Thus, a heart that had spent its whole life carrying passion for science, training, and inspiring students had stopped beating. The person who carried that heart – Professor Nguyen Tai Can – had left this world for heaven, leaving behind a void in the academic world. And in our hearts, alongside the sadness and regret of students for their teacher, there was the feeling of standing in front of a thousand miles of separation. The crane had flown up to the sky.
"Dedicate yourself to science"
Ten years as head of the department and even after he no longer held that position, the ambition to organize, build and develop the industry always urged him.
The consciousness of concern and desire for internationalization that is being talked about every day and strived to realize today, he and his comrades and colleagues have carried out since that day with very specific, practical, and quiet actions (he is very allergic, if not to say hateful, to noisy ostentation).
The programs and curricula were referenced and updated from abroad through the channels of Soviet universities, finding people with suitable expertise to bring back to the faculty or selecting people to send abroad to train new majors that the world had, the field of study and the country needed... to open subjects and majors: Applied Linguistics, Mathematical Linguistics, Statistical Linguistics, Neurolinguistics, Experimental Phonetics, Logic, Translation... to have people to research and organize teaching, right in that "prosperous" time, in the middle of the country still full of hardships in war and bombs.
“It is karma,” he often said to his students who had become colleagues. I understood that it was the motto “teach tirelessly” that Confucius taught long ago.
Professor Nguyen Tai Can spoke in his hometown (Nghe An) in early 2009.
During his life teaching at the University, as one of the leading experts in the field of linguistics in the country, he directly trained many students, researchers, and graduate students in the fields of Linguistics, Vietnamese Linguistics, and Han Nom.
Just counting the generations of teachers currently working in the Linguistics Department, from the Teacher down, are "five generations under one roof".
Although he has retired for a long time, he closely follows scientific activities in the department and school and still participates or directly teaches when possible.
His research field is very broad: from contemporary grammar to historical phonetics and Vietnamese history, from Sino-Vietnamese reading to issues of Sino-Nom script, from author and work language to literary language, textual studies and ancient poetry...
Not to mention research articles in scientific journals, domestic and foreign anthologies, just counting books, perhaps first of all must be books like:
Vietnamese Grammar: Tongues – Compound Words – Short Phrases (1975), Noun Classes in Modern Vietnamese (1975), Grammatika Vietnamskogo Jazưka (Vietnamese Grammar – written with N. Stankevich and Bưstrov), Origin and Formation of Sino-Vietnamese Reading (1979), Some Issues on Nom (1985), History of Vietnamese Phonetics (1995), Influence of Chinese Literature of the Ly-Tran (through Nguyen Trung Ngan's Poetry) (1998), Study of the Technique of Repetitive Paraphrasing in the Poem Vu Trung Son Thuy by Thieu Tri (1998), Some Evidences on Language, Writing and Culture (2001), then a research book on the collection Thu Da Lu Hoai Ngam by Dinh Nhat Than (2008), two major research works on the Tale of Kieu: Documents on the Tale of Kieu: Duy Minh Thi Version 1872 (2002), Documents on the Tale of Kieu: From Duy Minh Thi Version to Kieu Oanh Version Mau (2004)…
A few things about three of those books
The book Vietnamese Grammar: Tiếng – Compound Words – Short Phrases has two most valuable points: proposing the application of the concept of “Tiếng” corresponding to the concept of morpheme for Vietnamese grammar, and describing the structure of Vietnamese noun phrases.
It is the proposal to apply and clarify the grammatical value of "language" that has created a pivotal change, bringing about profound innovations in the perception of Vietnamese linguists in general when describing Vietnamese, making the description of the structure of contemporary Vietnamese more realistic and true to what it is.
The Vietnamese noun structure described in this work (applying the method of description according to distribution position) has contributed to many improvements and changes in the classification of word classes, a very important task of grammar research and description.
There may be many great research results, many people may have them, but there are certainly not many research results that can impact and change the perception of an entire research community. Nguyen Tai Can has that.
Also in this work, for many different reasons, to avoid too great a reversal, the Master's new idea about the central element (main element) of the noun phrase was presented starting on page 216 (1975 edition) with the name "two elements T1 and T2 in the central part", which recently, the famous linguist Cao Xuan Hao and others in studies on this issue, often mentioned and highly appreciated.
At point c. page 216, there are a few things presented, although gentle, even a bit "patient", but they are really an idea in contemporary grammatical analysis for the relevant issue.
The book History of Vietnamese Phonetics, it can be said, up to now, is the most complete and systematic research work on the history of Vietnamese phonetics, and its special feature is that: the origin relationships, the contact relationships between Vietnamese and related languages, between Vietnamese and Chinese; the influence of Chinese on Vietnamese and other minority languages in Vietnam... have been analyzed with consistent methods, evaluated reasonably in the whole general context, making the problem perceived and presented in a more comprehensive way.
Thanks to that, in the textbook, with a dense set of data, specifically and meticulously verified, the origin and evolution of the sounds belonging to the system of initial sounds, medial sounds, vowels, final sounds and tones of Vietnamese, the steps of evolution of Vietnamese phonetics from the Proto Viet Chut period (corresponding to the familiar term Proto Viet Muong) through the period of division into two branches Poong - Chut and Viet - Muong, then from common Viet Muong to Nguon, Muong and Viet separated, from early Vietnamese to modern Vietnamese... become much easier to visualize.
The book "Origin and Formation of Sino-Vietnamese Reading" first published in 1979, reprinted with revisions and supplements in 2000 is the first work in Vietnam to systematically and fundamentally research this issue.
In addition to other scientific values that many researchers have mentioned and introduced, the special thing I want to add is that, unlike the works of B. Karlgren (1915), H. Maspero (1912), T. Mineya (1972), Vuong Luc (1958), Ly Vinh (1952), J. Hashimoto (1984), SA Starostin (1989), this work restores and defines the system of 8 vowels in Thiet van (coincidentally, in 1992, WH Baxter also restored the system of 8 vowels); at the same time, it studies the entire process of evolution through different stages of the consonant system and the Chinese rhyme system from the Thiet van period to the period of forming Sino-Vietnamese reading.
The process of evolution and transformation through the stages during those three centuries, it cannot be said that neither H. Maspero nor SA Starostin had ignored it. H. Maspero only presented the Chinese phonetic system at two points in time: the time of Thiet van and then immediately switched to the system at the time of the formation of Sino-Vietnamese reading. One of the differences and advantages of the work Origin and the formation process of Sino-Vietnamese reading compared to the work of H. Maspero is right there.
Now, while discussing the books and research works of the Master, I would like to say this again: in those studies, the Master never used a single penny of the scientific research funding provided by the state...
Among those books, a group of works was awarded the Ho Chi Minh Prize while the Teacher was not in Hanoi. His colleagues and students reported and proposed the selection.
