Latest / The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen / 440 - Is Vietnamese Just the New Chinese Language? AMA Double Down with Prof. John Phan

Transcript

440 - Is Vietnamese Just the New Chinese Language? AMA Double Down with Prof. John Phan · The Vietnamese with Kenneth Nguyen

• 0:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: Welcome back to the Vietnamese podcast with our subseries ancient Vietnam with John Fam.
• 0:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Hello, how's it going everybody?
• 0:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: I always look forward to these and I think you know you and I are figuring out how to structure this and today we are you know, we talked about having this be really responding
• 0:21
  [SPEAKER_02]: kind of like an AMA forum to all of the comments that were, I mean, we had so many views on this YouTube episode, this first one.
• 0:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we want to be here today to go through some of the ideas that were brought up on this episode.
• 0:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was amazing to see the engagement with our last episode.
• 0:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a fantastic discussion.
• 0:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm really excited to get into some of that discussion with you today, Ken.
• 0:49
  [SPEAKER_02]: Before we start, and I do this with all of our sub-series as a way to raise money for the hours that Michael hosts like you put into the episode, but there's a button that you could donate on YouTube, and it helps with Professor John working on all the hours that he's putting into this sub-series.
• 1:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yes, please do help us out.
• 1:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Click on that button, subscribe, and help us out a little bit, our lives are precarious, and every little tiny bit helps.
• 1:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So please do, thank you so much.
• 1:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: Thank you, John.
• 1:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Today, we're urging listeners to go back to episode one to listen about the idea of identity, language, nationalism, national pride, all of these things are what we covered in episode one.
• 1:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And today, we're going to really talk about the questions and the points that we're brought out.
• 1:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we want to shout out to the sea of scholars and scholarship out there, which, John, your ideas come from.
• 1:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so first on the first note, again, we were both amazed by the engagement and the passion and the interest in the topic, which was fantastic.
• 2:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think what both we both realized was that a lot of the questions and comments
• 2:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: really focused on the themes of our sort of pilot episode about the importance of language in our lives, how we feel about language, and why we invest so much emotion in language.
• 2:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think the comment section of that episode that we just did about whether or not Vietnamese is the new Chinese language that was the title.
• 2:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: brought out actually why we did that very first episode about the role of language in our lives.
• 2:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So to anyone who listened to that episode, I really would urge you to listen to our first conversation.
• 2:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because in that first conversation, we talk about why, especially within the Vietnamese community, we care so much about what we believe about the Vietnamese language.
• 2:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And especially what we believe about the Vietnamese language, visa-v Chinese.
• 2:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: The way we imagine,
• 2:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: the Chinese language and the Vietnamese language has to do with all these issues of how we as human beings think about language in our own identity.
• 3:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we won't go through all of those issues again here, but if you were one of those people who were like, wow, this is crazy.
• 3:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like, I've been taught or I have these feelings about what the Vietnamese language means to me.
• 3:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when I hear about maybe the influences of other languages on the Vietnamese language, it sparks feelings in me.
• 3:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then that is the episode for you.
• 3:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: And actually anyone who's interested in this series, I would recommend you go back and listen to that first episode.
• 3:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: For now, our format is going to be, we're going to release an episode that focuses and drives one topic.
• 3:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then because of the engagement and the questions and the topics that people are bringing up,
• 3:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: The second one will be the AMA, we're going to do our best to address and talk about the points that were brought up in a general way.
• 3:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what I mean by general is we're probably not going to go into specifics on each question, but a lot of people are asking sort of the same question.
• 4:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we're going to try to bundle these questions into bullet points that we are prepared to answer.
• 4:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: So sub-series episode first, very clear topic, and then
• 4:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: usually the follow-up will be the AMA answers.
• 4:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we want to tease out the next episode, which is, so this is going to be about the AMA, but the next one is going to be about literary Chinese and the writing, the literature script in Vietnamese society, as it was evolving, future episodes after that will be like Juno and Kukmo.
• 4:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: So we'll slowly start to identify these different steps of the evolution of our language.
• 4:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so you know, a lot of questions that we got in that that common section were about to know where about literary Chinese, where about the realm of writing.
• 4:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if that was you and you were interested in that, please stay tuned because we're going to do an AMA for the episode today, but yeah, we're going to get into those things in the next sort of content episode.
• 5:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So stay tuned.
• 5:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's going to be great.
• 5:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: So our first point today is the general conditions of language shift, the Norman comparisons.
• 5:17
  [SPEAKER_02]: And we have comments on Vietnam defeating the Chinese colonizers, et cetera.
• 5:23
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm referring to our notes.
• 5:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: And John, if you're ready and you don't need to kind of talk about any other points, we can get right into the comments if you're all done with that.
• 5:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: sure yeah let's let's get into it okay yeah so yeah go ahead yeah so yeah going back to that first bullet point that we have is the general conditions of language shift and and the the Norman comparison etc.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 5:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, the most contentious part of my book and the ideas that we talked a little bit about in that episode was the idea that the Vietnamese language originates through a process where there was this Chinese language that was spoken in the area in what we now call Northern Vietnam.
• 6:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was at the speaker population shifted to the ancestor of the Vietnamese language and it changed that language in the process.
• 6:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's called language shift.
• 6:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Excuse me.
• 6:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Sorry.
• 6:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I saw some really brilliant discussions of that idea in the comment section.
• 6:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some people raised the great comparison of the Norman conquest of England, or of that part of the British Isles.
• 6:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what they're referring to is the moment in history when the Normans who were actually a kind of Viking group of people who conquered a part of France, then subsequently conquered England.
• 6:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: In both of those moments, the Norman shifted their language.
• 6:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they originally spoke, excuse me again, a Germanic language.
• 6:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then when they conquered the Norman coast, which is why that's called Normandy today, they shifted to French.
• 7:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: and they spoke a special kind of French, and then when they conquered England, they shifted to English.
• 7:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when they did that, because they were the ruling elite, they transformed the English language in the process.
• 7:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those commentators who mentioned the Norman conquest, you know, Kudos to you, that's an excellent comparison with what happened, or what I'm claiming happened in the history of the Vietnamese language.
• 7:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: In fact, it's in my book, I discuss explicitly the Norman conquest as a way of
• 7:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: a comparison.
• 7:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And those of you who said the difference is the Vietnamese conquered the Chinese colonizers.
• 7:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Kudos to you as well.
• 7:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: I don't agree with everything the way you put it because as we talked about extensively in the first episode, we can't really talk about Chinese and Vietnamese people yet.
• 7:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's true that there's a big difference between the Norman conquest and what happened in Vietnam because the Normans were the conquerors and then they shifted, right?
• 7:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: But they, you know, they stayed.
• 7:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in Vietnam, well, actually, it's quite similar that the Chinese, the Han, we should call them Han, the Han conquered the Red River Plane.
• 8:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is the area of northern Vietnam around where Hanoi is today.
• 8:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And they're speaking a dialect of Chinese for many, many centuries.
• 8:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then something happens where that dialect of Chinese dies out.
• 8:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: So actually similar to the, it's actually quite similar to the Normans.
• 8:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: When the Normans conquer England, England does not shift to French, right?
• 8:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the English language transforms as the result of the influence of this French speaking elite who themselves shifted to English speaking.
• 8:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I know that's a little confusing.
• 8:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I started, I get it.
• 8:43
  [SPEAKER_02]: I do have a question about who came up with this idea.
• 8:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: Did you come up with it?
• 8:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: Not the Norman part, but the sort of like the analogous side of it in Vietnam and Chinese language is.
• 8:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: Did you come up with that?
• 8:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: Or was it something that was like a little bit baked and you went in and went a little harder and go, I'm going to fully bake this?
• 9:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like what's the history of this Norman comparison?
• 9:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for asking that question.
• 9:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because that's another thing I wanted to talk about that came up in the quite brilliant discussion of our episode.
• 9:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are a lot of scholars who have worked on the mystery of Chinese influence on the Vietnamese language.
• 9:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: So to answer your question shortly, yes, the main contribution to this discussion has been to explicitly argue
• 9:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: that there was a spoken Chinese language, that for all intents and purposes became native to the region, and that the Vietnamese language is the result of language shift away from that language.
• 9:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that is, you can think of that as a John fun idea, but
• 9:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am not the first person.
• 9:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: By no means am I the first person to have theorized about Chinese languages in the region or their influences on Vietnamese.
• 10:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the probably the most important person that I should mention whose name I was so pleased to see also came up.
• 10:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: in our comments section.
• 10:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have a very smart group of people, you know, watching these episodes is really fantastic, is when I gun.
• 10:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: When I gun was the teacher of my teacher, he passed away relatively recently.
• 10:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: I mean, not too recently.
• 10:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: A couple decades ago now, or fifteen years ago now, something like that.
• 10:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he, in fact, was a great linguist, historical linguist studying the history of Vietnamese.
• 10:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: He also knows a lot about genome, which we'll talk about in a future episode.
• 10:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in one of his writings, he forwards the idea that there must have been a kind of Chinese spoken in the area of northern Vietnam before independent kingship.
• 10:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: So just to a reminder, the area of northern Vietnam is a part of the Chinese empires from the Han, through the Tang Dynasty's.
• 10:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's around the first thousand years.
• 10:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when we think about the first millennium,
• 11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the area of Northern Vietnam as a part of the Chinese Empire.
• 11:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then starting in the tenth century Vietnam becomes an independent kingdom.
• 11:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So wind like gun is saying, well, it's such a long period.
• 11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you look at the linguistics of Vietnamese, it's clear that some former Chinese was spoken.
• 11:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I would say I am most indebted to wind like gun for that idea.
• 11:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I do, as you say, go a little bit harder in terms of
• 11:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: theorizing the nativity of that language and the role that had on the Vietnamese language.
• 11:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But if I can, I want to take the opportunity right now to do a little bit more shout-outs because I do want to correct a little bit the idea that
• 11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: on the one hand, a, all of what I'm saying is just my ideas, because they're not.
• 11:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Parts of it are, for sure.
• 11:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: But my scholarship like any scholarship is rooted in decades, even maybe centuries, a previous scholarship, and I also am one of a group of people.
• 11:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: a very smart people who are working on Vietnamese language and the history of the Vietnamese language today.
• 12:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I won't bore you with an exhaustive list of the names, but I just want to mention, especially because some of our listeners have been asking each other about where these ideas come from and who were the scholars responsible.
• 12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, there was a group of early scholars, especially French scholars and Chinese scholars who did really great work on the Vietnamese language and its relationship with Chinese.
• 12:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: All he must be of is one of them.
• 12:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: He did incredible work.
• 12:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Another founding father, so to speak, is the Chinese linguist Wang Li.
• 12:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wang Li was a great linguist, both the Chinese language and the Vietnamese language.
• 12:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I've mentioned last time that Vietnamese is an Austro-Asianic language, right?
• 12:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we talked a little bit about its placement in that family.
• 12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a lot of scholars going, quite far back in history, who have been debating that.
• 13:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But typically, we think of a man in Andre or Rikur to have settled that debate.
• 13:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: He's not the first person to claim that Vietnamese was Austro-Aziatic, but he kind of ended the discussion in a series of articles in the early fifties, nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties, nineteen fifties.
• 13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: There are many, many other people I can mention, but I just want to mention, there's that group.
• 13:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a bunch of brilliant Vietnamese linguists, a little bit later in history, Wien Van Lai.
• 13:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wien Van Tai.
• 13:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: My teacher, Tantizai, who is still alive and still doing wonderful work on the language, I mentioned Wien Tai Karno, ready.
• 13:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Many others I could mention, but I just want to shout out two names in particular.
• 13:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: A man named Michele Fevlus, who is also French, but he is probably the scholar who did the most work on the Vedic languages, the languages related to Vietnamese, that I alluded to last time, but we can talk more about today.
• 13:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Brilliant scholar.
• 13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So all of this stuff that I'm talking about with regard to what language family does Vietnamese belong to, what is this relationship to the other languages.
• 14:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's this huge family of linguists going back a hundred years.
• 14:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: who have been doing that work.
• 14:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we go to the modern period.
• 14:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: We also have a bunch of people who are doing incredible work on the Vietnamese language, all aspects, and its history.
• 14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: People like Andrea Fam, who works on tone and phonology, Mark Brunel, a phonetician, James Kirby, a phonologist,
• 14:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Zhang Fan, who is a syntactician and somanticist primarily.
• 14:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And two of my very close colleagues, Shimizu Masaki, Masaki, Shimizu is his last name.
• 14:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Japanese scholar, who has been an incredible contributor.
• 14:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: to our understanding of, especially what we call middle Vietnamese, the Vietnamese language as it was spoken in the thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen centuries.
• 14:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then last person I'll mention, again, I'm leaving out so many people, is my colleague, a man named Mark Elvis, who, who like me, focuses a lot on the relationship between Chinese and Vietnamese and the influence of Chinese answer Vietnamese.
• 15:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I don't want to give you this impression that these ideas are out there, that they're on the only one who is saying them,
• 15:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: My contribution in that book, my book, Lost Tongs of the Red River, does focus on the idea of language shift and focuses on the phases of influence of the Chinese languages onto Vietnamese, which is something I want to clarify a little bit later.
• 15:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I think of myself as part of this great community working on these issues.
• 15:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you're interested in the history of the Vietnamese language or any academic idea,
• 15:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it's very responsible what a lot of the commentators have done, which is ask, where are these ideas come from?
• 15:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Who else thinks these ideas?
• 15:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because any credible academic argument is never a single individual's idea.
• 15:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: It comes out of a great community where we look at each other's ideas, we evaluate them, and we collaborate with one another.
• 16:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I want to emphasize that that is very much how I think of my own work.
• 16:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm sorry for that very long aside, but we had some great comments about it.
• 16:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I just wanted to to show my respect for those commentators and to say a bit.
• 16:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: It's so important that you just did that because then now I
• 16:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: And thinking about, I thought this was something that we can do in maybe a year, we could do all of it.
• 16:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: But it sounds like we could go on with all of these things for years because the breaking down of even that word that you just said, somebody is like a sin tactician.
• 16:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: What is that?
• 16:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: So you're going through this litany of different professions within your tradition.
• 16:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: That is something I've never even heard of.
• 16:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I can guess what it is, but okay, so if you brought up that role and that subject, I think we can dedicate like a whole episode to the work of that syntactician and what does that mean to the development of the Vietnamese language?
• 17:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right?
• 17:08
  [SPEAKER_02]: How does that fit into the pieces here?
• 17:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
• 17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's kind of that feeling you get when you watch a movie and you watch the credits of the movie and you're like, holy crap.
• 17:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's so many parts that go into the creation of a movie.
• 17:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like our understanding of anything in the world is the result of so many different people working on so many different little aspects of the issue.
• 17:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, myself included.
• 17:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm working on just a tiny, teeny tiny aspect of it.
• 17:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And a lot of the stuff that I'm sharing with you is
• 17:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: is coming from all those different other people.
• 17:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it'd be great to do that.
• 17:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I would also encourage a lot of those people, I think it's be great to have them.
• 17:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: right if you have a conversation yeah that would be amazing to have these guest lecturers or guest professors come on to the podcast because you know I I'll go through these comments in ninety five ninety eight percent of our like positive like grouble you guys are in a great job but then you'll get your view that are like very negative and very blanketed statements and I'm like okay well if we're getting that that means that either they know something that I don't know
• 18:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: or they're just making blanket ignorant comments.
• 18:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: But when you really unfurl and open up the drapery and you go here, this is what the mechanics are looking at behind the curtain in the stage.
• 18:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: This is a complex computer system that is, you just named it and I'm like, okay, there's a huge tradition of people that are, you're taking bits and pieces of the structure so you can bring it into your own framework.
• 18:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think here we are.
• 18:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and I think it's important to say that like there is no, what's the word?
• 18:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no magic.
• 18:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's no trickery.
• 18:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like the curtain is always open.
• 18:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if anyone has any questions about any of those small parts or how it works or how we get academic consensus, that's also worth talking about.
• 18:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I also want to say,
• 19:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I also don't want to lie to the audience to say that, oh, I'm not also, what I'm not saying is that everyone that I just mentioned agrees a hundred percent with everything that I've ever said.
• 19:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: We disagree with each other all the time.
• 19:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is how academics work.
• 19:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it's because we don't give up on each other.
• 19:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We disagree and we continue to talk and we continue to work and we change our minds and then the ideas get better.
• 19:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the main idea.
• 19:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's very different than I kind of
• 19:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: combat sports way of thinking on academics.
• 19:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have my idea, you have your idea, and now it's around one.
• 19:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is not how the academic world should work.
• 19:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've been very lucky in my life to work with just brilliant, generous scholars who are dedicated to the questions and not to their egos.
• 19:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's a really... That's ours.
• 19:52
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I think politics in the US, not to go off on a tangent, but politics in the US, it used to be like that.
• 19:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: It used to be healthy debates.
• 20:01
  [SPEAKER_02]: I hope that we can all get back to that one day, you know, here in America and even, you know, abroad, where we can just all sort of like really understand and compliment each other in the fighting aspect of healthy fighting, healthy debate, you know, coming up with discussions where it's uncomfortable, but we
• 20:19
  [SPEAKER_02]: or a family, we're one big giant family that we can put our ego aside and get into it.
• 20:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
• 20:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I have to say, you know, on that note, going through the comments from that last episode, I really was truly very hard, and though, by the number of people who are there, just like sincerely, with sincere interest and, you know, with sincere questions,
• 20:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, unashamed of asking good questions, you know, and just wanting to learn, and, you know, I think that is the right attitude.
• 20:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think it was great.
• 20:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we all said some very smart people, you know, providing some very good information about a lot of people.
• 20:59
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 21:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I think the next bullet point correct me if I'm wrong here but if it's Chinese Chinese linguistic history which phase which dialect that the Chinese influence the development of Vietnam and there's like you know you're gonna explain you know these phases of Chinese
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.
• 21:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is a good follow-up to the first bullet point you raised, which is about the idea of language shift, which is the Norman Conquest idea.
• 21:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: As I mentioned, that is one of the major points that I specifically am raising in the book that not everybody agrees with.
• 21:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then one of the second major points of my book that
• 21:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: that is one of my contributions, but is very in-conversational with other scholars have done is, well, if there is Chinese influence on Vietnamese, what is the specific Chinese that influenced Vietnamese?
• 21:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we saw that question very well put in a couple places in the comments.
• 21:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, is it modern Chinese?
• 21:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: If it's not modern Chinese, is it which ancient Chinese is it?
• 22:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's exactly the right question to ask because there is no single Chinese language.
• 22:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chinese is a huge language family.
• 22:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has, and each of its branches have speaker populations in the millions and it's so diverse.
• 22:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So which Chinese did influence Vietnamese?
• 22:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's two parts to that question.
• 22:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: The first part of that question is which historical phase of Chinese was
• 22:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: was exerting influence on the Vietnamese language.
• 22:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the second question is which dialect or which variety, like where geographic?
• 22:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, and I saw some people were like, is it the Han Dynasty era Chinese?
• 22:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is it the Tang Dynasty era Chinese?
• 22:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are the right questions to ask.
• 22:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, the first thing to say is, if we think about the history of the Chinese language, what are the phases?
• 22:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is what I'm about to tell you now is not my scholarship.
• 23:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is a huge world of Chinese historical linguists that has been talking about this for a very long time.
• 23:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: But most linguists have settled on the following periodization.
• 23:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we think now of the periodization of the Chinese language, we think of a very ancient period.
• 23:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: which we call old Chinese.
• 23:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, there is a hypothetical proto-Chinese, which is the language from which all the Chinese languages descend.
• 23:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then the first phase in which we have evidence of an ancient Chinese language that's written down, we call old Chinese.
• 23:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: And old Chinese is really the language of what we call the classics, both in Vietnam and in China.
• 23:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: That means the language of like,
• 23:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Confucius of drawings of those types of classical writers.
• 23:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's old Chinese.
• 23:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there's a kind of phase that's a little confusing that the language probably changed, I'm sorry, let me add, that's sort of like the first millennium BC.
• 24:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's very old.
• 24:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: We have, we have writing in Chinese going back all the way to the seventeen, eighteen centuries BC.
• 24:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Chinese has been written for a very long time.
• 24:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we have evidence of a phase of language at that time, and then when we get close to the Han Dynasty, which is like the second century BC to the second century CE, and remember that's the first time during which the area of Northern Vietnam is conquered by the Chinese Empire, then the Chinese language changes a little bit, and we have special features associated with the Han Dynasty.
• 24:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's kind of Han Chinese, and then
• 24:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: After the Han Dynasty, for what we call the medieval period, we have what's called middle Chinese.
• 24:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the most important phase.
• 24:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So from the end of the Han Dynasty around the second century to the third century, all the way through the tenth, eleven centuries, we have middle Chinese.
• 25:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: And middle Chinese is itself divided into early and late middle Chinese.
• 25:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you just split that period in half.
• 25:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And to give you an idea of how
• 25:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: much the Chinese language is changing over these long, long centuries.
• 25:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't get tone in the Chinese language until the middle period.
• 25:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Chinese before the middle period did not have any tones.
• 25:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when we say, we have to pinpoint the phase.
• 25:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: We really mean it because the language is so different from period to period that you're talking about a totally different kind of influence.
• 25:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: OK, can we stop right here?
• 25:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: Because I'm not going crazy.
• 25:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: The idea of Chinese and Vietnamese language not having tone is just mind blowing because how did that even happen?
• 25:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: How did tone even get introduced into people's tongues?
• 26:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I love that.
• 26:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's one of my favorite questions.
• 26:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there's some great experts out there, once again, shout out to Andrea Foam, who is an expert on tone in Vietnamese.
• 26:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And also, may he rest in peace, Andre Odre-Cour, that French scholar, who is the one that really developed the model that we use today for understanding how tone emerges in a language.
• 26:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a complicated story, but essentially tone comes from contrast in consonants.
• 26:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So for example, you will have different sets of consonants at the end of a syllable.
• 26:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: You say you have three different consonants that every syllable will end in in your language.
• 26:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, people stop articulating very carefully the difference between those consonants, right?
• 26:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the difference between say a Q and a T at the end of rather maybe a Q and a N at the end of the syllable.
• 26:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You start to lose, say, the articulation of the cut at the end of the syllable.
• 27:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: But whenever you're articulating a syllable that ends in cut, you're going to do something to actually the pitch, the tone of the, when you're pronouncing the vowel.
• 27:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: It might have a little bit of a rise or a fall or something like that.
• 27:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for a long time, you're still pronouncing the final consonant, but you're also doing this weird thing with the tone.
• 27:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But then eventually you lose the final consonant, all you have left is the tone.
• 27:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's half the story of how tone gets introduced into both Chinese and Vietnamese.
• 27:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the second half of the story is that the contrast in the initial consonants also changes the tone of the vowel.
• 27:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the most important difference in the initial consonant at the beginning of syllable is whether it is what we call voiced or unvoiced.
• 27:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a voiced consonant is something like a bar, like in Vietnamese we have bar, right?
• 27:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So you can feel your lips vibrating a little bit when you say bar, but actually let me use a different example because Vietnamese has a complicated, bi-labial system.
• 28:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: The, the, like, uh, yeah, you know, does the is a voiced sound.
• 28:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So
• 28:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dan, like the word, Dan, which means cinema.
• 28:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not the most common word in Vietnamese, but there's a word, Dan, right?
• 28:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dan is starts with the DA.
• 28:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the unvoiced parallel to that sound is DA.
• 28:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So tan versus tan.
• 28:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is the difference between a voice and voice.
• 28:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: In this moment, I should be able to give you a more common example of where this starts with a line across it versus a T.
• 28:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that's the difference between a voice and voiceless.
• 28:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's something else going on special with the D, but I'm going to ignore that for now.
• 28:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: For those of you know, you know, there's something else special going on.
• 28:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in the middle period, people stopped pronouncing the difference between the voiced and the voiceless.
• 29:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this peculiar thing happens where every time you articulate a vowel that follows a voiceless consonant, your pitch is automatically higher.
• 29:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And every time you pronounce a word that follows a voice consonant, your pitch is automatically lower.
• 29:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can even see that in English, although again, a few other things are going on, but test yourself saying, tan versus, uh, damn.
• 29:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now you're going to think about it and you're going to ruin it, but if you weren't thinking about it, whenever you say the word tan, you're going to automatically say the and a little bit higher than if you say the name, Dan, Dan's going to always be a little lower.
• 29:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is the influence of the content on the vowel.
• 29:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I know this is in the weeds, but when people stop articulating the difference between voiced and voices, what happened was, then you split
• 29:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: your pronunciation of the syllable into a high versus a low tone.
• 29:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's how we get six tones in Vietnamese because we had originally three different ways of ending the syllable and then we stopped articulating those differences and they just became differences in the contour of the tone and then those three different tones they were doubled into a high versus a low version when we lost the voice versus voice as consonants.
• 30:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Again, that is not my idea.
• 30:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is a bunch of super brilliant linguists who have been working for the past almost hundred years on this.
• 30:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it is a very well accepted idea.
• 30:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But yes, the takeaway of all of that is, tone is not in the DNA of the Vietnamese language.
• 30:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it wasn't even the need in the DNA of the Thai or the Chinese languages, but tone developed in the middle period of Chinese linguistic history, in middle Chinese.
• 30:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: And tone developed even a little bit later on Vietnamese.
• 30:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that was a bit of a digression, but that's the middle period.
• 30:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we have after the middle period of Chinese, we have the beginning of the modern period.
• 30:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have the development of all the modern Chinese language families, the northern language family to which Mandarin belongs, the U.F.
• 31:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: family to which Cantonese belongs, the Wu family to which Chinese belongs, et cetera.
• 31:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: So going back to the original question, which Chinese influence Vietnamese?
• 31:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, the answer is actually all of those different periods influenced Vietnamese.
• 31:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: One of the listeners asked, what about the quote unquote fourth period of domination?
• 31:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the Ming Dynasty conquest, right?
• 31:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a great question because
• 31:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: That period also influenced the Vietnamese language.
• 31:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we can talk about that later on if you like, but just to answer, just to bring to the question of the periodization of Chinese.
• 31:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we look at the Vietnamese language and the influence of Chinese on it, we can, and we just look at, for example, Chinese words that are barred into Vietnamese, what we call Han Vietnamese, right?
• 31:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Han Vietnamese words.
• 31:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can split them up, and this is something I do in my book.
• 31:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can split them up into different
• 31:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: phases depending on which of those periods of Chinese were donating those words.
• 32:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the scheme that I use that I think is fairly well accepted today, but the one that I forwarded in my book and in some earlier articles is a phase called early sign of Vietnamese.
• 32:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that split up into two levels, but that's basically any kind of borrowing before the middle period.
• 32:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Han Dynasty Chinese or earlier, and we do have a lot of words like that, and you would be surprised to hear what some of those words are, because we typically don't think of those words as Chinese, but in fact, the origin is Chinese.
• 32:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we, sorry.
• 32:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: I have three things I have to say.
• 32:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
• 32:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: The first thing I have to say and these are comments.
• 32:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: The first thing I have to say is like literally I feel like an eight year old who's parents just gave them like a few Lego sets.
• 32:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm so excited to open these up and really start getting into.
• 32:51
  [SPEAKER_02]: The second thing I have to say is I am blown away by how these scholars figured out
• 33:00
  [SPEAKER_02]: these tonal conditions, hundred years, hundreds of years later.
• 33:05
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I want to ask you like, how do you figure like when something is not tonal and then it goes shifts into tonal, but you're not alive to hear the audio side of this
• 33:18
  [SPEAKER_02]: mechanics like what it like what gives how can somebody how can these scholars go back in time and track the tonal evolution so that's like the the the the the the second thing I want to ask the third comment I have is now I think
• 33:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: I understand why I always wondered why Japanese and Korean were non-tonal languages.
• 33:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: I always wondered that.
• 33:42
  [SPEAKER_02]: I was like, what's the shift here?
• 33:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: So now it comes to find out that Chinese used to be a non-tonal language.
• 33:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: And maybe that separation of that shift going to Korean to China was from the predated to tonal shift of the Chinese.
• 33:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, yeah, so let me tackle that last point first.
• 34:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the Japanese and Korean languages do not belong to the same language family as either Vietnamese or Chinese.
• 34:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, we don't know what with any confidence, what language family they belong to.
• 34:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So any language family on the face of the earth can develop tone.
• 34:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ton is not genealogical, right?
• 34:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: Ton is is the result of
• 34:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: of transformations in your phonology, in the sound system of your language.
• 34:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So even in a thousand years, two thousand years, given the right conditions, even English could develop tone.
• 34:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's the first thing to say.
• 34:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: The fact that Chinese, I'm sorry, the fact that Korean and Japanese are not tonal,
• 34:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't have really to do with Chinese because they were never tonal.
• 34:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I shouldn't say that.
• 34:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, there's a theory that there was a kind of tonal system.
• 34:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: They are what we call pitch accent languages, which are not exactly tonal, but they're not non tonal.
• 34:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can talk about what a pitch accent language is another
• 35:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: opposite if you like.
• 35:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But contact does is theorize to maybe initiate certain changes in the following way.
• 35:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you have the right conditions in your language, say you have final consonants that people are starting to get lazy about articulating.
• 35:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then you come into contact with a language that also has that same situation, but they are strongly pronouncing tones at the same time.
• 35:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: That might push you into also pronouncing tones.
• 35:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So tone can catch, tone can spread.
• 35:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And we don't have any smoking gun evidence for that, but it's very suspicious that in Asia there are three language families that have tongue.
• 35:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's the Chinese languages.
• 35:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's the Kradai languages which are the Thai languages, right, Lao Thai languages.
• 35:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then there's Vietnamese.
• 35:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's the, there's the Vietnamese branch of Austeriesianic.
• 35:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And all three of those languages, they all converge right around Vietnam, like right around Southern China,
• 36:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: Northern Southeast Asia.
• 36:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's very suspicious that the three big language families that have such robust tone systems are all in contact with each other.
• 36:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it could be that Korea and Japanese, maybe they had a different kind of inclination towards tone, but they were not in intense contact with these languages.
• 36:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: exact moment that they needed to be pushed towards developing full-tone.
• 36:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there might have been other things that are preventing those languages from developing tone.
• 36:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: For example, they have very complex consonant systems.
• 36:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Japanese and Korean have very long words.
• 36:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They have multisolabic words, whereas in Chinese, Korean,
• 36:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm sorry, Chinese Vietnamese in Japanese, one of my saying, Chinese Vietnamese in the Kradai languages, you typically have something close to a monociliable, although actually even that developed in the oldest period, it was not monocilabic.
• 36:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Vietnamese itself wasn't even monocilabic until the middle period, really, until, like the second millennium.
• 36:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I'm getting very into many different things here.
• 37:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: The thing about how you asked how do people, how did like someone like Audrey Cooer figure out that this is how where tones came from?
• 37:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: And as with similar questions at some people posted for the last episode, there's a lot of answers to that, but the main answer is this method called the comparative method.
• 37:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: which takes modern living languages, compares the simulators and differences between them, and comes up with an explanation for those simulators and differences.
• 37:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Reconstructs the history of the related family.
• 37:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what Oricor did was he realized, like he looked at a bunch of related languages to Vietnamese, and he realized that, oh, all of the language, all of the words,
• 37:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And with with that have a zone now and as they'll set, they had a certain consonant in these other languages, you know, and in these language that don't have taught.
• 37:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that was the beginning of him realizing that, oh, maybe there was a phase in the language where there was no
• 38:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: tone, there was no suck or none, but there was actually a kind of consonant at the end of this kyrasilable, and that turned into suck now in Vietnamese.
• 38:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's a laborious process, but it's based on comparative analysis of modern living languages.
• 38:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is why it's so believable because basically you are looking out and you're seeing different stages of development that are still existing in spoken languages today and you're reconstructing where says the Vietnamese language must have come from.
• 38:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Wow, what a beautiful explanation of that process.
• 38:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's mind blowing to think about how you can track this sort of evolution going hundreds of years back.
• 38:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I still can't wrap my mind around it and that's okay.
• 38:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think one day we'll get into another episode of this sort of tracking the tonal development.
• 38:53
  [SPEAKER_02]: But I do want to go right back to Chinese Japanese and Korean and you say that it doesn't come from these two other languages.
• 39:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: It doesn't come from Chinese.
• 39:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: In my very shallow superficial bumping into other readings and people have talked about Japanese Korea coming from mainland China, just beyond the anecdotal side of my understanding.
• 39:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: I'm comparing different words in Chinese and Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese, like, for example, Kai, Kuai, right?
• 39:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, that, the cuteness of, it's shared, I think, in all four languages, right?
• 39:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so, how did that happen?
• 39:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's so cute that, I mean, no pun intended.
• 39:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: So cute that he was Kai, isn't it?
• 39:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think Kai is very cute.
• 39:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's also very modern borrowed.
• 39:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this is a great question.
• 39:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let me first clarify once again, because this also came up in a lot of our discussion of the previous episode.
• 40:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is that genealogy of languages is not the same thing as the genetic history of a people.
• 40:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And remember one thing that we said very carefully in the first episode to those of you who were listening in that first episode is that the history of a language is not the same thing as the history of a people who spoke it.
• 40:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the main reason is the history of a language
• 40:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: A particular group of people can abandon or adopt languages many different times in history.
• 40:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: For example, Mexico is Spanish speaking today, right?
• 40:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the history of the Spanish language is not the same thing as the history of the Spanish people.
• 40:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the same thing goes for this.
• 40:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I saw some really great interactions in the comments where someone was confusing.
• 40:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's confusing.
• 40:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's difficult.
• 40:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: But someone was confusing the genealogical history of the Vietnamese language.
• 40:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: It belongs to Austria's Etihadics with the genetics of the Vietnamese people.
• 40:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know?
• 40:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there are some great studies about how to, what the differences are and how to sort of compare them.
• 41:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's a great book from a senior colleague of mine, editor called Nohon Sagar, called the Peopleing of East Asia, and he brought linguist and geneticists together to exactly look at that.
• 41:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we don't have time for that today.
• 41:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I just want to warn people again, what I'm about to say about the history of the languages, not the same thing as the genetic history of the ethnicities or the peoples involved.
• 41:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you ever need a reminder of that, just remember,
• 41:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: My name is John Fahn, I am Vietnamese, but my native language is English, you know, and I am changing the history of the English language as a native speaker of English.
• 41:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: But obviously, genetically, I am not Anglo-Saxon.
• 41:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I think one of your, one of the commentators said exactly that, which I really, I was like shout out, that was smart, you know, that's exactly it.
• 41:50
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a good point.
• 41:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that caveat out there.
• 41:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: The history, the Korean and Japanese languages are actually big mysteries, like we don't know what language family they belong to.
• 42:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Korean language has not been identified to be related to any other language on earth.
• 42:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some people think it might be related to all-take languages.
• 42:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are like Turkic, Mongolian, those types of languages.
• 42:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the Japanese language may or may not be related to Korean,
• 42:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But what we think of as the Japanese language is related only to one of the language, the real Q and language, which is spoken in Okinawa.
• 42:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So first of all, we just got to remember that going thousands of years back in history, it's not like the Japanese language or the Korean language comes from the Chinese language, totally separate origins.
• 42:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, just like Vietnamese is a separate origin, right?
• 42:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now you're saying, oh, but what about all these words that are shared?
• 42:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is interesting, right?
• 42:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Not just kai and kawaii, but words like sahoi, sahoi is society, right?
• 42:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's shohui in Mandarin, that's shakai in Japanese.
• 42:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the first thing to note, and this is related to the question of what are the different phases of Chinese that influenced Vietnamese?
• 43:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a very late phase, the very last phase.
• 43:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: where intellectuals were actually going to, they were following a program and this is something maybe Kevin may have talked with you about or may talk about in a future episode.
• 43:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: There was a movement to go to Japan in the early twentieth century to sort of learn about modernization, to get modern scientific training, and also to think about how maybe to move towards independence from France.
• 43:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was called the dumb zoo movement, the movement eastward, to go to Tokyo.
• 43:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: And at that time, you know, in Japan, the Japanese had coined a bunch of new words to create Japanese, quote-unquote Japanese words for Western concepts like religion, society, culture.
• 43:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about those three words.
• 43:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: Religion is Thundal, right?
• 43:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is,
• 44:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Society where we're going to talk about culture is von war, von war, von war.
• 44:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's Bunkan and Japanese.
• 44:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those words are coined by Japanese intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries using classical Chinese elements.
• 44:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're creating new words.
• 44:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're called neologisms.
• 44:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then when Vietnamese, not only Vietnamese, but Vietnamese, Koreans, and Chinese people all studying together kind of hating each other, but studying together in Japan, they are disseminating those neo-logisms into each of those languages.
• 44:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a Vietnamese person is like, what the hell is Boom Ka?
• 44:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's not a word in Chinese.
• 44:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, it's this Western concept of culture.
• 44:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that's useful for my ambitions for Vietnam.
• 44:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to borrow that word, but I'm not going to borrow it as Boom Ka.
• 44:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to borrow it as vanhua because I also can read literary Chinese.
• 44:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: And boom, we don't say boom, we say vanhua.
• 44:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: We don't say ka, we say Hua.
• 44:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So of course, dun ka is vanhua and it becomes a Vietnamese word.
• 45:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the last phase of influence from Chinese is very complex because it goes through
• 45:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: This intellectual moment in Tokyo in Japan, and there's all these neo-lojisms that enter into Vietnamese that way.
• 45:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, the caveat is that that continues to happen today, but a word like Kai is almost certainly not from Kalai.
• 45:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, I don't know.
• 45:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Actually, I'm not sure, but there's a separate process by which Mandarin words.
• 45:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: like words that are in modern Mandarin, like Khai as a Mandarin word.
• 45:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Mandarin words are kelp.
• 45:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word is kelp.
• 45:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're translated into Sino Vietnamese and become words.
• 45:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Khai is one of those words.
• 45:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And there are other examples we can think of of kind of modern Mandarin words that are turned into Sino Vietnamese words.
• 45:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what's tricky is that because they sound Sino Vietnamese, we say Khai.
• 45:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: We think that they might be very ancient, but they're actually modern borrowings that rely on what we call cyanovidimiz Hanviat pronunciation.
• 46:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I don't want to get too confusing, but so we have this way to create these modern Chinese borrowings in the Vietnamese language.
• 46:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I've said, we rely on Hanviat pronunciation, right?
• 46:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, what is it?
• 46:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: Hanviat pronunciation?
• 46:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, Hanviat pronunciation is a way of pronouncing synetic words.
• 46:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: That is actually based on the middle period.
• 46:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's not based on the modern period.
• 46:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's based on that, that Han, sorry, the sort of first millennium period, particularly the second half of the first millennium.
• 46:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: So six, seven, eight, nine, ten centuries.
• 46:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Same.
• 46:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's where my book is really about.
• 46:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: So if you look at Chinese words in the Vietnamese language to go back to what we were saying earlier, we have early sign of Vietnamese, which is far before the Middle Period, very ancient words.
• 46:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I said, we don't think of those words as typically
• 46:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: belonging to the coming from Chinese.
• 47:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a good example of that is the word for X, right?
• 47:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word for X. I was just looking at my list of early scientific music for my book.
• 47:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: The word for X is, um, is Boa, Boa, right?
• 47:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Boa, but Boa is not a, is not originally of any of these words.
• 47:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's from the Chinese word.
• 47:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But it was borrowed so long ago that it has a different form today.
• 47:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it was rebarred in the middle period.
• 47:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: And in the middle period, uh, it was pronounced full
• 47:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is a more specific version that is not the normal word for acts.
• 47:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what I'm trying to say is that we have a very ancient set of drawings called early-sided Vietnamese, and most of those words we don't think of as Chinese, but they in fact originate from an early form of Chinese.
• 47:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then most of the words that are of Chinese origin in the Vietnamese language are borrowed in the middle period.
• 47:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's what I call, well, I have two phases.
• 47:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: One is called, well, actually it's just one.
• 47:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's called late-sign-of-the-demies.
• 48:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what I call late-sign-of-the-demies is really,
• 48:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: words that are barred from this middle period of what is called in the field late middle Chinese and that's Again seven eight nine tenth even eleven centuries that period of time and if you if you look at all the words that are of Chinese origin and you look at how many there are the vast majority from this period and
• 48:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you look at the phonology of those words, it's very interesting.
• 48:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: The sound system, right?
• 48:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm not going to get into the weeds.
• 48:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: If people have questions about this process, please do ask.
• 48:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But essentially, the argument of my book is, I look at the sound system, the phonology of late scientific and these words, and I conclude that, well,
• 48:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: the the the donor of those words must be from the middle period everybody knew that already right but also it must be a spoken language it's not like um there was just a couple people teaching Chinese in a classroom it's not like people in that period were just reading Chinese
• 49:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then, and that's the way they were borrowing these words.
• 49:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's important because going back to your point about Korean and Japanese, that's the main way Korean and Japanese borrowed Chinese words.
• 49:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: People didn't really speak Chinese and Japanese history.
• 49:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: They only learned it by a couple of teachers, monks, and they learned it by reading.
• 49:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: So all of those Chinese words in the Japanese language are mostly through that route.
• 49:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: And if you look at Vietnamese, it's so different.
• 49:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: We cannot explain
• 49:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: Lates and the Vietnamese that way.
• 49:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: What we have to say instead is that, oh, Chinese was actually a spoken native language of the region.
• 49:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was a bilingual society.
• 49:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why we have so many words from that period.
• 49:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's why the phonology of the Vietnamese language changed the way it did because it was spoken alongside a spoken Chinese language.
• 49:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: That was an up period.
• 49:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have early side of it means then we have this complicated period which is late side of it means that are the result of bilingualism and then language shift.
• 50:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the normal conquest idea.
• 50:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then we get into the late period.
• 50:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: where now we're not Chinese is no longer spoken in the Vietnamese kingdoms, right?
• 50:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: We only speak Vietnamese, but we still continue to write in Chinese and so forth, but the influence doesn't stop.
• 50:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It just changes.
• 50:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we have what I call recent sign of Vietnamese, which are all the different types of Chinese words that are borrowed in the second millennium, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, six, all the way through to the twentieth century.
• 50:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: from very different kinds of Chinese languages.
• 50:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: So one kind of recent sign of Vietnamese are Chinese neo-lojisms that are bar via Japan that we just talked about, Bunkha, Van Huai, et cetera.
• 50:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: And another type of word are all those Cantonese words, like those food words that we talked about last time, and those other words like
• 50:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, you know, let's say that's a Cantonese word.
• 50:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: See, y'all was a Cantonese word, et cetera.
• 51:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are recent sign of eating.
• 51:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: Those are recent borrowings.
• 51:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And even non-cantanese food words like j'all and like me, you know, me is a Chinese word, but it's not sign of the enemies, right?
• 51:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: Me means noodles, right?
• 51:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: And what is the Chinese word?
• 51:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Cantonese, it's mean with an n at the end, right?
• 51:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like Tao, mean, right?
• 51:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: In Mandarin, it's mean.
• 51:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It has an n at the end.
• 51:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: So how do we, what is the sign of Vietnamese proper pronunciation of that word?
• 51:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: Well, how was it borrowed in the middle period?
• 51:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: And how is the middle period, late sign of Vietnamese version of that word, sound today?
• 51:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: can anyone guess it's mean which means something different right now when you say mean you mean specifically yeah the clear noodles like mean man for example and me is typically the wheat noodle right that's that that's the modern meanings but me and comes from the Chinese word for noodles in general
• 51:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: And now, for some reason, in the modern period, we've borrowed a different word, probably from a mean, like from a Fujini's kind of dialect, and we borrowed that word for the weirdo.
• 52:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: So those are all recent changes.
• 52:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's question.
• 52:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's all in my book.
• 52:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can also chat GPT in my book for like a summary, because we've been kind of going here and there, but basically what I want to say is,
• 52:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: When we look at the history of Chinese influence, every period of Chinese language has influenced the Vietnamese language.
• 52:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: And when we look at Vietnamese words and the Vietnamese language, we typically split it up into three big phases.
• 52:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Early setting Vietnamese, which is before the middle period,
• 52:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Late sign of Vietnamese, which is from the middle period, and then recent sign of Vietnamese, which is all these various different forms of Chinese barrings in the modern period.
• 52:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the last complicating factor is that a subgroup of recent sign of Vietnamese, those words that are barred via Japan for all these modern concepts, they are barred in the modern period, but they use the pronunciation, the phonology of the middle period.
• 53:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I know that was a lot.
• 53:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: But some of you asked a lot of questions about the phases.
• 53:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that's the answer.
• 53:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: And easier thing to do is to look at my book and just look at the chart.
• 53:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because the chart has all three phases listed out for you.
• 53:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: But sorry to go on so long about that, but I love it.
• 53:20
  [SPEAKER_02]: And especially the me, me and all of those examples is something that has been in my brain, because I live in the six to six.
• 53:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: We've sang a real valley in Los Angeles.
• 53:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And when you drive around, you see examples of M-E-I-N.
• 53:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: And you see, Chalmin on a Panda Express, a Chinese American brand.
• 53:46
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then you see men on like a very Chinese restaurant and then you go to a Vietnamese father shop that has Min Ga and you're like all of these things are related.
• 53:56
  [SPEAKER_02]: And now I have to do, you know, mental jujitsu to kind of figure out and put it all it now, make super clear now.
• 54:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: How this is all broken down.
• 54:06
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm just so thrilled to sit here with you, John, to talk about it.
• 54:11
  [SPEAKER_02]: Our time is getting limited, but I do want to move on to the next question, but leading into this astral agiatic theme, I went to Guam, and when I was with the Chomoro people, there's this argument right now, a recent thing, I don't know how recent, but the Chomoro's
• 54:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: are saying, there's a group of them that are saying, no, no, no, we, our language came from Taiwan.
• 54:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: And it was like, Australia, Taiwan, which I always equated the tomorrow people from Guam closer to the Philippines, but they're saying that perhaps it goes from the Taiwanese to the Philippines back after Guam, Guam, to tomorrow people.
• 55:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm like, again,
• 55:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: How does this all have to do with Vietnamese people, right?
• 55:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: Like, did we come from Taiwan, this astro-ajiotic, and I was explaining to somebody the other night, then my confusion, I'm like, I can't wait to talk to John about this astro-ajiotic movement.
• 55:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's so awesome that you were thinking about it, like when you were doing this other super awesome thing that the linguistics was in your mind.
• 55:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I love that, that's awesome.
• 55:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: So a disclaimer, I don't know anything about the Chomoro people or language.
• 55:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let me put that out there.
• 55:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: But my guess is they were not, they weren't saying Austro-Aziotic, they were saying Austronesian.
• 55:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because remember, Austro-Negian and Austro-Aziotic are two different languages.
• 55:45
  [SPEAKER_00]: Austro just means southern, so Austro-Aziotic means the languages of the southern part of the Asian continent.
• 55:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nija means islands.
• 55:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: So Austro-Negian are the languages of the south islands.
• 55:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's a different language family and Austronesian languages include Malay is the biggest, you know, Malay Indonesian.
• 56:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also, a lot of minority languages in Taiwan.
• 56:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to get to that.
• 56:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: Tagalog and all the languages of the Philippine language islands are also Austronesian.
• 56:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also, Hawaiian.
• 56:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: is an Austronesian language.
• 56:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: Austronesian is the biggest geographical language in the world.
• 56:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: It ranges from Madagascar on the east coast of Africa all the way to places like, wow, you know, so it's just, it's any, have you watched Moana?
• 56:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: Moana is about like the thing that the Austronesians are famous for is that they were these incredible sailors.
• 56:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: They just sailed across the whole world and they spread the Austronesian family everywhere.
• 56:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's a huge debate over the origins of the Austronesian language.
• 56:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: So most linguists today
• 56:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: agree that there's a kind of choke point in the diversification of the Austronesian languages and that is Taiwan.
• 57:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we don't know before they settle on Taiwan, but from Taiwan, from Taiwan
• 57:07
  [SPEAKER_00]: various different australian language groups spread out and they just colonize the rest of the seas.
• 57:15
  [SPEAKER_02]: Okay, so that's bothering me for like this whole time hearing about your absolutely right.
• 57:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think they were referring to Micronesia.
• 57:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: Why Taiwan?
• 57:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so this is where the controversy comes because there, and I actually saw, I mean, we really have a good group of people listening.
• 57:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: I saw some of the discussing the commentators asking this question about what is the ancient origin of the Austronesian language.
• 57:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: So let me, the privacy is by saying it's super controversial, but some people have tried to argue
• 57:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: that Austronesian people who left Taiwan and went to, you know, the Malay archipelago went to the Philippines, went to the rest of the southern islands.
• 58:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: They came from mainland Asia, mainland Southeast Asia, and they were related either to Kraday peoples, or to Senator Betten peoples, or even to both the Kraday and the Senator Betten people.
• 58:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the major proponent of this theory, it's called the peace stand theory,
• 58:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: proto-sino-to-betten Austronesian, and then sometimes Kreda is also added into it, but mostly the main argument is that it's sino-to-betten and Austronesian.
• 58:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the Chinese language family and the Tibetan language is related to Austronesian.
• 58:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the theory as peace stand, proto-sino-to-betten Austronesian.
• 58:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: The main proponent of that is my dear senior colleague, Laurent Sagar.
• 58:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he has explored that idea in his writings.
• 58:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, it's entirely, in my humble opinion, and let me preface that by saying, I'm speaking to someone who is absolutely not an expert on either Austernian, well, I work a lot in sign of Tibetan languages and Chinese languages, but I don't know anything about Austernians.
• 59:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have a lot of friends who are great experts on the Austernian languages.
• 59:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dan Kaufman, who is here in New York City, is an expert on Austernian languages.
• 59:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: Dan, if you're listening, chime in and correct me if I'm wrong.
• 59:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the main issue here is that we have good comparative evidence.
• 59:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Remember the comparative method.
• 59:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: We've got good comparative evidence to trace the history of Austenian languages back to Taiwan.
• 59:24
  [SPEAKER_00]: But we have very little comparative evidence to tie it to Sino-Tibetan.
• 59:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, the argument is based on a few words here and there.
• 59:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's a very scant amount of evidence.
• 59:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: That doesn't mean it's not true or possible.
• 59:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's entirely possible, but it's very difficult to prove.
• 59:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, you know, another favorite thing that I saw in the comments is the celebration of the word, gem's all.
• 59:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: God bless all of you.
• 59:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: I love that word because I love it too.
• 59:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's a good, actually it's a really useful concept because this is another one of those cases where you've got to just be content with gems all because it's fun and it's possible but you can't really gather enough evidence to go beyond that realm of discussion.
• 1:00:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what we know as the Austronesian probably almost certainly exploded out of Taiwan, and the ethnic minority languages of Taiwan today are Austronesian languages.
• 1:00:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Also incidentally, as some of you noticed, the Chom language is also an Austronesian language of the Kingdom of Champa in Central and Southern Vietnam.
• 1:00:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: But before Taiwan, it's very unclear what the history of the Austronesian languages were.
• 1:00:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: So amazing.
• 1:00:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: I really can spend a whole episode on this idea of Austro-Nesian language and Austro-Aziotic, the difference.
• 1:00:50
  [SPEAKER_02]: And these are things that were like, again, I always say, like, I turned fifty this year.
• 1:00:57
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how is it that I'm this old and have never heard any of this stuff broken down for me?
• 1:01:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, I'm getting a really high quality education here.
• 1:01:10
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm so happy to share this with the listeners and the people who are tuning into the evolution of the Vietnamese culture because it all has so much history and roots that are way beyond what we can even imagine what modern Vietnam is today.
• 1:01:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, I can, I mean, I'm going to get, I'm a very scientific person.
• 1:01:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm going to try to control myself right now.
• 1:01:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I will say, I value this opportunity so much because, you know, one thing that we're seeing so everywhere in the internet space and, you know, like, is misinformation.
• 1:01:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, like we're seeing so much misinformation, you know, fake news if you want to call it that.
• 1:01:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: But also just the habit of people just pursuing their opinions.
• 1:01:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: and people pursuing what they want to believe about the world.
• 1:02:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the truth of the world, the scientific truth, does not care about your opinion or your feelings.
• 1:02:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's really good.
• 1:02:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's actually freeing to learn
• 1:02:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: what is objectively, you know, studyable, you know, observable in the world.
• 1:02:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: And then as we talked about so extensively in that first episode, to do that and then to step back and think about what that means about me and my life.
• 1:02:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because of course, our feelings are important, our feelings and our, our, they dictate the way the world works.
• 1:02:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that you've set up a space where people can have their feelings,
• 1:02:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: you know, and then also like listen and learn and be curious and not be ashamed and just ask things is just it's like a very very precious thing.
• 1:02:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I just I really hope that people continue to do that and people feel free to to write their concerns and their and what even what worries them, but also what they're curious about, you know, what they want to hear more about
• 1:02:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: in the comments because we're just very happy, you know, to talk about whatever listeners want to talk about, you know, in this space.
• 1:03:07
  [SPEAKER_02]: And what I'm learning from you today, I mean, today's title was going to be AMA Chinese, you know, does it Chinese come from the Vietnamese come from Chinese and then dash AMA, but it's also like the whole idea of
• 1:03:22
  [SPEAKER_02]: your genetics are not your language genealogy.
• 1:03:26
  [SPEAKER_02]: Sort of that's like sort of like the big takeaway for me today.
• 1:03:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: It just blew the door open to understanding a way to minute, just because you are a Vietnamese genetics, genetically born from your mom and dad here in America, living in New York,
• 1:03:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: you're speaking English and it is not, it's not, it has nothing to do with each other, almost.
• 1:03:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean, think about it and think about it.
• 1:03:53
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about how much modern American English and modern American English has influenced English around the world.
• 1:03:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: Think about how much modern American English is indebted to black English.
• 1:04:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And black people are not Anglo-Saxons, right?
• 1:04:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: They don't come from England.
• 1:04:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet they have that community has completely shaped what modern English is.
• 1:04:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So when you think about the history of a language, you've got to really be careful about distinguishing what that really means.
• 1:04:19
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I'm glad that we had a chance to talk about that.
• 1:04:24
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, um, somebody wrote something about language, can unite and disunite.
• 1:04:29
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we've really talked about that.
• 1:04:31
  [SPEAKER_02]: That's a very nice thought.
• 1:04:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: You've, you've brought up.
• 1:04:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: And the, the other thing, genealogy is hierarchical and thought.
• 1:04:38
  [SPEAKER_02]: I think we kind of covered that sort of that idea, right?
• 1:04:41
  [SPEAKER_02]: Cultural influences are network.
• 1:04:44
  [SPEAKER_02]: And I mean, I don't know if you want to get into that, or I think what I really want to get the last point, if that's okay with you, is this idea of the name of Vietnam.
• 1:04:55
  [SPEAKER_02]: Oh, I think that's really important.
• 1:04:58
  [SPEAKER_02]: When I saw that, I was like, all right, I think we can end this episode on that.
• 1:05:02
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then if you'd like to pick out the other bullet points to go over with the comments, yeah, we can, we have time.
• 1:05:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, well, let me just say one thing about genealogy being hierarchical.
• 1:05:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: I thought that was a very smart comment, and I really appreciated.
• 1:05:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: I actually especially appreciated the comparison with computational work.
• 1:05:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, I don't know how to code, but I had this fantasy of finally learning one day, so I didn't appreciate that comment.
• 1:05:33
  [SPEAKER_02]: You don't need to learn it anymore.
• 1:05:34
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could just chat to B.T.
• 1:05:35
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could just chat to B.T.
• 1:05:36
  [SPEAKER_02]: You could just chat to B.T.
• 1:05:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: And then they'll write the code for you.
• 1:05:39
  [SPEAKER_02]: So, dammit.
• 1:05:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's incredible.
• 1:05:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I scary, but also incredible.
• 1:05:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I just wanted to point out very quickly that it's an astute point and actually historical linguists have absorbed that.
• 1:05:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's an old debate and historical linguistics between the genealogy, the genealogical approach, phylogenetic approach,
• 1:05:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: which is basically organizing languages into trees, family trees, which are hierarchical, and what's called the wave model, which is basically social networks, like the model of change, not caring about your genealogy, but spreading like a wave across a community.
• 1:06:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So that's a very old debate.
• 1:06:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's over a hundred years now, I think, originated in Germany, and now modern linguists basically use both models, because what we see is that language changes
• 1:06:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: I wouldn't say hierarchically, but vertically, from generation to generation, because every time language is learned by a child, they're learning it from their parent.
• 1:06:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it's reproduced that way, and then, and it is, you know, genealogical, like the English language does descend genealogically from its ancestors, but in every generation, social changes everywhere, social changes, the way in which language changes.
• 1:06:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the wave and the tree are both true.
• 1:06:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: So the way we think about how language changes is both lateral and vertical.
• 1:07:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: I'm not using the right words, but that person was very correct.
• 1:07:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: And Vietnamese is an excellent example of that because Vietnamese
• 1:07:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I did want to say this for all of the audience, like remember that two things can be true at once.
• 1:07:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vietnamese can be super, super-synetic, but it can also not be synetic, right?
• 1:07:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, and that's what I was trying to say in the last episode.
• 1:07:21
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is the good way to think about it.
• 1:07:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Vietnamese genealogically is austereziatic.
• 1:07:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: It does not descend from the same place that family has Chinese, but it has so many genetic features today because of social change, because all these contact-induced changes, right?
• 1:07:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: And yet, at the same time, it preserves all these Austro-Asianic features like its vowel systems, for example.
• 1:07:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: So I know that was a little complex, but I just wanted to shout that up because it was something good point.
• 1:07:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it gets to the heart of people who want to be able to use to either be, you know, Southeast Asian or Chinese.
• 1:07:55
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's absolutely both.
• 1:07:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's absolutely both.
• 1:07:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: So onto the question about the name of Vietnam, this is a famous story.
• 1:08:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a very famous story.
• 1:08:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: I have to caveat again by saying, please, y'all, listen to the first episode again, you know, because there's so much emotion invested here and there's so much of that emotion is instilled in us because of nationalism.
• 1:08:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nationalism is not a bad word, but like any kind of
• 1:08:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: ideological system, if we're not careful about it, it can make decisions for us.
• 1:08:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: It can make us not listen.
• 1:08:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So listen to that first episode.
• 1:08:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what is the name of Vietnam?
• 1:08:34
  [SPEAKER_00]: Some very smart commenters noted, it is of course a synthetic name.
• 1:08:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: There's two elements, Vietnam, and it comes from the name of a kingdom
• 1:08:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nam Vip, Nam Vip, or Nam Geh, in modern Mandarin, Nam Geh, in Cantonese, and this is a kingdom that was founded by a general or a commissioner of the Qing dynasty, the guy who built the Great Wall, the guy who was the mummy and went by gently anyway.
• 1:09:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: That dynasty fell, and one of his commissioners ran away and created this kingdom in the southern part of China.
• 1:09:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he conquered the pre-existing society or culture, or maybe it was a kingdom that was located in the Red Replane, that is on the site of what we now call Goa.
• 1:09:22
  [SPEAKER_00]: Goa Rai is this big kind of spiral.
• 1:09:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: Citadel that is very, very ancient.
• 1:09:27
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's also where a lot of dumb-selling drums and artifacts were found.
• 1:09:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So, so the first big kingdom that Vietnam was in corporate, that the red river plane was in corporate into was Nam Viet.
• 1:09:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Nam Viet.
• 1:09:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for the rest of history, like that guy, his name was Jouda, for those of you who know, his childhood, and Chinese Jouda created a kingdom.
• 1:09:51
  [SPEAKER_00]: If you know anything about guy Luong or Tao, there's some great operas about Jouda's son and the daughter, you know, I'm sorry, Jouda's.
• 1:10:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Jouda's son and the daughter of Anzun Vuong, with some really good stories there.
• 1:10:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: But the main thing we want to say is that for most of you to be a history, even starting an independent Vietnam lead dynasty, all the way through the twentieth century, Tilda was remembered as a great king of Vietnam, and especially because he defied the Han Dynasty for a long time.
• 1:10:26
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, he eventually did submit to the Han Dynasty, but he maintained his independence from the Han for a very long time.
• 1:10:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he also kind of allowed the Red River plane to sort of govern itself for a very long time.
• 1:10:40
  [SPEAKER_00]: And so when
• 1:10:43
  [SPEAKER_00]: jumping for, he has a varying reputation, but mostly he's very deeply respected.
• 1:10:48
  [SPEAKER_00]: Then jump forward to the nineteenth century when the wind dynasty is established by the first emperor of the wind dynasty, he conquers the center and the north, right?
• 1:11:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: And this is the first time
• 1:11:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: a Vietnamese emperor is in charge of such a huge territory, the stretches from southern China all the way down to the Gulf of Thailand, right?
• 1:11:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: The Gulf of Siam, rather.
• 1:11:14
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it is just an unprecedented territory.
• 1:11:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: So what Zalum, which I said to himself was that what we need a name, we need a dip, we can't call it dive lead anymore.
• 1:11:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, we can't call it the name we used to call it because this dive lead was just the north.
• 1:11:29
  [SPEAKER_00]: Right.
• 1:11:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: So we need a new name for this kingdom.
• 1:11:32
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he was very smart.
• 1:11:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: His staff was very smart.
• 1:11:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: And he looked through the history and he was like, what is an appropriate name for this huge imperial entity.
• 1:11:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: He said, Nam Viet.
• 1:11:42
  [SPEAKER_00]: That's the right name.
• 1:11:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: But as you know, at this time,
• 1:11:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: one of the most important diplomatic missions when you become the new emperor is to establish, you know, diplomatic relations with China with the Qing Dynasty at this time.
• 1:11:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: So they enter into negotiations.
• 1:11:58
  [SPEAKER_00]: They're like, I am the new emperor.
• 1:12:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: The lay dynasty is no more, right?
• 1:12:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am the new emperor.
• 1:12:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: I've suppressed the face to and rebellion.
• 1:12:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am the new ruler of this era.
• 1:12:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: He didn't call himself emperor, I should say that.
• 1:12:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: I am the new ruler of this era.
• 1:12:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I would like to be recognized as the kingdom of Nam Veeh.
• 1:12:16
  [SPEAKER_00]: the kingdom of none yet, right?
• 1:12:17
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want that to be the official record, think of it as like the UN recognizing a particular thing, right?
• 1:12:23
  [SPEAKER_00]: Is that I want the Qing to call me none yet?
• 1:12:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: I want the Qing to call me none yet.
• 1:12:28
  [SPEAKER_00]: And of course, the Emperor at that time was like no way because
• 1:12:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: I also have a staff of scholars, and they went through the books, and they're like, the Kingdom of Nanyah, or Nam Viet, as ruled by jute now, included Guangxi and Guangdong.
• 1:12:41
  [SPEAKER_00]: So there's no way we're going to allow you to call yourself something that includes vast tracks of modern-day China that is under our direct rule.
• 1:12:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: So this was a very long negotiation.
• 1:12:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was like, I think it was over a year, I think, but maybe it was two years of negotiation.
• 1:12:56
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not trivial.
• 1:12:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: This is them ironing out their diplomatic relations.
• 1:13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: Wow.
• 1:13:00
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's a two-sided discussion.
• 1:13:02
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the compromise is to switch the characters around.
• 1:13:05
  [SPEAKER_00]: You can't call yourself Nam Vietnam, but you can't call yourself Vietnam if you want.
• 1:13:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: And that is the origin of the name Vietnam.
• 1:13:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: Now, I'll tack onto that.
• 1:13:13
  [SPEAKER_00]: People in the comments were like, why would you call yourself a Chinese name, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:13:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: But I want to remind you that China and Vietnam, like when we're talking about the Han Dynasty, the Qing Dynasty, even the Sui and the Tang Dynasty, there was no China or Vietnam.
• 1:13:31
  [SPEAKER_00]: Like, this is a time in which the modern identities of China and Vietnam did not exist, and there was not a division the way there is now.
• 1:13:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: There is a division now, and there's a lot of bad blood, and that bad blood is real.
• 1:13:44
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's important, and it's traumatic.
• 1:13:46
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's traumatic.
• 1:13:47
  [SPEAKER_00]: But when the Vietnamese were thinking of their own culture, they thought of Nam Vietnam as part of their own culture.
• 1:13:54
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, they thought of seniority characters as part of their own culture.
• 1:13:57
  [SPEAKER_00]: They thought of Chinese classical Chinese as their own literary language.
• 1:14:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: They didn't think of it as Chinese.
• 1:14:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: They thought of it as their own.
• 1:14:04
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it was very natural for them to be like, of course, we want to call ourselves Nampia.
• 1:14:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: Because one of our greatest leaders in history was the King of Nampia.
• 1:14:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, so that might be controversial because now history is rewritten to think of Tupda as foreign.
• 1:14:18
  [SPEAKER_00]: as a foreign conqueror.
• 1:14:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: But he was not thought of that way in a lot of history, same with the guy named Signeep, Signeep, who was the Han Dynasty governor of the area of northern Vietnam.
• 1:14:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: For most of history, Vietnamese intellectuals thought of him as one of the greatest leaders.
• 1:14:35
  [SPEAKER_00]: of our culture.
• 1:14:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: But in modern times, because of bad blood between China Vietnam, notably dating from the fourth period from the Ming Dynasty conquest, then attitudes around these figures change and we start to think of, no, that guy's Chinese and this guy's Vietnamese.
• 1:14:49
  [SPEAKER_00]: But that's a modern rethinking of history.
• 1:14:52
  [SPEAKER_00]: So it is actually totally natural to want to for Zalam to have asked to be called Nam Vietnam.
• 1:15:01
  [SPEAKER_00]: And for us to have settled in the name of Vietnam.
• 1:15:03
  [SPEAKER_00]: And it's not unnatural.
• 1:15:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: As we talked about last episode, I know I'm going on too long.
• 1:15:09
  [SPEAKER_00]: But this is the last thing I'll say.
• 1:15:10
  [SPEAKER_00]: As we talked about last episode, if you start on the journey of trying to exercise everything that is quote unquote Chinese from Vietnamese culture, you're going to end up with very, very little.
• 1:15:20
  [SPEAKER_00]: It's just, it's not a good, it's not, it's, it's never going to work out.
• 1:15:25
  [SPEAKER_00]: And the thing that a reminder self is, is that those things are not exclusively Chinese.
• 1:15:30
  [SPEAKER_02]: Right.
• 1:15:30
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that Chinese are not the only ones who can claim them.
• 1:15:33
  [SPEAKER_00]: We can claim them equally as our, as our cultural heritage.
• 1:15:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, so that's the history or the name of the history of the naming of the Kingdom of Vietnam.
• 1:15:45
  [SPEAKER_02]: You know, again, it's one of these things where we can do a whole episode on the naming of Vietnam, because I think whatever is predating Nam Viet, there's David, and there's all these eight or two names that Anam and, you know, these things in history exist that the majority of us don't know about.
• 1:16:04
  [SPEAKER_02]: And so I would love to dedicate a whole episode to the names of the historical periods of Vietnam.
• 1:16:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: You know, that's not fun.
• 1:16:12
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
• 1:16:14
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's just sort of, you know, we're diving into ancient history and we're, ancient Vietnam, we're diving into linguistics and words and, and, and the construction of language, but at the same time, this is like, it feels almost like history is even bigger than words.
• 1:16:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: The study of the history within linguistics is almost
• 1:16:37
  [SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's the same size, almost.
• 1:16:40
  [SPEAKER_02]: You spent so much time breaking down history to get to just a morsel of words, you know, and I'm here for it.
• 1:16:47
  [SPEAKER_02]: I love it.
• 1:16:48
  [SPEAKER_02]: The next episode we are going to talk about this idea of the structure of Vietnamese, correct?
• 1:16:59
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, especially kind of a sequel to what is Chinese about the Vietnamese language.
• 1:17:06
  [SPEAKER_00]: I think we're going to talk about
• 1:17:08
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do Vietnamese people write in ancient Vietnam?
• 1:17:11
  [SPEAKER_00]: What language do they write in?
• 1:17:12
  [SPEAKER_00]: What do they think of as their literary language?
• 1:17:15
  [SPEAKER_00]: And I think we'll start with the shocking one, which is from much of history, Vietnamese intellectuals thought of literary Chinese as their native literary language.
• 1:17:25
  [SPEAKER_02]: And how has been taught that?
• 1:17:27
  [SPEAKER_02]: I've always been taught that literary Chinese is where modern Vietnamese came from.
• 1:17:32
  [SPEAKER_02]: So I look forward to getting into this topic so much.
• 1:17:36
  [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, me too.
• 1:17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: Can't wait.
• 1:17:37
  [SPEAKER_00]: It was super fun.
• 1:17:38
  [SPEAKER_00]: As always, kind of.
• 1:17:39
  [SPEAKER_00]: Thanks so much.
• 1:17:40
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks, John.
• 1:17:41
  [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for listening to the Vietnamese with Kenneth Wyn.
• 1:17:43
  [SPEAKER_01]: Special thanks to Brittany Tran, to Jane Wyn, Catherine Wyn, Tina Fam, Sydney Jamie, and Crystal Tran.
• 1:17:51
  [SPEAKER_01]: Please find us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok at the Vietnamese podcast.