether it is imported or whether it's locally composed.
53:00
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you'll have a translated,
53:02
[SPEAKER_00]: into a form of gnome, but a form of kind of crazy Vietnamese, the Vietnamese is kind of mixed with literary Chinese.
53:11
[SPEAKER_00]: And it sounds kind of weird.
53:12
[SPEAKER_00]: It has words that we never use in spoken language and it has structures that we know that are very odd, would sound very odd to us.
53:18
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's kind of evidence that in this early phase, people just weren't used to writing in Vietnamese.
53:25
[SPEAKER_00]: They just, they, they were like, aw, it feels weird.
53:28
[SPEAKER_00]: At the same, it's like two, they're feeling two things I want.
53:31
[SPEAKER_00]: On the one hand, they're like, Vietnamese is way easier because that's the language I speak, but when I actually put pen to paper, it feels strange to write in Vietnamese.
53:40
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm gonna automatically instinctually kind of mix it with literary Chinese because it's so powerful in my mind, the idea that when you write you write in Chinese.
53:50
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's one of the ways in which the Vietnamese language transforms.
53:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's true of French when it started to get written down of Japanese, of Korean, of all of these languages like that.
54:01
[SPEAKER_00]: So, the first genre is this size, genre where you have translations of mostly Buddhist texts, and then people start to care more about the translation.
54:11
[SPEAKER_00]: People start to pay more attention to it, and people also start to want it to sound more natural.
54:16
[SPEAKER_00]: like more flowing.
54:19
[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, this is what my second book is while I'll say two things.
54:23
[SPEAKER_00]: This process of zi is a thing that my very brilliant student Albert Erickson.
54:28
[SPEAKER_00]: I have two brilliant students.
54:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I have actually a third brilliant student coming in.
54:31
[SPEAKER_00]: Shout out to Dan Wynn, my brilliant student who's working on the Wynn Lords in the 18th 19th centuries, and shout out to Albert Erickson, my student who's working on XI right now.
54:42
[SPEAKER_00]: He's discovered some amazing things.
54:44
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's working on that process.
54:45
[SPEAKER_00]: And then my second book will be about the changes in the literary language that we saw.
54:51
[SPEAKER_00]: Because when you start doing this,
54:53
[SPEAKER_00]: the language changes and then as I said a minute ago you start caring about how it sounds in the Vietnamese language and then you start realizing oh things sound different in the Vietnamese language like we can say things in the Vietnamese language that we it's not that you can't say them in the Chinese language but the way in which the Chinese language exists in your culture prevents you from saying it that way.
55:13
[SPEAKER_00]: So again with the hip hop analogy like
55:16
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, if there is a feeling that is very specific to your daily experience of your neighborhood, you're not going to say that in the dialect of English that is, you know, that is downtown Manhattan.
55:28
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to say it in a Bronx way, you know?
55:31
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could, you could, like,
55:39
[SPEAKER_02]: It'll never get to that Tennessee exactly.
55:43
[SPEAKER_02]: Ealing that you're trying to kind of explain to the public or your art, you're trying to express something, but it won't get to that.
55:51
[SPEAKER_02]: It'll never get to that.
55:53
[SPEAKER_02]: Exactly.
55:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
55:54
[SPEAKER_00]: So people feel that.
55:55
[SPEAKER_00]: They start feeling that.
55:57
[SPEAKER_00]: that remarkable pedestrian quality, or like daily quality to the spoken language, and they start, it sparks their imagination.
56:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And what we get in the beginning are experimental translations of things that are written literally Chinese, but they want to hear what they sound like and know.
56:16
[SPEAKER_00]: And they start transforming them.
56:17
[SPEAKER_00]: And I can't remember whether I said this last time or not, I sure I've said it in another kind of video of mine.
56:23
[SPEAKER_00]: They take a thing and they transform it.
56:26
[SPEAKER_00]: Take a thing that's written in literally Chinese and transform it to norm.
56:29
[SPEAKER_00]: That is like taking, for example, like, that's like taking,
56:35
[SPEAKER_00]: Like, that's like taking like the Iliad, like, but, you know, like ancient Greek poem and indeed turning it into like a hip-hop song.
56:47
[SPEAKER_00]: Like it's a transformation of that caliber because often when you're writing a literary Chinese, you are writing in this kind of elevated mode.
56:55
[SPEAKER_00]: and maybe about people that are far away or things like that, but it's a story.
56:59
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a good story that might have very human elements.
57:02
[SPEAKER_00]: You're like, oh, that would make more sense or it would be powerful in a specific way if I focused on this or that.
57:09
[SPEAKER_00]: So the first
57:10
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll give you two great examples of this type of translation.
57:14
[SPEAKER_00]: One, probably the earliest, is a book called Qin Giman Look, which is the overflowing record of strange tales.
57:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And it is a, it's a, it's a set of kind of like ghost stories.
57:28
[SPEAKER_00]: It is written literary Chinese, but it's written,
57:31
[SPEAKER_00]: in by Vietnamese author, Wenzu.
57:33
[SPEAKER_00]: So he's Vietnamese and as because as we've said, he thought of his natural language as literary Chinese.
57:39
[SPEAKER_00]: Gropey's ghost stories, but then someone is like, that would be cool and no.
57:44
[SPEAKER_00]: Like that would be cool to hear how it sounds like in the vernacular, especially ghost stories, you know, strange, weird, like thing.
57:51
[SPEAKER_00]: So then it gets translated.
57:53
[SPEAKER_00]: Another more famous example, maybe is
58:01
[SPEAKER_00]: also written by a Vietnamese author in literary Chinese.
58:04
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a poem about a soldier going after war.
58:07
[SPEAKER_00]: People love it because Vietnamese history is so much war.
58:10
[SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, it's continually popular, but it's actually super boring.
58:13
[SPEAKER_00]: I shouldn't say it as part of my book, but it's like, my god.
58:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, he says goodbye to his wife and walks like 10 feet and then he turns around and then they say goodbye again.
58:22
[SPEAKER_00]: And then he walks 10 more feet and then they do the same thing.
58:29
[SPEAKER_00]: But then it gets translated into Nome and it becomes a totally different thing because now it's not this like high romance, high chivalry boom.
58:38
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about the feeling of separation.
58:40
[SPEAKER_00]: It's about the grief of being torn apart.
58:43
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's exactly the kind of thing that's happening.
58:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's driving creativity in the vernacular because you can now express types of emotions that you could express in literary Chinese.
58:55
[SPEAKER_00]: It's possible.
58:56
[SPEAKER_00]: But the strength of literary Chinese lies elsewhere, lies in a kind of click philosophical clarity, you know, and now you can get into those sort of the dirty and the nasty really in a way that you couldn't before.
59:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I would love to hear an episode on the dirty and the nasty.
59:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You've worked us up the third time, the dirty and the nasty of, you know, I would love to dedicate a whole episode just to hear the language, the comparison between, you know, the way we speak English and the neighborhoods are hip hop, because it sounds exactly the
59:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It is really similar and I do want to clarify.
59:41
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't want to overstate the dirty in the nasty because it is true that what I really mean by that is that people are getting to the sort of more sensual emotions, you know, in the gnome literature, but gnome literature, it's very important to note, is so heavily hybridized with Chinese voice, Chinese style in literature that there is never really
1:00:06
[SPEAKER_00]: moment in the in the beginning where you just have the purely oral Vietnamese literature written down which does contain a lot you think about things like Gazelle and like different types of sayings where you you can get quite dirty sayings and diddies and things like that in Vietnamese today that still circulate.
1:00:23
[SPEAKER_00]: And in the early history of no one's really running that stuff down.
1:00:25
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, they are kind of, actually there's one really good story where two tutors in the gender dynasty, they seduce their their higher to the higher to teach the princesses, how to read and write literary Chinese, which is really interesting because it's evidence that the gender princesses were allowed to learn literary Chinese and they get in trouble because they
1:00:50
[SPEAKER_00]: They write dirty poems to seduce those two ladies and they get fired.
1:00:54
[SPEAKER_00]: And one of them is the ancestor Wintai, who is very famous guy.
1:00:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, but I don't want to, so we do have evidence that there was like dirty known, but in the early kind of literary pieces, like, youthful men, like, children who might know, it's not like you're going to get like really dirty stuff.
1:01:11
[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to get more like gritty stuff, like like more emotions or more visual sensibilities and less images and metaphors and like speaking through a symbol or speaking through an illusion.
1:01:22
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what you're going to get.
1:01:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, I want to emphasize with the to the audience.
1:01:29
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have any questions, comments, please leave them in the comments section.
1:01:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Because the next episode that we do will be talking about the comments that you leave and the things that you express that you want to dig into.
1:01:45
[SPEAKER_02]: If you have any questions, comments, please leave them in.
1:01:48
[SPEAKER_02]: So we can go through it.
1:01:50
[SPEAKER_02]: and we aggregate them and we use the next episode as a sort of an AMA space.
1:01:58
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, exactly.
1:01:59
[SPEAKER_00]: Please do ask everything that you can ask.
1:02:02
[SPEAKER_00]: We're so interested in discussing things with you guys have been a great community for that reason.
1:02:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And we're just scratching the service but no, you know, like we haven't really got into, for example, the history of the literature because the literature transforms over and over and over again.
1:02:16
[SPEAKER_00]: It becomes
1:02:17
[SPEAKER_00]: It transforms the Vietnamese language, and it becomes a, you know, when you think about it in some ways, the endpoint, you can imagine is something like the tale of guilt and guilt, and just guilt is such a
1:02:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you would not think you wouldn't have think to yourself that you was anything like hip-hop because it is such an elevated form of language.
1:02:36
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's very, very elevated in its sensibility.
1:02:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, it is also an example where we're talking about.
1:02:42
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a kind of translation of a literary Chinese.
1:02:44
[SPEAKER_00]: We're not a literary Chinese, but a Chinese text.
1:02:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Um, so if you remember anything from this episode, think about gnome in that hip-hop sensibility, I think it's a very useful one, and also that the habit of writing a gnome is transforming the Vietnamese language.
1:03:01
[SPEAKER_00]: It's changing the way not only that not only the way we think and express ourselves in writing, but ultimately even the way we speak.
1:03:09
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, and the, the, the language that we speak today, at least it's some dialects of Vietnamese is deeply indebted to this process by which that for neck of the language starts to get met and down.
1:03:20
[SPEAKER_02]: John, thank you so much for today and I had wait to hop on the next episode with me to always a pleasure, can I.
1:03:28
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
1:03:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie and Crystal Tran.
1:03:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese Podcast.