Like a flying crane

Thus, a heart that had spent its whole life carrying enthusiasm for science, spent its whole life training, and passed on the fire to its 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 before a thousand miles of separation. The crane had flown away.fly up to the sky...Born on May 2, 1926 in Thanh Van commune, Thanh Chuong district, Nghe An province, in a Confucian family, he studied at Vinh National School and Hue National School; grew up and fought in the resistance war; peace was restored, and he was appointed by the Ministry of Education as the first Vietnamese linguistics expert in our country at Leningrad University, Soviet Union; while teaching, studying and researching with famous Soviet scientists, in 1960, he started his linguistics career by successfully defending his first Associate Doctorate in Literature thesis in Vietnam in the Soviet Union on Vietnamese Noun Classes. In 1962, when he returned to Vietnam, he was assigned to be the head of the Linguistics Department of the Faculty of Literature, Hanoi National University (now divided into two faculties: Literature and Linguistics of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University, Hanoi). His “heaven-given” qualities, both profound in Sinology, trained and worked in a European academic environment, and tirelessly “devoting himself to a religion” for science… all of these things have contributed to making the talented teacher and scientist Nguyen Tai Can, one of the great figures holding the leading position in the field of contemporary linguistics in our country. Ten years as head of the department and even after he no longer held that position, the ambition to organize, build and develop the field has always urged him. The consciousness of concern and desireinternationalizationthat we are talking about every day and trying to do, the Teacher and his comrades and colleagues, with very specific, practical, and quiet actions, have been doing since that day (He was very allergic, if not hating, the noisy and ostentatious). The program and curriculum were consulted and updated from abroad through the channels of Soviet universities, finding people with suitable expertise to bring to the faculty or selecting people to send abroad to train new majors that the world has, the field of study and the country needs... to open subjects, majors. Applied Linguistics, Mathematical Linguistics, Statistical Linguistics, Neurolinguistics, Experimental Phonetics, Logic, Translation... had people to research and organize teaching, right in that "prosperous" time, when the country was still full of hardships in the war of bombs and bullets. "It's a career, that's how it is." The Teacher often told his students who became his colleagues like that. I understand, that is the motto “hới nhân bất duyên” (teaching tirelessly) that Confucius taught long ago. During his life teaching at the university, as one of the leading experts in the field of linguistics in our country, he directly trained many students, researchers, and graduate students in the majors of Linguistics, Vietnamese linguistics, and Han Nom. Just counting the generations of teachers currently working in the Linguistics Department, from him down, they are “five generations under one roof”. Although he has retired for a long time, he has closely followed the scientific activities in the department and the school and still comes to participate or directly teach when he has the opportunity. However, now, his enthusiastic and passionate lectures are no longer heard. 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, text 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 such as:Vietnamese Grammar: Words - 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 Continuous Parallelism in the Poem Vu Trung Son Thuy by Thieu Tri (1998), Some evidence of language, writing and culture (2001),then the study of the volumeAutumn Night Traveler's Recollections by Dinh Nhat Than (2008), two major research works on The Tale of Kieu:Kieu Story Documents: Duy Minh Thi 1872 Edition.(2002), Documents of the Tale of Kieu: From Duy Minh Thi's version to Kieu Oanh Mau's version (2004)...Let me say a few more words about three of those books.Vietnamese Grammar: Words - Compound Words - Short PhrasesThere are two most valuable ones: the proposal to apply the concept of "sound" corresponding to the concept ofmorphemefor Vietnamese grammar, and describes the structure of Vietnamese nouns. It is the proposal to apply and clarify the grammatical value of "language" that has created a pivotal change,brought profound innovations in the perception of Vietnamese linguists in general when describing Vietnamese, making the description of contemporary Vietnamese structure more realistic and true to what it is.. The structure of Vietnamese noun phrases 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 have an impact on 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 much upheaval, the Teacher'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. On page 216, there are a few things presented, although gentle, even a bit "patient", butreally an ideain contemporary grammatical analysis of relevant issues. The bookHistory of Vietnamese Phonetics, it can be said that, up to now, it 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 familiar 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 more comprehensively. 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 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 bookOrigin and formation process of Sino-Vietnamese readingFirst 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 inGear(coincidentally, in 1992, WH Baxter also restored the 8 vowel system); at the same timeResearch the entire process of evolution through different stages of the consonant system and the Chinese rhyme system from the Iron Age to the period of formation of Sino-Vietnamese reading. The process of evolution and transformation through the stages during those three centuries, it cannot be said that it did not exist, both H. Maspero and SA Starostin ignored it. H. Maspero only presented the Chinese phonetic system at two points in time: the time of Thiet van and then switched to the system at the time of the formation of the Sino-Vietnamese reading method.One of the differences and advantages of the work Origin and formation of Sino-Vietnamese reading compared to the work of H. Maspero is right there.Up to this point, while discussing the books and research works of the Teacher, I would like to say this again: in those studies, the Teacher never used a single penny of the scientific research funds 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 declared and proposed the selection. Doing the work that science needs; being responsible, devoted to the passions that the profession of "being a teacher" requires... attaching great importance to theory and method, but always having to be very practical... are always the points that students and colleagues often easily see in the Teacher. The year I graduated, I stayed to be trained to become a lecturer; one day the Teacher asked: "What was Nghieu assigned to teach?" I answered: "Yes, I was assigned to the group teaching linguistic theory". The Master said: “Very good. This is very important. Now that you can’t go abroad, try to read and study. But remember, no one just does theory. Any theory must start and then progress from specific research.” I was like the butcher in the old fairy tale, on the ferry crossing, he met Buddha, heard a sentence and suddenly understood. The last time I met the Master was on August 2, 2010. Taking advantage of the opportunity to have work in Moscow, I visited the Master and his wife for an afternoon. It was very special. Extremely happy. We talked endlessly. There were even tears. Because of joy and emotion. The Master immediately took the magazine.Nghe An CultureHe gave it to me and told me that I had read the paper about our country's national name at the national linguistics conference on behalf of the teacher. However, my intuition, as someone whose old father had fallen ill, secretly told me:it's hard to be okay anymore;and suddenly felt my heart tighten. When I left, the Master hugged me tightly, not wanting to let go, his eyes red, and said: Go home, I can't come down to see you off. But I will stand here with you waving.” When I got to the yard, I looked up and saw the Teacher and the Teacher’s hands reaching out the window to greet me. I waved and bowed. I walked about half the length of the building, turned back and looked up: still two arms raised straight. I bowed again and walked. A few steps down the length of the building, I turned back: still the same. I waved, bowed again, then quickly walked into a hidden corner and stood for a few seconds. I turned back to look. Only then did I see the Teacher and the Teacher stop waving... Hearing the bad news about the Teacher, although I had been worried for a long time so I didn’t feel too surprised or sudden, but when my friends told me “you should write something about the Teacher”, I was confused, not knowing what to write... Surely at this time, those who were blood relatives were still with the Teacher and must have “tears falling and soaking the stone...”. I, ​​a “little boy” among all of the Teacher’s students, did not understand why, and what it meant, but I heard it as if it was passing somewhere in the hurried wind, the last sentence in a poem by Hoang Cam...Ripe banana tree fell down and broke the vine...