Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 462 - Part 2 AMA - What Is Chữ Nôm Premodern Hip Hop? Viet Origins with Professor John Phan

Transcript

462 - Part 2 AMA - What Is Chữ Nôm Premodern Hip Hop? Viet Origins with Professor John Phan · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

0:01
[SPEAKER_03]: All right, I think maybe it won't go so well.
0:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, they were, you know, like we had less engagement with you known, but we had really smart questions.
0:09
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we had less engagement because there was no like rage clickers because there's nothing to do with China.
0:14
[SPEAKER_03]: That's right, that's right, I don't know, it's okay.
0:18
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, here we go.
0:20
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, okay, John, how are you?
0:22
[SPEAKER_02]: How's it going, Kenneth?
0:23
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm doing good.
0:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Good.
0:24
[SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to the Vietnamese podcast with my co-host John Fan at Columbia and this is the Vietnam origins series.
0:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And today we are answering questions.
0:36
[SPEAKER_02]: So this is our AMA from what you know, the last episode.
0:40
[SPEAKER_02]: So welcome everybody.
0:42
[SPEAKER_02]: Hey everybody welcome back.
0:45
[SPEAKER_02]: So we have a lot to cover.
0:47
[SPEAKER_02]: There's different questions that we selected from the M.A.
0:51
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's get started.
0:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
0:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Sounds good.
0:56
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought I just mentioned to you, Kenneth.
0:59
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought the questions, the quality of the conversation in the comments was really high in that last episode.
1:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So thank you all for joining that conversation and posing your excellent questions.
1:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And as usual, apologies that we don't always get to every single very smart question.
1:15
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, even also, you know, I looked a little bit at some of the previous episodes, and there's some great questions popping up in the previous episodes after our AMA.
1:23
[SPEAKER_03]: So, um, bless you.
1:25
[SPEAKER_03]: We do see those and we'll try to incorporate them, um, if and whenever we can, but, um, yeah, looking forward to this conversation.
1:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And a lot of them overlap too, right?
1:34
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's, you know, that's another key thing that we should be looking for too.
1:39
[SPEAKER_02]: for sure, for sure, yeah.
1:41
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think there was a good set of clusters for this question, yeah.
1:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So sorry for this episode.
1:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So one of the clusters, I think that we got, was should we learn to know or some people didn't pose it as a question, some people posted it as like, we should learn to know, we should make it our national script et cetera.
2:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I understand that feeling, but there were a bunch of remarks
2:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I think there's a couple ways to answer that question.
2:12
[SPEAKER_03]: The first one is regardless of whether it becomes any kind of implemented script, yes, the answer is you should learn to, no, because it's fun, and it will unlock a huge part of Vietnamese heritage and literature for you that you will no longer have to read in transliteration.
2:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's not that hard.
2:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Let me interrupt myself.
2:32
[SPEAKER_03]: I wanted to make this announcement, and this first question,
2:37
[SPEAKER_03]: brings it to mind, because I mentioned a couple episodes ago that the teacher who taught me Juno is named Wien Guang Haom, a very eminent scholar who trained many generations of people in hand-known studies in Vietnam, as well as many many international scholars.
2:54
[SPEAKER_03]: like myself.
2:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And a little bit of sad news he'd just passed away.
3:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the funeral was yesterday in Vietnam.
3:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And the entire world, the entire world, really, of Vietnamese studies is in great morning for him.
3:10
[SPEAKER_03]: He was really someone who protected and nurtured the study of two-nome in a time when it was really on the verge of extinction.
3:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in the 80s and 90s there was truly
3:24
[SPEAKER_03]: who could read, know, and he was almost single-handedly responsible for reviving that field, for maintaining that training and for spreading it around the world.
3:36
[SPEAKER_03]: So he is a great scholar, and we all owe him a huge debt, and
3:41
[SPEAKER_03]: even Zeknantu, you know, we all miss him a great deal.
3:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So I just wanted to say that for any of you who might know him and deal with his family for sure.
3:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Before you go on, yes, I'm sharing in your loss and sounds like a very key figure to the field.
4:05
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, when you say that, you know, it almost died because there's only, just a few people.
4:14
[SPEAKER_02]: It, what, can I have in my head is, but when you're, I don't know, like, let's say 10 or 15 people in the field is like really thinning out at that, you know, at that time.
4:25
[SPEAKER_02]: If it ever went away, let's just say theoretically 40 years ago, that all of the academic people that were responsible, just kind of like it went away.
4:34
[SPEAKER_02]: And nobody's, how do you revive something that kind of subject when there's nobody around?
4:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that's a great question.
4:46
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a scary question.
4:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the answer depends on which period of history.
4:53
[SPEAKER_03]: So the lucky thing about now is that thanks to people like Nguyen Kang Hau, we have amazing resources like he compiled, probably the most important etymological dictionary of tune of him.
5:06
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called the Boolean Tunums in Thai.
5:09
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that exists both on paper and on our website digitizing Vietnam.
5:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Shoutout digitizing Vietnam, we can talk about that a little bit later.
5:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a great, important cutting edge hub for all things Vietnam, all things concerned with research and study of Vietnam.
5:26
[SPEAKER_03]: and we have to have a dictionary on that site.
5:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So if everyone, all of a sudden, we all gathered in a room and it got struck by lightning, God forbid.
5:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Those resources exist and you could reconstruct that knowledge from these dictionaries, these pedagogical tools.
5:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Another one of my colleagues, Chancepsoom, has created pedagogical materials for learning known.
5:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So even if you don't have a teacher, now it's not impossible.
5:56
[SPEAKER_03]: you know, those materials didn't really exist.
5:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So that is one of the reasons why Wienpang Haom is so important for producing those materials and also for training people, you know, in the study of no.
6:08
[SPEAKER_03]: There's other things other than learning just the script as well, you know, things like tyhomes, companies,
6:14
[SPEAKER_03]: capacious and extraordinary expertise on the actual texts, on the sutras, the early gnome sutras, and things like that, that is more difficult to reconstruct because not all of that knowledge is in a published form.
6:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So if we don't maintain the field, if we don't maintain training like that, then always a lot of things can be lost irreparably.
6:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So anyway, I think it's, that's a good question to ask on this overall topic of should be learned known because we should.
6:49
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, it should never be allowed to die out because even if it does die out and we can reclaim it through these materials, you do lose a huge amount.
6:59
[SPEAKER_03]: So everyone learned known, everyone learned as much as they can and then share that knowledge with others.
7:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And I asked, because there's so many implications in that answer that you just, you know, reply to, because, you know, when these things, I mean, can you imagine how many other things in the record are missing, you know, as a result of like the tapering off of professionals in that field or the lack of interest.
7:24
[SPEAKER_02]: And, you know, just a real quick plug here, we, you and I sat down with another anthropologist, Nancy Kim, who's been on the podcast.
7:32
[SPEAKER_02]: And we are going to be releasing that very soon, but we, uh, yeah, we speaking of, you know, things that become lost, uh, we are discussing, you know, this, uh, sort of the meeting between, um,
7:48
[SPEAKER_02]: linguistics and hard-earth archaeology where, you know, those intersections are meeting with the Gorla history and all of the text sites coming around coming out of that time frame.
8:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, that was such a fun conversation.
8:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I can't wait to hear it when it gets released.
8:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Nam is amazing.
8:10
[SPEAKER_03]: And I 100% agree that a lot of that conversation was about retrieving things that had been lost.
8:19
[SPEAKER_03]: The via records that are on Orthodox, like the material and the linguistic records.
8:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So it was a great talk.
8:25
[SPEAKER_03]: Talk about noomsoon.
8:26
[SPEAKER_03]: We talk about Golra.
8:27
[SPEAKER_03]: We talk about Haibatin.
8:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So tune into that one as soon as you can.
8:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Into that.
8:31
[SPEAKER_02]: All right, let's get right back into our next question.
8:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so just to finish up this should we learn to know, you know, there's the kind of disease Hanban, the cultural legacy reason for learning known, but also it is there is an aesthetic quality to know, you know, like,
8:53
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like, it's a kind of art form.
8:56
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a whole visual culture to know to the character, and not only known but to have and to know more part of a kind of visual aesthetic and religious culture that was very important to Vietnamese people for many, many centuries, that then is speaking of things lost, was largely obliterated when we made the move to what mood.
9:20
[SPEAKER_03]: also side note, our next episode will be about what new, so tune into that as well.
9:26
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, we see things today like, you know, two-fat book-new, you see calligraphy in what new, which is beautiful and interesting, and it's a kind of survivor of the transition.
9:38
[SPEAKER_03]: But it is a teeny, tiny survivor of a very rich, very diverse visual culture that we lost.
9:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, that's a good indication of like a kind of culture that's associated with the character, you know, that if you, if people learn known, they can, they can also tap into that.
9:56
[SPEAKER_03]: So, that colleague I mentioned, Cheng Cheng Zuang, and many, he's part of a group of avant-garde calligraphists in Vietnam, they're called Zune.
10:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And they are, are reviving, you know, known calligraphy as a kind of avant-garde art form.
10:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I want to mention that because, of course, if you end up learning know me, you can also get into that world, you can explore that art form.
10:23
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is maybe a good segue to another question that I have done on the list about other forms of scripts in Vietnam that were someone asked a really smart question about whether any other experimentations other than know for alternative forms of writing.
10:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to get to that issue later.
10:42
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the examples of that is a script that was invented in the 20th century, and in the preface to the book that introduces this alternative script, the author is like, one of the problems with bookmoo is that it does not satisfy our cultural need, like, you know, and what he says, he says is remarkable thing, which is like, we Vietnamese,
11:05
[SPEAKER_03]: on birthdays, on anniversaries, when we get promoted, when we want to thank someone, what do we do?
11:10
[SPEAKER_03]: We, we bestow a caligraphic scroll.
11:13
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what we do.
11:14
[SPEAKER_03]: That is our habit.
11:15
[SPEAKER_03]: And if we switch all the way to what we're going to do on those occasions, which is an amazing thing to read because that was the 20th century.
11:23
[SPEAKER_03]: That's not that long ago.
11:24
[SPEAKER_03]: But that entire sort of habit, which we see still alive in other places of East Asia, China, Korea, Japan.
11:31
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, it is almost completely gone in Vietnam.
11:34
[SPEAKER_03]: As part of the the switch from do you know, I'm into Quoc Ngu.
11:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, this question of should we learn Quoc Ngu should we implement Quoc Ngu?
11:43
[SPEAKER_03]: another part of the answer as well.
11:46
[SPEAKER_03]: One thing that is happening that might happen if more people learn it is a revival of other parts of Vietnamese cultural practices like that.
11:55
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, the question of should be practically implemented as the new writing system of Vietnam.
12:01
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I mean, the truth is, and we'll talk more about this on our episode in
12:12
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you know, like, but neither is the English alphabet, neither is the French alphabet, you know?
12:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Like the best one is Spanish, or Italian, those ones are really easy, while Spanish is better than Italian.
12:24
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, like it's a simple, you know, usable script that, you know, if you look in history, it did, it really did increase literacy in the 20th century.
12:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Now,
12:34
[SPEAKER_03]: you know that we have computers now so you you could if you want to do you could you could you could standardize know and you can make it the new script and and it would probably not have that much of an impact on literacy because you can because with computer technology you can type know et cetera almost as easily but you know like
12:54
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, attempts to implement something like a culture revolution like that that doesn't have a practical application or doesn't have a practical motivation, they almost always fail and they've happened many times in history where someone has a cultural imperative that they want to implement and then they try to implement it.
13:15
[SPEAKER_03]: But if there is a practical engine, if there's a practical motivation to have people actually adopt and use it, it will almost certainly fall apart.
13:24
[SPEAKER_03]: So I don't see, I won't answer the question of whether we should or not, but I don't see any likelihood that we will.
13:31
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do have a hope, a personal hope that people will learn and people will explore it from the cultural perspective and revive different parts of Vietnamese cultural practices that are associated with do-know.
13:44
[SPEAKER_02]: I do have two thoughts that come in mind.
13:48
[SPEAKER_02]: They're kind of related.
13:49
[SPEAKER_02]: So when I think about our title, is you know, the predecessor or very similar to hip-hop.
13:56
[SPEAKER_02]: And I wonder slightly, if there's correlation, because if you
14:01
[SPEAKER_02]: go out another 50 years or 100 years and you reflect back on hip hop rap, you know, at Berkeley there's two poxikurs, you know, they teach his songs and they go back and then they break down words,
14:16
[SPEAKER_02]: When we look back at you know, is it very similar to hip hop in that way where you know, it would be just kind of weird to talk like a hip hop artist or musicians 50 years or 100 years from now?
14:33
[SPEAKER_02]: That kind of colloquial sort of like the slang that's used is it weird like that?
14:38
[SPEAKER_02]: That's my first question and then my second related question to that is
14:44
[SPEAKER_02]: the meanings within hip hop, I don't know if everything is, if you can define it and everybody agrees with it, right?
14:53
[SPEAKER_02]: There's some people that might have gradients of like, oh, that means that, but it can also mean something else.
14:59
[SPEAKER_02]: And I'm wondering if Junome has that sort of flexibility the way hip hop did in, you know, back in the 80s and 90s?
15:12
[SPEAKER_03]: As you know, I'm a big fan of this hip hop analogy.
15:15
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the first thing to say is that we've got to be careful because there's character writing script and then there's the literature written in the language that the literature written in the writing script of no um.
15:31
[SPEAKER_03]: That language is Vietnamese, different versions of Vietnamese.
15:36
[SPEAKER_03]: So your question sounds more about the language, right?
15:39
[SPEAKER_03]: The language that is expressed in known character writing at different times.
15:45
[SPEAKER_03]: And as we talked about in the episode, it's true.
15:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Like when the script of known was invented, it allowed for Vietnamese vernacular language to be expressed in writing.
15:56
[SPEAKER_03]: in a way that's similar to the evolution of hip-hop or the development or of hip-hop.
16:03
[SPEAKER_03]: So, if you're asking, like, is there a specificity to Vietnamese language, Vietnamese literary language in different moments of known history?
16:13
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, there is a specificity to different hip-hop forms of hip-hop in history.
16:19
[SPEAKER_03]: I would say the answer is definitely yes, because as we talked about the past couple of episodes, the vernacular is by definition specific, both in time and place, right?
16:30
[SPEAKER_03]: So the more vernacular you are, the more specific you are, as we talked about, if a super vernacular form of hip-hop that is specific to a block, a specific block, will have expressions and words that are only intelligible to people, who live on that
16:49
[SPEAKER_03]: In a similar way, there are forms of known that are very specific to borrow a term from another one of my colleagues, David Lurie.
17:00
[SPEAKER_03]: There are specific to realms, different realms of literacy, different little orbits of writing and reading.
17:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was the language in that a particular text might be very specific to a particular audience in that same way.
17:15
[SPEAKER_03]: and actually not only the language, but even as I talked about in the last episode, even the form of the known character, because the form of the known character can be very idiosyncratic.
17:26
[SPEAKER_03]: It can be almost to an individual author.
17:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm not sure if I'm really answering your question, but when we look at known literature, definitely there is idiosyncracy to the language, according to the text, depending on the genre, and there is idiosyncracy to the script,
17:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So, to connect it back to, like, should we revive gnome?
17:50
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, whenever people say that today, what I guess that they're really meaning isn't we, should we speak in a 17th century way?
17:57
[SPEAKER_03]: Should we write in a 17th century way?
17:58
[SPEAKER_03]: What they're really saying is can we adapt and standardize gnome to represent modern Vietnamese?
18:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Which is a really interesting question because, like,
18:08
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like, how would you write the word yato?
18:11
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, that word gato, like the mixing game, that means that you're kind of jealous of something, which is, yeah, so like that's like an acronym in modern Vietnamese.
18:19
[SPEAKER_03]: You'd have to create a new, you know, ground character for that.
18:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So, you know, yeah, so,
18:26
[SPEAKER_03]: Guest to summarize, Vietnamese in these different periods of time are super videos and products.
18:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So we were to revive known for modern Vietnamese, it would have to be completely adapted.
18:38
[SPEAKER_03]: That second question you asked, can you remind me, because I babbled so long I already forgot what you asked.
18:44
[SPEAKER_02]: you the kind of answers it all together in that that last series of answers.
18:50
[SPEAKER_02]: So let's move on because I think that hopefully it satisfied the audience as well.
18:54
[SPEAKER_02]: But I think I got what I what I came for.
18:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, good.
18:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry.
19:00
[SPEAKER_03]: I have to, okay, caveat, I got my Moderna vaccine.
19:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm like a little out of it today.
19:06
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, maybe I'm hallucinating a little bit.
19:09
[SPEAKER_03]: So I apologize.
19:11
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, your question reminds me of another one of the questions that we got, which was, I thought was really interesting.
19:17
[SPEAKER_03]: One of our listeners was like, oh, when you,
19:20
[SPEAKER_03]: use AI to you prompt AI to speak in middle English, then it sounds very different than modern English.
19:28
[SPEAKER_03]: But when you prompt AI to spit something out in middle Vietnamese or 1617-century Vietnamese, it doesn't look at all different from modern Vietnamese, and why is that?
19:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So that was an interesting question.
19:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I also like the fact that someone out there is doing this for the AI, I like to experiment with that way, like good for you, that's really fun.
19:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, first of all, middle English is intelligible with modern English, but it's definitely different, you know, for sure.
19:54
[SPEAKER_03]: To answer this specific question about why AI is doing this, the answer is specific to AI.
20:02
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is because clearly whatever AI model you're using, just is not trained on middle Vietnamese.
20:08
[SPEAKER_03]: So it does not have the data to reproduce for you what middle Vietnamese would sound like.
20:13
[SPEAKER_03]: So that doesn't mean that middle Vietnamese is not distinct from modern Vietnamese.
20:18
[SPEAKER_03]: It just means that the AI does not have access to the reconstructions of middle Vietnamese that would allow it to do that.
20:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And of course, most AA models have a lot of access to English because middle English is everywhere on the internet.
20:32
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, this is a real problem.
20:34
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're interested in AI, a lot of Vietnamese companies and Vietnamese institutions are interested in this issue and that the issue is, it's complicated, but the primary issue is that Vietnamese language resources are not well represented in the AI space.
20:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So when we use AI tools for Vietnamese purposes,
20:53
[SPEAKER_03]: they're less effective because the the base is more impoverished.
20:58
[SPEAKER_03]: So big companies like Mehta for example are looking for ways to increase AI access to Vietnamese language materials.
21:08
[SPEAKER_03]: in order to refine and enhance the applicability of AI tools to Vietnamese debate.
21:15
[SPEAKER_02]: How does that change for the general public?
21:17
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, let's just say with the chat, GBT, OpenAI model, is it just a matter of like, people uploading more stuff to the main brain?
21:28
[SPEAKER_02]: So it's just a matter of time.
21:30
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's just a matter of time, and it's a matter of where those materials are.
21:35
[SPEAKER_03]: So like, I don't know exactly which databases, Chetchi BD can access.
21:40
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, a lot of them, but a lot of think about it.
21:44
[SPEAKER_03]: Think about if you think about the corpus of English literature and how much of the corpus of English literature is digitized and available just like on Google.
21:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And then you think about the corpus of Vietnamese literature and how much of it is digitized and available.
21:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Like the answers you're going to get about English literature are going to be so much better than the answers you're going to get about Vietnamese literature.
22:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Never mind Vietnamese language, like materials actually in the Vietnamese language.
22:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So this question about middle Vietnamese is a good one.
22:12
[SPEAKER_03]: There are reconstructions of middle Vietnamese.
22:15
[SPEAKER_03]: My colleague, one of the most important linguists working on Vietnam today, I think I mentioned once, Shimizu Masaki, has done extensive work on reconstructing middle Vietnamese.
22:27
[SPEAKER_03]: And by middle Vietnamese, we do mean kind of 17th century Vietnamese or so.
22:32
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, that work just is not accessible in a, you know,
22:38
[SPEAKER_03]: in a kind of usable way to these AI models.
22:42
[SPEAKER_03]: They, you know, and there are other materials that contain it.
22:46
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's a good, it's a good question to illustrate the poverty of Vietnamese resources that are available for AI.
22:54
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, that's a morally complicated question as well, because there's privacy, and there's intellectual property, and things like that.
23:01
[SPEAKER_03]: But that was an interesting, go ahead, go ahead, good.
23:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I was just going to say to answer the substantive question about Middle Vietnamese.
23:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Middle Vietnamese did sound very different than modern Vietnamese.
23:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And the most obvious place it sounds different is in what we call consonant clusters.
23:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So the initial clusters of Middle Vietnamese were very different.
23:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'll give you a simple example.
23:25
[SPEAKER_03]: The word,
23:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Taikai, you know, Taikai, like fruit, that was pronounced black with a BL, and joy, the word joy, like heaven, could have been pronounced black as well.
23:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And send us even pronounced joy.
23:44
[SPEAKER_03]: twa is already a twa is not a word we're using anymore but twa means time like like key key you know like when twa is an ancient word but twa in middle Vietnamese would have been pronounced grua with a KL so all of these clusters with a what we call a medial liquid an element the middle they've disappeared or they've turned into something else now but they were all over middle Vietnamese and if you look
24:12
[SPEAKER_03]: the first published dictionary of Wokmoo.
24:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You'll see a lot of them spelled out in his dictionary.
24:16
[SPEAKER_02]: So fascinating.
24:18
[SPEAKER_02]: This is like, and you know, I've never heard a combination of a consonant paired up with an L in Vietnamese, like a BL or KL.
24:26
[SPEAKER_02]: And hearing this is like, brings me to like a fantasy level token, right?
24:32
[SPEAKER_02]: Like inventing languages, but it was there.
24:35
[SPEAKER_02]: It was
24:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Grandparents were even born.
24:40
[SPEAKER_02]: It's just so fascinating to hear.
24:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and it wasn't that long ago.
24:44
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, middle Vietnamese was 17th century, a few hundred years ago.
24:48
[SPEAKER_03]: I would love for she uses reconstructions to be available to AI, so we could hear it.
24:55
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we could hear, you know, being spoken out.
24:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it would sound very different to our mom and daughter.
25:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So it would be amazing.
25:06
[SPEAKER_02]: But you know,
25:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, really?
25:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, that's it.
25:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, yeah.
25:10
[SPEAKER_02]: From when that's weird when it never.
25:13
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, you don't have to say that's one of the old words.
25:17
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
25:18
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
25:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's cool.
25:19
[SPEAKER_03]: That's cool.
25:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And she uses that.
25:20
[SPEAKER_02]: You know, um, I.
25:23
[SPEAKER_02]: wanted to go back on this whole impoverished thing that you brought up.
25:29
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know how many words exist in the Vemies or the English language, but when I think about impoverished, I brought up a fun podcast many times.
25:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry, I'm laughing because there is this famous interview with Nome Chomsky with I forgot who the comedian was, but he sits down and like Nome Chomsky is looking very serious and like the comedian sits down and goes, how many words are an English?
25:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that was first question, and then there's no way to answer that question, there's you know, like there's no way to quantify it, but that was a totally non-sequitor, I apologize.
26:02
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a funny interview.
26:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm looking up on you.
26:04
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
26:05
[SPEAKER_02]: But isn't there?
26:06
[SPEAKER_02]: There's got to be some basic numbers, right?
26:08
[SPEAKER_02]: Like there's some basic numbers.
26:10
[SPEAKER_02]: There's got to be a range.
26:11
[SPEAKER_02]: Like English had a hundred thousand because there's a combination of like a gazillion languages and Vietnamese is, is like a phoenix.
26:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Who knows, right?
26:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
26:21
[SPEAKER_02]: But don't you think?
26:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Interesting.
26:24
[SPEAKER_02]: That we are incapacitated.
26:26
[SPEAKER_02]: We are admitted in what we are able to
26:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting, I didn't know which direction you were going and that's an interesting question and actually you make a really a smart point because Languages that are well first cosmopolitan languages, but secondly languages that have been influenced by many other languages.
26:50
[SPEAKER_03]: You're right, their vocabularies get enriched like an English is one of those languages that has been in contact with so many other languages That we do have this huge vocabulary compare that your hundred percent right compare that with an Amazonian language spoken by
27:05
[SPEAKER_03]: 800 people, you know, they're not going to have a word for a battery charger, you know, and they're certainly not going to have the word sushi in their vocabulary, you know, so you're right.
27:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is a really good point because that's one of the main things that happened to the Vietnamese language as the result of no, as the real of writing, no,
27:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So we already talked about how many Chinese words entered into the Vietnamese language because of bilingualism over the first thousand years of, you know, the quote-unquote period of domination.
27:41
[SPEAKER_03]: But another way in which words did enter the Vietnamese language was through this the literary development of Nome because as we talked about in the episode, I'm known, writers in Nome were not confident about what Nome should be like, what literary Vietnamese should sound like, so they were borrowing from Chinese models.
28:02
[SPEAKER_03]: Chinese words, Chinese phrases.
28:04
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's a way in which Vietnamese vocabulary was enriched.
28:08
[SPEAKER_03]: We got new words, new phrases from Chinese into the Vietnamese language in order to extend the expressive capacity of the language.
28:17
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a such a good point, Kenneth, and actually it's like the heart of my second book project.
28:20
[SPEAKER_03]: You really zeroed in right exactly on what I'm interested in in that second book.
28:25
[SPEAKER_03]: How the expressive range of a language can change over time.
28:33
[SPEAKER_02]: far trajectory, projecting implications.
28:36
[SPEAKER_02]: And here's what I mean by that, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, we all are on the world market place, right?
28:47
[SPEAKER_02]: And you have Englishmen or Frenchmen coming in to a marketplace.
28:50
[SPEAKER_02]: And when I say marketplace, I mean, just the general area where we're all like trading or we're trading ideas or we're trading books or we're trading technology or we're selling at a sort of proverbial world fair, right?
29:03
[SPEAKER_02]: But as Vietnamese, you only have, let's say you only have a thousand ideas.
29:10
[SPEAKER_02]: But these international guys coming from England or wherever, they're like, they've dominated, colonized the world.
29:17
[SPEAKER_02]: They're coming up with like a hundred thousand things to bring to the world fair.
29:20
[SPEAKER_02]: They're advantage.
29:22
[SPEAKER_02]: is like a thousand X because of the amount of accumulating that's happening with thinking and thoughts.
29:28
[SPEAKER_02]: And it's kind of like a computer programming language to me like the early languages are built on the next languages.
29:35
[SPEAKER_02]: So by the time you get to a word like my feet didn't that's three words when computer is one word.
29:41
[SPEAKER_02]: But how many times is that exponentially happening in the world of
29:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Um, so this is a really complicated question, so I'm going to explain essentially limiting us and the reason I know about this is because, yeah, you still talk about all the time he said, when you think about like what we can explain, sometimes we need four words to explain one thing that Americans will explain, sometimes no word, sometimes nobody's come up with
30:10
[SPEAKER_02]: the way to explain this thought and it's like language on top of language on top of language like if you think about computer language c++ to Java to all of these like scripts they they smoothen out and they shorthand four generations, eight generations before like programming language 20 years ago is very good.
30:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Today we could use modern just regular colloquial language in
30:38
[SPEAKER_02]: It's crazy what's happening in computer language and then when I think about Vietnamese, the language of Vietnamese, and how if we don't talk about this, what kind of like not talking about something in the room, where we're like limited our parents.
30:54
[SPEAKER_02]: And I bring this up because I'm excited about this particular topic because I think about psychology and all these other things that my mom,
31:03
[SPEAKER_02]: and her generation, they're very limited because we're frustrated with the speed of what they can and cannot understand.
31:11
[SPEAKER_02]: And typically as children, we want them to be more open-minded.
31:14
[SPEAKER_02]: But it's impossible when you're, when you're dictated,
31:18
[SPEAKER_02]: by how much words you actually have because words dictate how much thought you have and understanding and broadness and all that.
31:26
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a really interesting and complicated issue to raise.
31:31
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there's a couple aspects of it.
31:33
[SPEAKER_03]: So the first is,
31:35
[SPEAKER_03]: As we talked about last time, the capacity to think is not so that at least according to modern generative linguistics, that's Chomsky and linguistics, all humans have the same linguistic underlying grammar in their heads, which means that they have the capacity for the same capacity for linguistic expression, even if the instantiation of their language does
32:05
[SPEAKER_03]: that's an important distinction to make right away.
32:10
[SPEAKER_03]: But, you know, this relationship you're talking about between words and expressivity.
32:16
[SPEAKER_03]: As we talked about in the context of literature, I 100% agree with you.
32:19
[SPEAKER_03]: And let me see languages.
32:21
[SPEAKER_03]: develop and transform expressively.
32:26
[SPEAKER_03]: But at the same time, this thing you're talking about with regard to this exponential lagging behind.
32:33
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the important thing to remember is that languages are living systems, which means they will self-correct and self-simplify.
32:43
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, as because they're always, they always need to be running as a system.
32:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So you're never going to accrue structures to the point where, I mean, the system crashes.
32:55
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm speaking a little bit too abstractly.
32:56
[SPEAKER_03]: But what I mean is, at a certain point, if you're finding it cumbersome to express a certain idea, but you have the idea in your society, what will probably happen is that,
33:07
[SPEAKER_03]: you will just shorten that word or you'll develop a new word or you'll just borrow the foreign word like you know like in English in Vietnamese at least in America we often say my sale we don't say my z-dum you know because my sale was just easier so we just borrow the the word sale you know for cell phone and that is just a common occurrence and like think about English as well like we don't say
33:30
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't say raw, sliced fish, you know, we say sushi because, you know, it's just easier to borrow the word sushi and now sushi is in the English language.
33:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think the very mechanism of borrowing words is a way that in which the expressive capacity of a language is increased.
33:48
[SPEAKER_03]: when new concepts, new ideas, new objects enter into a society and they enrich the the lexical base of that language.
33:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I don't think, I think what you're really describing is
34:04
[SPEAKER_03]: There is a generational leg though, you know, like when a new generation and there's new ideas, new phenomena, in the, in, in a particular society that are, that is very different from the previous generation, and there is a, and that is expressed linguistically as well.
34:20
[SPEAKER_03]: There can be a kind of gap, you know, but I think that has much more to do with generations than it has to do with linguistic structure.
34:27
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Vietnamese today, if you really,
34:29
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, if you really created a contemporary dictionary Vietnam, there would be so many borrowed words in Vietnamese.
34:39
[SPEAKER_03]: And you would see that the Vietnamese language is capable of expressing all of these words.
34:44
[SPEAKER_03]: It's just that we happened to just borrow the words.
34:46
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's very natural.
34:48
[SPEAKER_03]: You pointed out English as being one of those languages.
34:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's exactly right.
34:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Think about how many French words are in English.
34:55
[SPEAKER_03]: There were phases in English history
34:58
[SPEAKER_03]: the native English vocabulary just lacked the way of saying so many different things and as a result they just borrowed those words and now we have a, you know, an enriched English vocabulary of many different provinces.
35:14
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that's that happened to Vietnamese.
35:16
[SPEAKER_03]: It's continuing to happen to Vietnamese.
35:18
[SPEAKER_03]: And it happens to essentially every language.
35:21
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it happens naturally, so the cases where it doesn't is when you don't have contact, like that Amazonian language deep in the Amazon rainforest, where there is no social contact, therefore there's no impetus and no mechanism by which new ideas, new objects can enter into the society and therefore the language.
35:39
[SPEAKER_02]: And vice versa too, right?
35:40
[SPEAKER_02]: Like the Eskimos 50 50 words for snow or their water.
35:45
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, a description.
35:45
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sure in the Amazon there's maybe 50 words for their ideas of water or, you know, snakes, whatever that we there's no way that we or leaves or medicine that they have that we are just completely in the dark.
35:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and that's a good reminder because, you know, as we come into contact with different types of cosmopolitan languages, there's that concept again, we there is a kind of extinction, you know, to a diversity that might have existed before, you know, like, you know, we talked about the word jump.
36:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, for a head, some people still use it in places, but that's completely replaced by the word no, you know, so there who knows what types of distinctions and vocabularies were wiped out, you know, as a result of these cosmopolitan languages being implemented.
36:29
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's what I meant by language being a system.
36:31
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a kind of system load in languages.
36:34
[SPEAKER_03]: So like,
36:35
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, if you have x range of expressivity, but you still might actually populate that range with a huge number of words and distinctions, but then maybe the range of things you need to express doubles.
36:47
[SPEAKER_03]: like the system load kind of remains the same.
36:49
[SPEAKER_03]: So you might replace, you know?
36:51
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think it's a very interesting question.
36:53
[SPEAKER_03]: I question, I'm not equipped to answer, but actually in this age of big data and AI, like I wonder if linguists are gonna start to be well-answered questions of this type of this scale, with regard to entire corpuses.
37:05
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really interesting.
37:07
[SPEAKER_02]: Awesome.
37:07
[SPEAKER_02]: We are literally on, we're moving on to our third question, we're like, oh, for halfway, this is, right?
37:13
[SPEAKER_02]: We're slow.
37:17
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, geez, well, I think another related question, so I'm gonna combine a couple of questions.
37:26
[SPEAKER_03]: So one question that was asked was, about you know, there were two questions.
37:31
[SPEAKER_03]: One does you know, did having to you know make it easier to transition to QuotMoo and to in a kind of related way, like,
37:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Please compare to, you know, to other types of vernacular scripts in China.
37:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And the example that came up, I think twice, was, year one, was the Cantonese characters, characters for the Cantonese language.
37:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'll take the first one about what move first and then I'll go to the year one question.
38:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Qdom did, in a sense, make it easier to transition to Quattmune.
38:07
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll talk more about this next episode, just because there was a precedent for writing the Vietnamese language.
38:12
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, like, because all these things we've been talking about about the how Vietnamese language transformed as a result of the invention and development of Nome,
38:22
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, we didn't have to do that when we transitioned to Quotnoo because by then we had centuries-old tradition and way of writing the Vietnamese language.
38:32
[SPEAKER_03]: So the precedent of writing the spoken Vietnamese language had already been established.
38:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So if you've never written your spoken language and then you want to write it down, even if you have the precedent of writing in another language, it's going to be a whole process of development.
38:47
[SPEAKER_03]: and transformation.
38:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But if you already have one way of writing your language and then you're just switching to another way of writing your language, that's a much simpler transition.
38:56
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a much, much simpler.
38:57
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think that's the simplest way or yeah, most direct way to answer that question.
39:02
[SPEAKER_03]: But stay tuned because we'll talk a lot about that in the Quoc Nu episode coming up.
39:07
[SPEAKER_03]: Now, the other question about how is do you know like or not like different kinds of vernacular Chinese scripts?
39:14
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a very smart question.
39:16
[SPEAKER_03]: And the short answer is, you guys are right.
39:19
[SPEAKER_03]: It's exactly the same.
39:20
[SPEAKER_03]: So like there are so many scripts that developed out of the, out of the, out of the precedent of Chinese writing that was, you know, people taking the Chinese script and adapting it to their form of speech.
39:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And, you know, it's not just Vietnamese, but as we talked about last time, even many by-speakers, speakers of a Kradai language in Northern Vietnam, also created genetic-based writing scripts for their language, which call it because a Junongai.
39:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And then we have examples of Chinese languages that are doing the same thing like Cantonese has kind of, there are characters that exist only for words that are in the Cantonese language, same thing with Mi Nangwa, like mean kind of scripts,
40:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And the thing that is similar to in all of these cases, even though each of these languages are different language families, the thing that's similar is that the scripts generally function like the Chinese script, meaning they're what we call Morphosilabic, their scripts, where a single character represents generally,
40:28
[SPEAKER_03]: a single syllable and generally a single morphine, meaning a single meaningful unit and that's different than an alphabet or a syllabary.
40:36
[SPEAKER_03]: An alphabet is individual units of sound with no meaning represented, a syllabary like Japanese katakana or Hiragana is every single unit is a syllable but no meaning is associated.
40:49
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah one, the Cantonese script, the Vietnamese two
40:57
[SPEAKER_03]: more fosalabic, meaning they usually represent a syllable and a meaningful unit in a single a single character.
41:06
[SPEAKER_03]: But there are more phonographic, more things that are more like syllabaries that are adapted as well.
41:12
[SPEAKER_03]: But that means, yes, what Cantonese people are doing when they create characters for the Cantonese language, that's the same thing that
41:19
[SPEAKER_03]: that Vietnamese intellectuals were doing when they were creating characters to represent the Vietnamese language.
41:25
[SPEAKER_03]: The difference is just one of magnitude because there's way more overlap between Cantonese and written Chinese than there is between spoken Vietnamese and written Chinese, right?
41:35
[SPEAKER_03]: But that's the only real difference.
41:37
[SPEAKER_02]: That was a really smart question.
41:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so that brings me to another really smart question, because I know we were like daily downing.
41:50
[SPEAKER_03]: So I want to get to this one before we move on.
41:52
[SPEAKER_03]: And that is like someone asked, as I mentioned earlier, like, did Vietnamese ever develop a phonographic script, did it develop a syllabary like Katakana or Hira-Gana that we have in Japan or like an alphabet like Hangul in Korea?
42:06
[SPEAKER_03]: This is such a smart question.
42:08
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's related to another question,
42:11
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, whoever that is, God bless you.
42:14
[SPEAKER_03]: Another listener asked, could you tell us more about the book?
42:18
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, whoa, you know what I'm doing, you are amazing.
42:21
[SPEAKER_03]: What I'm doing is a very not well-known 20th century invention of a script that I've written, so we had a professor at
42:31
[SPEAKER_03]: Fulbright University has written a short article on it.
42:35
[SPEAKER_03]: We in Huang Hong, Rest in Peace, also wrote about this script.
42:39
[SPEAKER_03]: I have a couple articles about this script as well.
42:41
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really fascinating.
42:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So those two questions are related because what Amtantu is a kind of alternative script that was invented for the Vietnamese.
42:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Wait, so what does that mean?
42:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
42:51
[SPEAKER_02]: Amtantu.
42:53
[SPEAKER_02]: That sounds... Yeah.
42:55
[SPEAKER_02]: So contradictory.
42:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's... Yeah.
42:58
[SPEAKER_03]: Kukam is the sounds of the the national sounds, just like the you know the Vietnamese language.
43:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Kukam and Tanto means the new characters.
43:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So the new writing.
43:08
[SPEAKER_03]: So the new writings for the nation sound.
43:10
[SPEAKER_03]: The new writing script for the nation sounds.
43:12
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like, Kukam with the, you know, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto, Tanto,
43:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So this question in general, like, did Vietnamese ever develop an alternative script.
43:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So before the 20th century, we have little to no evidence that there was any other scripts other than Quoc-Mu invented by the Europeans and do no them invented by Vietnamese.
43:41
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
43:42
[SPEAKER_03]: Some people try to find evidence of, you know, maybe an index script used in Vietnam, but there is no real evidence for that as far as I know.
43:51
[SPEAKER_03]: no substantial evidence.
43:52
[SPEAKER_03]: But in the 20th century, after colonization, when especially when what news starts to get sort of more widespread, there are a bunch of Vietnamese intellectuals who are really from a kind of mixed class who are partially or completely trained and have known, you know, who feel very sad essentially.
44:14
[SPEAKER_03]: They feel like, um,
44:17
[SPEAKER_03]: They feel like a huge part of eating this culture is disappearing because we are abandoning literary Chinese and because we're abandoning gnome.
44:24
[SPEAKER_03]: As I said, the example I gave earlier is an example of this where that one guy is like, what are we going to do on birthdays?
44:30
[SPEAKER_03]: If we can't, if we can't bestow a calligraphic script, you know, they found quake loose so offensive essentially.
44:37
[SPEAKER_03]: They were like,
44:38
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, this is the end of Vietnamese culture.
44:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So I have an article about this exact thing called the secularization of the signograph, which if you're interested in this process, you can read, it's a short article.
44:51
[SPEAKER_03]: But it describes this process where in the early or part of this era, people are really freaking out almost religiously.
44:58
[SPEAKER_03]: They're like, it truly is the end of Vietnamese culture.
45:01
[SPEAKER_03]: Like Vietnamese culture, as we know, it will be over if we abandon characters, if we abandon Chinese, if we abandon, no, we will not be Vietnamese anymore.
45:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Like that's really the idea.
45:11
[SPEAKER_03]: And then,
45:13
[SPEAKER_03]: And part of the reason why there was that reaction is because in classical Vietnamese culture, writing was considered to be the expression of the cosmological pattern.
45:22
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, you think about the word van, we say han van viet van.
45:26
[SPEAKER_03]: We don't really say viet van, but we could.
45:28
[SPEAKER_03]: Van means vanhau, and also means vanming.
45:31
[SPEAKER_03]: But van originally meant pattern, like the pattern of a tortoise shell, or the pattern of a snowflake, or the pattern of veins on a leaf.
45:40
[SPEAKER_03]: And in classical, synthetic, Vedic culture, that pattern was believed to have been extracted by ancient sages to create the writing system, the Chinese writing system, right?
45:51
[SPEAKER_03]: And no, is a derivative of the Chinese writing system.
45:54
[SPEAKER_03]: So,
45:55
[SPEAKER_03]: When we were in this moment of abandoning signographic writing, both Han and Noam, these intellectuals were thinking, we're abandoning our connection to the pattern of the cause of the universe.
46:09
[SPEAKER_03]: We're abandoning
46:11
[SPEAKER_03]: our direct connection to the logic of how the universe works, the van of the universe.
46:17
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was really a serious issue, you know?
46:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And the idea was a quackmoo might be the utilitarian, but it does not have this cosmological religious significance.
46:28
[SPEAKER_03]: It is really not too different from the idea that occurred in Turkey around exactly the same time when Turkey was abandoning the Arabic script.
46:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And all of these
46:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Muslims were like, how can you abandon the Arab-except?
46:39
[SPEAKER_03]: You're abandoning the godly script, right?
46:41
[SPEAKER_03]: The divine script.
46:43
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, classical Vietnamese elites were thinking the same thing in the beginning.
46:47
[SPEAKER_03]: And then, of course, as time went on, not very much time, they stopped and the world didn't end.
46:54
[SPEAKER_03]: The attitude gets adjusted and adjusted and adjusted, but there's still this lingering kind of grief over the visual culture, like the culture of characters that we're going to lose.
47:08
[SPEAKER_03]: Hence, that guy I mentioned, who was like, what are we going to do on birthdays?
47:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are, as a result of these responses to Quacknul, a couple of different scripts that are invented around the early 20th century.
47:22
[SPEAKER_03]: So, what in them is the Kwakum Tantu.
47:24
[SPEAKER_03]: The Kwakum Tantu is a really fascinating script.
47:28
[SPEAKER_03]: It is probably part of the earlier moment of this script experimentation.
47:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's too complicated for me to explain.
47:37
[SPEAKER_03]: So please read my article.
47:38
[SPEAKER_03]: I have another article about it.
47:41
[SPEAKER_03]: excuse me.
47:42
[SPEAKER_03]: What is it called?
47:42
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called a crisis in the cosmopolitan colonization and the promotion of the vernacular in an early 20th century Vietnamese script experiment.
47:51
[SPEAKER_03]: That's way too long.
47:51
[SPEAKER_03]: Just Google my name and Quocam Thuntel and you'll find it and it explains the structure of the script.
47:57
[SPEAKER_03]: But essentially the script is based on a
48:02
[SPEAKER_03]: a cinematic, philological breakdown of the Chinese character that then is recombined in different ways to produce and represent the syllables of the Vietnamese language.
48:11
[SPEAKER_03]: It's really fascinating script.
48:13
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very cumbersome.
48:15
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't work very well, but you can tell by reading this book, what come tuntu?
48:19
[SPEAKER_03]: That the author was really afraid.
48:22
[SPEAKER_03]: that Vietnamese culture was endangered was going to go extinct as the result of abandoning Chinese writing.
48:29
[SPEAKER_03]: So he invented the script as a way of trying to protect Vietnamese culture, which was fascinating.
48:35
[SPEAKER_03]: And then if you fast forward in time a little bit, there's another script.
48:39
[SPEAKER_03]: called Vietto, mot loi, vietting, anam, so that mean Vietto is clear.
48:45
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like Vietnamese characters, right?
48:48
[SPEAKER_03]: Mot loi, vietting, anam means a way of writing the enemy's language.
48:53
[SPEAKER_03]: Animies language, in this case, means the Vietnamese language, right?
48:56
[SPEAKER_03]: And this one, this script is essentially
49:01
[SPEAKER_03]: It takes like the Chinese characters and it breaks them up and it recombines them into, it is an alphabet, but it recombines them in a way that creates a block for a syllable.
49:13
[SPEAKER_03]: It's actually really similar to Hungle.
49:15
[SPEAKER_03]: So I always wondered, did the person who invented Viply?
49:19
[SPEAKER_03]: Did they know about Hungle because it's constructed almost the same way?
49:22
[SPEAKER_03]: It's an alphabet, but a syllable block alphabet.
49:25
[SPEAKER_03]: And then there's another one, the last one I mentioned, is called Do You Know My, which is, you know, obviously it means new to you know.
49:34
[SPEAKER_03]: And this is the simplest of these alternative script experiments.
49:37
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's like basically it takes Chinese characters and or radicals.
49:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And it just assigns, it basically maps them almost directly onto what blue.
49:45
[SPEAKER_03]: So that you can write what blue, but it looks like Chinese characters.
49:49
[SPEAKER_03]: So the answer is yes, the Vietnamese did try to develop these other forms of scripts that preserved some element of genetic writing, hand-nome writing, but then was, you know, a rapid form of modern, more phonographic uses.
50:04
[SPEAKER_03]: But none of them took hold and guacamole in the end one out.
50:07
[SPEAKER_03]: So we'll talk more about that in the next episode, but I thought that was a really smart question.
50:12
[SPEAKER_03]: And please do read those articles about guacamtham tu.
50:14
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so impressed that somebody mentioned that text.
50:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So, yeah, great questions.
50:21
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I know we're running out of time.
50:23
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a, can we do like as we did last time at kind of rapid fire response to some of these questions?
50:31
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, I'll, I'll sit out and listen.
50:33
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, yeah, because I want to give these smart questions they're due, but we don't have much time left.
50:38
[SPEAKER_03]: So first,
50:41
[SPEAKER_03]: real quick because this is one that is my fault.
50:43
[SPEAKER_03]: So someone fact checked me about the child script and I don't know they were like because I said that there's a difference between the child and the script and the script used for writing Sanskrit in the child kingdoms and this person was like I think it's just the child script for both and I think that maybe they're right I'm not an expert on that but
51:02
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that you are right.
51:03
[SPEAKER_03]: I think what I was talking about in terms of the curly script is a 15-century cursive version of the chum script.
51:09
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think still that the chum script, the script, the pile of a derived script that's used to write the chum language that has some differences with the original pile of a script.
51:21
[SPEAKER_03]: the potlava director to write Sanskrit because there are there are sounds in the child language that are not in Sanskrit.
51:28
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think there's some difference there but I'm just not an expert.
51:31
[SPEAKER_03]: So thank you for just a shout out for that person.
51:35
[SPEAKER_03]: Another person asked, what do you think is someone is trying to start a fight?
51:40
[SPEAKER_03]: So someone was like, what do you think about Liam Kelly's idea?
51:44
[SPEAKER_03]: A criticism that many Vietnamese historians don't know literary Chinese.
51:47
[SPEAKER_03]: So first of all, shout out, Liam Kelly is a dear colleague of mine, he's brilliant, premodern historian of Vietnam.
51:53
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's got a great, he's also a great source for knowledge about Vietnam in the public humanity space.
52:01
[SPEAKER_03]: So read his blog, listen to his videos, watch his YouTube channel.
52:05
[SPEAKER_03]: And you know, what I will say is that first of all, I know a lot of Vietnamese historians who do know literary Chinese.
52:13
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, I think what I will say is that Liam is right, that to study pre-modern Vietnam, you have to know literary Chinese.
52:19
[SPEAKER_03]: There's, there's no way around it.
52:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Like there's no way to do any serious research on pre-modern Vietnam without using that language because all of the documents are written in that language.
52:29
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do think a lot of scholars, maybe in the earlier period, this was not true, but today,
52:37
[SPEAKER_03]: Today, literary Chinese training is very well-represented.
52:41
[SPEAKER_03]: And that may be a result of efforts by people like Liam to emphasize the importance of literary Chinese.
52:49
[SPEAKER_03]: But I had to answer that question because I was like, oh, someone is someone's throwing gas on the fire.
52:54
[SPEAKER_03]: I get it.
52:55
[SPEAKER_03]: OK, it's OK. Another question.
52:59
[SPEAKER_03]: Another course, fact check.
53:05
[SPEAKER_03]: that Mahayana Buddhism was primarily spread into Vietnam through China.
53:11
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't, that's not wrong.
53:12
[SPEAKER_03]: But I do want to emphasize that in recent scholarship, especially by people like Litana, a feminist historian of Vietnam, there is a great deal of evidence that
53:24
[SPEAKER_03]: that Buddhism traveled via the maritime route directly from India into the area of northern Vietnam.
53:30
[SPEAKER_03]: And in fact, the area of northern Vietnam was one of the gateways to transmit Buddhism into the rest of China.
53:36
[SPEAKER_03]: And actually, we also see strong evidence of Mahayana Buddhism in Southeast Asia.
53:41
[SPEAKER_03]: For example, Jaya Varman, the eighth, is the king who commissioned the building of the Bion.
53:48
[SPEAKER_03]: If anyone has been to Ankara,
53:50
[SPEAKER_03]: the amcor park.
53:51
[SPEAKER_03]: The bion is the it's the it's the Tomb Raider.
53:56
[SPEAKER_03]: It's one of the Tomb Raider core temples.
53:58
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the one with the big faces on it.
54:00
[SPEAKER_03]: Those big faces are
54:01
[SPEAKER_03]: depictions of Jaya Varmann as of Bodhisattva.
54:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So we know he was a Mahayana Buddhist.
54:06
[SPEAKER_03]: So we know that Mahayana Buddhism was strongly present in Southeast Asia in pre-modern times, even though today, Mahayana is primarily represented in East Asia.
54:16
[SPEAKER_03]: So I want to complicate what I said by saying that there was a lot of Mahayana in Southeast Asia and that it might have been traveling from Southeast Asia into Vietnam and not the other way around.
54:28
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a bunch of other questions like there's one question that I think I think I will end on this one and then, you know, kind of, if you have any other thoughts or questions, we can talk about those, but I want to end on this one because I think it's a really good question and it's a question that I don't know very much about, so I'm going to end with an invitation.
54:47
[SPEAKER_03]: So the question is, do you know about any known that specific to the self?
54:52
[SPEAKER_03]: Southern Vietnam before the 20th century.
54:55
[SPEAKER_03]: So the answer is that it must have existed.
54:58
[SPEAKER_03]: And I will answer in two ways.
55:01
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not an expert on this, but I'm very interested in this question.
55:05
[SPEAKER_03]: So the first thing is, of course, we have the Epica Bluquanti and the Genkiu of the South, which was written in Nome.
55:12
[SPEAKER_03]: So we know that people were writing.
55:14
[SPEAKER_03]: You know, in no man himself and certainly we know that they were and we also have a text called the sci-fi which was from Which is from Neng jam which was from the wind lords period of the south.
55:28
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a it's a satire about a monk and a nun
55:32
[SPEAKER_03]: written by a man in wing, including, and that there's a book about it and a translation of it by my caught my very dear colleague, Clotting, so there's a short answer to your question.
55:43
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are two very well-known southern specific known pieces of known literature, but what I will say is that there must be much more, and there are two places I want to point out.
55:54
[SPEAKER_03]: One is the Boulach BULAC library
56:01
[SPEAKER_03]: with many representations of southern known literature.
56:04
[SPEAKER_03]: So you can look at their catalog.
56:06
[SPEAKER_03]: And the second is, if you're in Ho Chi Minh City, Saigon, there is a Buddhist temple called Huang, Huang Temple, and they have been collecting examples of known specific to the south.
56:18
[SPEAKER_03]: for many years.
56:20
[SPEAKER_03]: So they, they are another place to go if you're interested in specifically southern known.
56:26
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's a great point and a great thing to raise.
56:28
[SPEAKER_03]: But the invitation on the issue is anyone who is in the field or thinking of going into graduate school or thinking of studying known.
56:35
[SPEAKER_03]: This is a good topic, like look at Southern Nome because it's understudied and it's underrepresented in the scholarship.
56:42
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's a couple of rapid firing answers to some questions.
56:45
[SPEAKER_03]: I know there were more, but we daily daily too much.
56:48
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think we'll probably have to wrap it up.
56:50
[SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, John.
56:51
[SPEAKER_02]: That's uh, it's very comprehensive.
56:53
[SPEAKER_02]: And I look forward to the, you know, the next uh, lesson lesson is not the
57:04
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
57:04
[SPEAKER_02]: Conversation.
57:05
[SPEAKER_03]: Conversation.
57:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Conversation.
57:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Conversation.
57:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
57:06
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, the next topic.
57:08
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what we do.
57:09
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, we do.
57:10
[SPEAKER_03]: Me too.
57:10
[SPEAKER_03]: So we'll be talking about the emergence and development of what knew and how what knew became the quote and quote national script of Vietnamese.
57:18
[SPEAKER_03]: So tune into that episode.
57:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Very exciting.
57:20
[SPEAKER_03]: And thanks again, Kenna.
57:21
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you, John.
57:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Great as always.
57:23
[SPEAKER_03]: Bye.
57:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wynne.
57:30
[SPEAKER_01]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wynne, Catherine Wynne, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
57:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.