Tiếng Việt

Before I came to Vietnam I had been in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Nepal and China, five countries where I couldn't even read the alphabet. I love looking at the delicate, curly scripts of Southeast Asian languages. I think it's a pity they're being overtaken on signage by the more blocky and ungainly English language.

For instance, this is the full name of the Thai capital in the Thai language:

กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยา มหาดิลกภพ นพรัตน์ราชธานีบุรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์มหาสถาน อมรพิมานอวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะวิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์

It's beautiful just to look at. Lao and Khmer look similar.

Chinese pictograms are fascinating, but the only way to learn them,, even for the Chinese, is one character at a time.

I liked Nepali so much I had a word from the language tattooed on my arm! (Sagarmatha, the Nepali name for Everest.)

It was a bit of a relief, though, when I first looked at the Vietnam section in my pocket language guide for Southeast Asia. I recognized the letters! This was going to be easy.

The Vietnamese language, according to my phrasebook, "was strongly influenced by Indic and Malayo-Polynesian languages, but this all changed when the Chinese took control of the coastal nation in the 2nd century BC."

For over a thousand years the Chinese ruled Vietnam and was the official language. Vietnamese was still spoken and was written using Chinese characters.

Vietnam broke free of China in 939 AD. European missionaries appeared a few hundred years later. After the French took control of Vietnam in 1859 they imposed their language and, in 1910, a new alphabet called Quốc Ngữ ("national alphabet"). The Vietnamese language, in fact, is not called Vietnamese, it's Tiếng Việt.

Note the accents and other funky things floating around the letters. These are called diacritics. A diacritic is any mark added to a letter to change its pronunciation.

The alphabet was devised by a French Jesuit named Alexandre de Rhodes. There are 29 letters, but not all of the letters of the French alphabet are used. Because there are sounds in Vietnamese that are not in French, Rhodes modified some letters to represent the new sounds.

As a result there are three A's, two D's, two E's, three O's and two U's. As a result it's terribly confusing to an English speaker...

Diacritics are used to distinguish them. For instance A, à and  are three different letters in the Vietnamese alphabet, representing three different sounds.

Vietnamese is also a tonal language. I've wrestled with tonal languages since China. What this means is that what we would consider to be a single word has completely different meanings depending on how it's pronounced.

A phrasebook I had made a great point. It said that Westerners have trouble hearing the tones, let alone speaking them.

If you don't hit the tones right, though, the Chinese honestly have no clue what you're talking about. You would think the context would help -- obviously I mean 'mother' and not 'horse', right? -- but no.

Thai is tonal, but it's not such a big deal, mostly because virtually everyone speaks English. If I don't hit the tone right when I say 'thank you' they know I'm a farang and, given the situation, that's probably what I meant.

Chinese was impossible. There are five tones in Chinese. Vietnamese has six.

Vietnamese is hard. This is a vast simplification, so I ask my Vietnamese friends to bear with me, but it's like trying to speak and read Chinese with a watered-down English alphabet.

It's hard to read because of all the darn diacritics. There are so many extra marks that the script appears cluttered to these eyes. Tones are indicated by diacritics. There are letters which have built in diacritics. So a single letter can have multiple marks.

For instance, this is Vietnam as written in Tiếng Việt: Việt Nam. Note the two diacritics on the 'e'.

Now check out this sentence from an embassy website:

Luật Hiện đại hoá an toàn thực phẩm được giới thiệu tại Thượng viện, Luật này sẽ cải thiện những nổ lực của Chính phủ nhằm đảm bảo an toàn thực phẩm nhập khẩu và sản xuất trong nước.

It's a bit ... daunting.

I certainly don't mean this to read as a critique or criticism of the language. I always struggle with new languages. As an American I only speak one language, and poorly at that. It's always humbling to meet Swiss, Dutch or Swedish travelers because not only do they speak multiple languages, they speak English better than I do!

My point is that my initial glance at the language was deceiving. I expected it to be easier than the other languages I've wrestled with. In fact, it's harder than most.