Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ham Duong: linguist - soldier

Nearly forty years ago, late autumn 1963. At that time, the Faculty of Literature, Hanoi University of Science was located near Lang Pagoda (now the residential area of ​​the two Universities of Foreign Trade and Foreign Affairs). One afternoon, we saw the teachers of the Linguistics Department coming out of a meeting, among them was a very "impressive" looking stranger, tall and very Western looking, dressed elegantly, holding a red Jawa motorbike which was very rare at that time. Mr. Nguyen Cao Dam told us, the third year students, that this was Mr. Nguyen Ham Duong, who had just received his Associate Doctorate in Linguistics from Lomonosov University. We saw a huge gap between him and us in terms of education and lifestyle. Every now and then, we saw his shadow in the faculty but we had no chance to meet him, so that gap seemed to grow.

A year later, we were able to study with him. Mr. Nguyen Ham Duong said: “I used to be a soldier, holding a gun to fight the French, and was able to go to school. Now I am back to teach at the university, hoping to receive your sympathy and cooperation.” We were extremely surprised by his simple and friendly demeanor. During each break, he shared with us a cup of tea, a cigarette, and a sesame candy. He still maintained the soldier’s demeanor during his lectures: speaking very simply, going straight to the point, expressing his opinions, criticizing students frankly and sincerely, and letting it go once the job was done.

Prof. Dr. Nguyen Ham Duong (1930-1992) was Head of the Department of Linguistics (1973-1978).

He gave us the first general and applied linguistic knowledge that I still continue to learn from him, decades later. Through him, we learned about the Structural Linguistics of the time with names from Bloomfield to Harris, from Hjelmslev to Jakobson. The first time I heard the name of N. Chomsky was from his lecture when Chomsky had just appeared 7 years earlier (1957) with "Syntactic Structures". Mr. Ham Duong was also the first person to provide us with knowledge about Linguistics and Information through the work of Malmberg, Linguistics and Cybernetics with books by Wiener, Shannon, Esbi,... which were very unfamiliar. Today, when teaching students the subject "Language - Communication - Marketing", I cannot help but recall the story of that time.

In 1965, we graduated in the middle of a fierce war. In the mountains of Dai Tu district, Thai Nguyen, Mr. Ham Duong and I were assigned to live together. A kind landlord gave us two bamboo houses, but they were empty on all sides and had no walls. I was worried. Before I could worry, that evening Mr. Duong gathered the three of us and said: We are starting a new life, perhaps long-term, so it cannot be temporary. We must organize like a military to suit wartime and must be quick to work. Mr. Thuat and I suggested forming a group of three people with a common name, Duong Duc Thuat.

For a whole month, the commander commanded us to build a house, plaster the walls, make beds, tables and chairs, and collect firewood for cooking.

Then came the increase in production. He borrowed land from the people, organized the digging, and planted vegetables. The hardest part was fertilizer. I was worried again. He said: there are quite a lot of children herding cows and buffaloes on the mountainside, that is the source of fertilizer for us. Then he made three sets of carrying poles and agreed that each person had to pick up five loads of manure. He did it first. Every afternoon along the mountainside, I carried the poles and followed him along the mountainside to pick up cow dung, each teacher and student had a load. Seeing that I was shy, he understood and said: Don't be shy, just because you pick up cow dung doesn't mean you won't be able to get a wife in the future!

Being close to my teacher, "leisurely telling stories of his hard days", I learned about his life as a soldier through each story he told during the three years we were together.

Born in the suburbs of Nam Dinh in a poor family, he was in his final year of high school when the August Revolution succeeded. Two months later, at the age of 16, he dropped out of school and volunteered to join the province's Southern Expeditionary Army to fight the enemy in the South. His company participated in the war in the South Central region. When the front broke, his squad drifted to Laos to fight with the Laotian army. In March 1946, the Laotian front broke again, and while surrounded, he and the Laotian soldiers swam across the Mekong River following Souphanouvong's army. Hungry and cold in Thailand, he contacted the Party's Overseas activities led by revolutionary Nguyen Duc Quy. He was assigned to act as a merchant to buy weapons for the revolution. He said: I knew how to dress fashionably thanks to this job in Bangkok. In 1947, the Thai right-wing faction came to power and suppressed the revolution. He was arrested and imprisoned. Four months later, the Party rescued him and put the group into secret activities. He left Thailand to begin a new dangerous journey: participating in transporting weapons purchased in Thailand to the U Minh forest in Ca Mau by sea.It can be said that he belonged to the first generation of soldiers of the sea trail.. For two consecutive years, he went to sea on unnumbered boats, sometimes pretending to be fishermen, sometimes pretending to be traders to transport guns and ammunition. He faced many dangers at sea, with the enemy, and many times thought it was difficult to escape. He was one of the veteran soldiers of the Western sea weapons transfer line. In 1949, he was admitted to the Party and assigned to Zone 9 to fight in Phan Trong Tue's army. After three years of struggling on the front lines and working in the jungle, in 1952 he was transferred to the Southeast region. Unlike the jungle, the Eastern forest lacked rice and medicine, and there was constant malaria, hunger, and eating wild roots day after day. Teacher Ham Duong really liked the song "Southern Resistance" and the song "Rung Music", which, according to him, were "The Eastern region is hard-working and heroic". In the East, he had a very close friendship with two friends, the playwright and director Ngo Y Linh and the poet Xuan Mien.

Signed the Geneva Agreement. He left the Eastern jungle to join the Ceasefire Committee in Phung Hiep and Sa Dec. He spoke French and joined the struggle to implement the agreement with the French in the rank of company commander. He asked to stay in the South to fight, but the decision was made that he had to go to the assembly because he had been exposed.

From the battlefield to the North, he was sent to study in the Soviet Union. In that country, because he had not graduated from high school, he had to continue studying the Russian high school supplementary program before being able to enter university.

From a soldier, Mr. Ham Duong became a Bachelor of Linguistics and then the first PhD in Experimental Phonetics in our country under the guidance of the famous Professor Reformatski at the laboratory of Professor Artjumov (MGU). Being a person who boldly entered the new, he was the one who soon entered applied linguistics with the topic of aphasia, developed the specialty of Neurolinguistics and successfully defended his PhD thesis (1984) at the laboratory of the famous Professor V. Ivanov (MGU). He became the first director of the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies of the school and then returned to the South with his love for the South and the soldier with the badge "The citadel of the Fatherland" as a professor at Ho Chi Minh City University of Science.

His scientific contribution is to bring to the country's linguistics the latest information on linguistic science before our country opened up. He was a pioneer in approaching new issues and passing them on to his students: Language and information, applied linguistics, N. Chomsky's linguistics and especially pathological linguistics, neurolinguistics, etc.

His outstanding features were his straightforwardness and determination in all matters, from small to large. Whatever he decided to do, he would complete it. He left behind many generations of students with deep respect.

To me, the image of my teacher always remains as a gallant intellectual with a very modern style and a weathered soldier with "the moon hanging on the gun barrel".

I remember the teacher's words the most: "I am a soldier who became an intellectual, and you intellectuals must become soldiers" (1965).