Prof. Dr. Tran Tri Doi: Language contributes to the vitality of Vietnamese culture

We can see this most clearly in the fact that, in today's Vietnamese, people still say "nursery" (in "going to nursery") in a purely Vietnamese order; meanwhile, words borrowed from the Chinese language group have preserved the Chinese order for Sino-Vietnamese words such as "lecture hall" (to lecture hall; lecture: teaching, road: house; so lecture hall is a place or house to teach); this order is different from the order in the case of "nursery" mentioned above. That grammatical order is to distinguish what is purely Vietnamese language and what is borrowed (language of Chinese origin). People who speak Vietnamese every day do not need to pay attention because the Vietnamese language has "transformed" the word "lecture hall" (of Chinese origin) into their own language; but researchers still have to or need to know. Or like in Vietnamese, people still say words related to human body parts such as "bang cong", "hai satisfies", "phai trung" etc. In the Vietnamese language, what is "long"? When Vietnamese people say "Today the pig's intestines are very delicious", any normal person knows what "pig's intestines" include, but no one pays attention to distinguishing between "intestines", "liver" or "stomach", etc., which are words or elements of Chinese origin.
The basic vocabulary layer of the Vietnamese language from the early period (linguists call it pre-language) is still preserved in the Vietnamese language. But what is more special is that when borrowing, the Vietnamese language always stipulates that those borrowings must respect its own phonetic rules. For example, when Vietnamese people say "I live on the third floor", the word "floor" is a word of Chinese origin (Chinese character 閣) that has been affected by the phonetic change rules in the Vietnamese language from the early period that our book has mentioned in the beginning. It is said that there is a basis to see that the Vietnamese language retains all the characteristics of a language of South Asian origin. Thus, it is thanks to the activities of this phonetic rule that the Vietnamese language has handled borrowings from different languages ​​according to its own way of operating its language to preserve its South Asian identity in language use.
When borrowing, the Vietnamese language stipulates that those borrowings must respect its own phonetic rules.
In the book above, he wrote, "In the process of developing the history of the Vietnamese nation, to have a culture with a strong identity like today, there is a contribution of the national language as both a cultural element and the most important communication tool to convey culture." So how has language developed to contribute to the strong vitality of Vietnamese culture in history?

Many opinions say that Vietnamese culture has a process of acculturation, harmonizing many diverse elements. So how does the history of language show the diversity of Vietnamese culture?
In the history of the development of human society in general and of each nation in particular, there is no community or country that can develop without being closed, without communicating or contacting with a country or community using other languages. When communicating or contacting, there will of course be a process of acculturation, accepting many diverse elements to create harmony for one's culture or civilization. For the community of residents using languages ​​belonging to the Vietnamese group (Vietic) in history, there is no exception. For example, the Vietnamese language during the period of being colonized by the Northern feudal state did not abandon its original South Asian state, and at the same time proactively accepted languages ​​that it did not have before to enrich the language, and along with the language, the culture, of the Vietnamese community.
Regarding this, you can refer to Professor Mark's opinion. Alves, Editor-in-Chief of the JSEALS journal (a journal of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Association, published in the US), in his newly published work in 2023, “Lexical evidence of the Vietic household before and after language contact with Sinitic,” will show how the Vietnamese language has contributed to the diversity of family culture in Vietnam. Or as in my book, in the writing on pages 261-288, we briefly presented that only from the 2nd century, the Vietnamese language “expanded” the words indicating kinship relations in the family as well as the way of addressing. Before that, in the pre-Vietnamese period (ie from the 2nd century onwards), the Vietnamese language expressed family relations in a narrow and direct scope around the father/mother-child axis; only after contact With the Han people (due to the Chinese domination), the words for uncle, aunt, uncle, aunt, etc. appeared in the Vietnamese language. Or like before, the forms of address in the Vietnamese language also revolved around the axis of "I - you/you - it" (similar to the form of address in English) which is still used in Vietnamese today but is considered "colloquial" words. Only when exposed to "Han culture" did the forms of address according to rank, title, relationship, etc. come into the Vietnamese language and over thousands of years became Vietnamese culture. Likewise, in the pre-Vietnamese period, the Vietnamese language did not use words for surnames; but only when exposed to "Han culture", due to the need to manage society to rule, did the forms of address to identify surnames (such as Hoang, Tran, Truong, etc.) enter the Vietnamese language and society. Even in Vietnam, today, the "kinship" culture is more extreme than the Chinese. It is through the study of linguistic history that we know how the “expansion” or “acceptance” of cultures of different human communities is like that.
It is this active borrowing or adoption that has led some people, purely on the surface, to mistakenly assume that the languages ​​of the Vietnamese language groups no longer retain their South Asian origins but are more like dialects of Chinese. Or another example is that when the Vietnamese language groups peacefully interacted with the Thai language groups (when they migrated from the North to the South), the languages ​​of the Vietnamese language groups adopted agricultural cultural elements that they did not have before, creating a more diverse and rich Vietnamese (Southern) agricultural culture as it is today.

In the case of the Vietnamese and Thai people, because they lived peacefully together for thousands of years in Southeast Asia, they borrowed words related to agriculture from each other. Thanks to that, the Vietnamese language has additional words such as canal, ditch, phai, etc. These words are not the entire agricultural vocabulary of the Vietnamese people in the past. They are only a small part, just borrowed to enrich the Vietnamese language.

How does studying the history of the Vietnamese language help us visualize the origins of Vietnamese culture?
As we all know, when studying the history of the “origin of Vietnamese culture”, according to the principles of historical science, those cultural phenomena must have been recorded by “contemporaries”. But most of the time when we talk about the “origin of Vietnamese culture”, we have to rely on folk legends and records in Chinese history books from the 10th to 11th centuries and earlier. For us, “folk legends” have a historical core; but in any case, they are not completely identical to history. As for the events recorded about the Vietnamese community in the South in Chinese history books from the 10th to 11th centuries and earlier, it can be said that there are not many and they are not systematic. But the most important thing is that those records are often not directly witnessed but heard from, and are generally made by scholars who only lived in the capitals of the Northern dynasties. Therefore, what belongs to the culture of the Vietnamese community from about the third century and before often depends on the ways or attitudes of "recording" or the ways or attitudes of "annotating" those records by Chinese scholars from about the third to the tenth century.
To supplement or overcome that weakness, in the interdisciplinary approach, in addition to archaeological materials, scientists writing about prehistory consider the linguistic materials used by historical linguistics to be one of the most important sources. When studying “The Origin of Agricultural Societies”1, Professor Peter Bellwood once commented, “In fact, the history of language tells many important things that most scholars outside of linguistics seem to be completely unaware of. I began to realize that some aspects of human history must be completely different from the approximate reconstructions of archaeologists based on comparative cultural records preserved in ethnographic materials”. He said, “To understand the processes of cultural and anthropological diffusion in history, we need to consider the data of many different research fields. First, we have archaeology, the study of ancient societies from their material traces left on or under the ground… But archaeology also has clear limitations because the evidence is often fragmentary and sometimes very ambiguous… Second, we have comparative linguistics… Comparative linguistics has an advantage over archaeology, which is that the database of linguistics, in the case of a living language, is often complete”. Here, I would like to cite the case of Professor Peter Bellwood as an example to illustrate my opinion. That is a reality in current prehistoric research.
Therefore, studying the history of the Vietnamese language allows us to reconstruct the linguistic picture of the community at each specific historical period2; then the cultural researcher will be able to “read” or “recognize” the characteristics of the cultural origins of the Vietnamese people. That is how historical linguistics, specifically the history of the Vietnamese language, contributes to the study of the cultural origins of the Vietnamese people in particular and the study of the cultural origins of a community in general.
According to my personal observation, for specialized scientific content, state management agencies often "ask" or "assign" people with titles in scientific agencies, but rarely delegate to real scientists. Professor, Dr. Tran Tri Doi commented.
How can we generalize the formation and development process of Vietnamese language through historical periods?
As the research results presented in our published book, the formation and development process of the Vietnamese language through historical periods can be summarized as follows. Accordingly, the Vietnamese language has developed into the pre-Vietnamese period (proto Vietic) corresponding to the "Dong Son culture" period, which means that the residents using the Vietnamese language are the indigenous residents (homeland) in Southeast Asia; the ancient Viet-Muong period (Archaic Vietmuong) corresponding to the period of Chinese domination in Vietnamese history; the common Viet-Muong period (Vietmuong common) belonging to the early period when the Dai Viet state was independent from the North; the Old Vietnamese period (Old Vietnamese) in the 13th-15th centuries when Vietnamese (language Vietnamese) and Muong developed into independent language individuals; and then developed into the Middle Vietnamese stage and gradually expanded to the southern part of the country, so that from the mid-nineteenth century it was the Modern Vietnamese stage in Vietnam. In each of the above historical development stages, the Vietnamese language contained a lot of information about Vietnamese culture. With such historical development, the Vietnamese language had Nom script (13th century) as the first written script in history and by the 17th century, Latin script was added. The birth of Nom script helped Vietnamese develop qualitatively and become a literary language in Vietnamese life. At the same time, based on the analysis of historical linguistic changes, the book also proved that the name Lac Viet is an autonym of the community of Mon-Khmer speakers residing in mainland Southeast Asia, including residents speaking Vietnamese languages.
During the discussion, we found that historical research is very complicated, persistent and requires long-term investment. So has the relationship between the history of Vietnamese language and cultural history received proper attention and investment in research, and why?
In our view, the relationship between the history of language and the history of Vietnamese culture has only recently received some attention from the public. There are the following objective reasons for this delay. Firstly, it is due to the linguistics industry itself. Although this branch is a branch of linguistics, it is at the intersection of many different social sciences and humanities, so it is one of the most complex and also "dry" in both the literal and figurative sense. In our country, "complex and dry" means that few people are committed. For example, in the last decades of the 20th century, in order to obtain materials for a few articles in this field, we had to wander all over the Western regions of Quang Binh, Ha Tinh, Nghe An, etc. regardless of the rainy season or the blazing summer, even risking our lives. With few experts, where can we get products for other branches of science to use? Secondly, in Vietnam, scientists and especially those in charge of science related to cultural origins often think that only the research results of the historical field are enough to give a final opinion. Only recently, when it has been shown that the interdisciplinary approach has overcome shortcomings in research, have people paid attention to the contribution of the comparative-historical linguistics subfield to the study of cultural history. But recognition is one thing, and promotion of research is another. Thirdly, it lies in those responsible for scientific management in this field.

So when you ask “Have we invested in research properly?”, I would like to answer briefly “no”. And when you ask “why?”, in my personal opinion, the three reasons that I explain when I say that the relationship between the history of language and the history of Vietnamese culture is still receiving very little attention have themselves shown the reason why in our country, when presenting the history of Vietnamese culture, people are “confident” with the way things have been done so far and the understanding of cultural history that we have. To further explain this, we would like to cite an example of how to respond to public opinion related to the content of the name Lac Viet (雒越). Those are really the difficulties in promoting research on the relationship between the history of language and the history of Vietnamese culture in our country today.
Faced with many difficulties in terms of materials, research time, and limited investment, how did you and other linguists organize research on the history of the Vietnamese language?
It can be said that the problem of researching the relationship between the history of language and the history of Vietnamese culture is actually facing many difficulties in terms of materials, research time, and investment in gathering a team. How? Almost giving up! For many reasons, but the most recognizable reason is that in general, the comparative-historical linguistics branch has to spend too much effort but its research results cannot be applied immediately (because this is a basic science) but only serve as a basis for different branches of social sciences and humanities. In other words, it seems to us that in this field, having research is fine, but not having research does not harm anyone. In essence, such a way of behaving, as we have analyzed above, is because we are currently "satisfied" with what is related to the issue of the origin of Vietnamese culture on the basis of existing scientific conclusions. Meanwhile, in neighboring countries or countries with developed social sciences and humanities, people think differently and are not completely assured that the existing explanations of this content are scientific truths. It is very possible that there will be content related to the issue of Vietnamese cultural history from the perspective of linguistic history that will be built by international scientists based on their research results. At that time, how we will do it will surely be recognized immediately by those interested in the issue. Our dream (formerly of Professor Nguyen Tai Can, Professor Phan Ngoc, researcher Ho Hai Thuy, etc. and myself) is that the comparative-historical linguistics branch can build an "Etymological Dictionary of the Vietnamese Language" in its true sense to contribute to the study of Vietnamese cultural history, but it seems (and no longer seems) difficult to do.
Perhaps one hope is to cooperate with historical linguistic research centers that are interested in the issues of Vietnam and Southeast Asia. But in the present time, research cooperation must be equal, especially equal in resources to achieve equal results. Meanwhile, in Vietnam, according to my personal observation, for a specialized scientific content, state management agencies often "ask" or "assign" people with titles in scientific agencies but rarely delegate to real scientists. And not all people with titles in scientific agencies are truly interested in science and are scientists. It is more effective to choose the right expert in a scientific field to assign tasks. To do this, not only linguists but also scientific research managers must join hands in organizing research on the history of Vietnamese languages.