The tireless scientist

>>Prof. Dr. People's Teacher Hoang Thi Chau passed away

Hoang Thi Chau was born in 1934 in the suburbs of Hue city. She was the youngest daughter of a family of civil servants during the French colonial period. As a child, she attended primary school in Phu Yen. When the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was founded in 1945, she followed her father and brother to Hue. Here, she was continuing her studies in the upper grades when the resistance war against the French broke out. With the patriotic spirit of youth, she went to school and participated in revolutionary activities, fighting in the youth guerrilla team in the inner city.

Hoang Thi Chau is the first female professor of Vietnamese Linguistics. To date, she is one of the oldest professors of this field, a field of science that is known to be dry and "difficult". To achieve that glory, the Hue woman who was once famous as the "beauty queen" of the Faculty of Literature, Hanoi National University, had to work hard in a very unfavorable personal situation. Many generations of students and colleagues always respect her because she is not only a former guerrilla who has fought many times but also a "fairer" scientist who has devoted much to and contributed to the field and to the profession. It can be said that she is an exemplary teacher and mother that anyone who grows up can look up to as an example.

Late Professor, People's Teacher Hoang Thi Chau (1934-2020)                                       

Her family had a revolutionary tradition. Her parents had hidden cadres in their house during the war against the Americans. All three of her sisters had been active in the enemy's territory since the first resistance war. Her eldest sister had been captured by the enemy and exiled to Con Dao. Her second brother had also experienced torture in prison. She herself had been arrested by the enemy twice. However, when she escaped from prison, she continued to work. The last time she had to leave Hue was when she taught and did enemy agitation work at Bo De High School (Buddhist school). That time, her base was exposed, and as soon as she entered the classroom, she was surrounded and arrested by the police. However, because someone had come to report in time, she quickly escaped the siege and went to the war zone. She was admitted to the Party and was introduced to study. She followed the organization to the North. That year was 1955.

A year later, in 1956, with the policy of prioritizing children from the South in the long-term strategy of training scientific staff, Hoang Thi Chau was sent by the State to study at a university in the Soviet Union. At Lomonosov University that year, the Vietnamese Compatriots Committee received another charming but very brave female student from the poetic land of Hue. At that time, female students studying at the university level were very rare.

Graduated from university in 1962, Hoang Thi Chau returned to Vietnam and worked in the Linguistics Department, Faculty of Literature. Shortly after returning to Vietnam, she began to have research articles that attracted the attention of experts. Those articles are as follows:The problem of verifying ethnic groups in Vietnamco-written with Nguyen Linh (Ethnic, No. 38.1963);Ancient Language Connections in Southeast Asia Through River Names(Scientific bulletin of Hanoi University of Science, Literature volume 2, Education Publishing House, 1966);Van Lang country's territory through linguistic documents(in “Hung Vuong built the country. Volume 1. Social Sciences Publishing House 1968)... After publishing these articles, Hoang Thi Chau determined her long-term professional direction. She focused on researching the fields of toponymy, dialectology, Vietnamese teaching methods, languages ​​and writings of ethnic minorities. When it comes to dialectology in Vietnam, no one can forget Hoang Thi Chau. She is a leading expert in this field.

After working for 13 years at the Department of Linguistics, she was sent to the German Democratic Republic as a Vietnamese language expert. During her 5 years working at an international university - Humboldt University, she taught, researched and successfully defended her PhD thesis in 1980. With her deep understanding and knowledge of Vietnamese, she published a Vietnamese language teaching book in German. This is a language teaching book that is considered to be of high quality, especially in the phonetics section. Therefore, after the unification of Germany, it is still used as a Vietnamese language teaching textbook for students at this famous university.

Teacher Hoang Thi Chau with colleagues

As the only woman in the department at that time, Professor Hoang Thi Chau never accepted the "priority" of the "men" in the department. During the evacuation, she also climbed mountains and waded through streams with students to the remote mountainous areas of Viet Bac, connecting her life with the teaching and learning life of staff and students in the department and school. When the department implemented the Tay-Nung language research project, a key research project of the department during the years of fighting the Americans, she also carried a backpack to guide students on field trips, going down to the most remote alleys to investigate the linguistic situation of ethnic minorities. From then until her retirement, almost every year she took students, researchers and colleagues to remote areas such as Dong Van - the northernmost point of the country, Dien Bien, Vo Nhai... to record languages ​​without written language such as Dao, Ha Nhi or languages ​​in danger of extinction such as La Chi, Klao... In this field, she made many contributions to the study of writing and phonetics and was also an expert with many contributions in teaching and scientific research at universities.

From 1983 to 1993, for 10 consecutive years, she also held the position of Head of the Linguistics Department in the Faculty of Philology. As a professional manager, she always expanded cooperation with other units in research and training, and coordinated research activities with colleagues. During that time, due to the requirements of international cooperation, she coordinated with a number of cadres such as Huu Dat, Mai Ngoc Chu and Diep Quang Ban to complete a set of Vietnamese language textbooks (3 volumes) used as teaching materials for Cambodian students.

What is worth mentioning about the life of Professor Hoang Thi Chau is that she had to live in an unfavorable situation, but she always knew how to put aside her personal matters to think about the common good. She had the disadvantage of having a difficult personal life, but no one ever heard a word of complaint from her. Working hard in science, with a small salary, saving to raise two grown sons, she rarely had time to take care of her personal life. Yet, in life, she was always decent. Decent in her lifestyle. Decent in her behavior with students and colleagues, decent in her scientific personality. With her subordinates, she always wholeheartedly helped. With her superiors, she never flattered or complied. Gentle in communication, polite in gestures, but brave in science, she herself created a personality, a unique identity in her scientific career. Her personality is a harmonious combination of the brave qualities of a female guerrilla and the charm of a soulful, dreamy female student of the dreamy city of Hue. It is this combination that gives her the courage to overcome the harshness of her private life while still maintaining a balanced, dynamic state of thinking. Therefore, looking at her scientific journey, many "heroes" of the male gender are amazed. In the past few decades, she has published 7 books (in different fields such as textbooks, monographs, dictionaries) and published 56 articles (not counting the last two years). For a female scientist, the above number is a record that few people have reached. It makes many people respect her, especially in the field of linguistics. Because there are quite a few professors who, in their entire lives, can only write a couple of books, which is a lot of trouble. Not to mention dozens of articles published in many domestic and foreign magazines in languages ​​from Vietnamese to French, German, English, she is also a shining example of hard work and tireless learning. With these great contributions, she received the State Prize for Science and Technology in 2005.

There are countless generations of people who have grown up from the Faculty of Philology, Hanoi National University and the Faculty of Linguistics, University of Social Sciences and Humanities, who have partly contributed to her. Among them, many people have become writers, scientists, professors, doctors, university lecturers, managers... Anyone, whenever mentioning the name Hoang Thi Chau, has a feeling of closeness and respect. It can be said that she is both an exemplary teacher and a scientist who always works tirelessly. Her career is worthy of being a career of stature in the field of Vietnamese Linguistics.