The Dōngfāng zǎobào 东方早报 (Oriental Morning Post / dfdaily) (May 26, 3013) carried an article entitled "Dāng rénmen dōu xiě Hànyǔ shí" 当人们都写汉语时 (When everyone writes Chinese) that begins with the following photograph:
Any literate speaker of one of the Chinese languages is going to look at that and get a headache. Their head will spin. They won't know whether to begin from the left or right. They will experience severe cognitive dissonance. They may get angry. They may say that stupid Vietnamese do not know how to write Chinese. They may want to trash the sign, like the Communist Party official who missed his plane in Yunnan (not too far from Vietnam!).
What does the sign really say?
If we try to read it in Mandarin from left to right, it would be:
–> yuàn yánjiū hàn nán 院研究漢喃
(courtyard research Sino-Nom)
– that doesn't make much sense.
If we try to read it in Mandarin from right to left, it would be:
yuàn yán jiū hàn nán 院研究漢喃 <–
(Nom-Sino XX [next two characters don't compute in that sequence] courtyard)
– that makes even less sense.
Before proceeding, I'd better explain what Nom 喃 is. Nôm or chữ nôm is a vernacular script that was used to write Vietnamese during the 15th to 19th centuries. Based on Chinese characters employed in a variety of creative ways, but also including many invented characters, nôm was used to write popular literary works in Vietnamese language, while Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese was reserved for more serious purposes. The graph 喃 for nôm itself is a good example of how new characters were devised: Mandarin nán 南 ("south") has a little "mouth" radical added to the upper part of the left side, resulting in a new character that is intended to specify the writing system we know as Nom. Of course, it has absolutely nothing to do with "south" or "mouth"!
Now let's read it in Vietnamese from left to right as it is intended:
Viện nghiên cứu Hán Nôm 院研究漢喃
("Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies")
Literally:
The Han-Nom Research Institute
From the point of view of meaning:
The Institute for Research on Classical Chinese (i.e., Han) and Vernacular (i.e., Nom) [Documents {implied}]
Here's the website for the institute, and here's a Wikipedia article about it.
I asked three specialists on Vietnamese for their views on the wording of this sign.
Bill Hannas:
If you read right to left in the old (formal) way of writing Chinese horizontally, the 研究 (nghien cuu) would be reversed, which is the only invariable in the expression. So you have to read left to right. The question is what language (or script) is it?
It surely isn't (classical) Chinese. The word order (noun + adjective) is indeed Vietnamese and "vien nghien cuu" is a proper lexical item. But my guess is the institute is using Nom, not some newly contrived way to make Vietnamese readable with Chinese characters.
Of course, that's exactly what Nom was meant to do, so this may be a distinction without a difference.
Liam Kelley:
It makes sense, but I think it was probably somewhat of a nationalist decision to write it that way. Probably 90% of what that place holds (manuscripts, rubbings of inscriptions) are in what they call Han (classical Chinese). In the past, when classical Chinese was used, I think any official entity would have recorded its name in the classical Chinese order (and this continued in the South to some extent after 1954). So by writing it in this way they are trying to make a modern "Vietnamese statement."
N.B.: By "classical Chinese order", Liam means hàn nán yánjiūyuàn 漢喃研究院 ("Han-Nom Research Institute").
Steve O'Harrow:
Liam has, as usual, hit the nail right on the thumb. But while "nationalist," it is also good Vietnamese syntax. And, after all, it IS their language. It's very much in accord with the cadence of the language as it is spoken in Viet Nam today.
In other words, "it feels right." The rhythm of this modern language [in Viet Nam itself, and NOT in Orange County] is different from what it was only a few decades ago. As with all living languages, there are running changes - [Viet Kieu language teachers in the US, Australia, and Europe teach the idealized language of their youth].
[VHM: Viet Kieu are ethnic Vietnamese living outside of the country.]
A good example of this kind of thing is the politically correct tendency to try to rid English of "-man" at the end of words like "chairman," in the mistaken assumption that "man" here means "male." But the historical meaning of the suffix in English is actually "person." However, because most modern speakers of the language are supremely ignorant of etymology [as are most Frenchmen, Chinese, Danes, and Solomon Islanders, and anybody else you can think of], they've succumbed to the "correct" usage of "chairperson" or, now, simply "chair." [ I was a departmental "chair" for a while and I insisted that I felt more like a "footstool."].
The point is that now it "feels" right to think that "gay" has to mean homosexual and not "light-hearted" [pity author Gay Talese, as he laughs all the way to the bank]. So it has become with Vietnamese: it feels correct to say "Viện Hán Nôm" and 'Công hoà Xã hội Chủ nghĩa" and "Khoa học Xã hôi," even if the original in Chinese was in different order.
They say Chinese is the Latin of the East but Italians don't speak Latin [a related language] and Vietnamese certainly don't speak Chinese [an unrelated langauge].
These are the expressions referenced in Steve's penultimate paragraph:
"Viện Hán Nôm" = 院研究漢喃
("Institute Hán-Nôm", i.e., Hán-Nôm Institute")
"Công hoà Xã hội Chủ nghĩa" = "Socialist Republic"
as in "Công hoà Xã hội Chủ nghĩa Việt Nam"
[Socialist Republic of Viet Nam — 共和社會主義越南]
Cf. Mandarin Yuènán shèhuì zhǔyì gònghéguó 越南社會主義共和國 with the same meaning.
"Khoa học Xã hôi" = "social science"
as in "Trường Đại học Khoa học Xã hội và Nhân văn"
[University of Social Sciences and Humanities — 場大學科學社會吧人文]
NOTA BENE : 吧 ("and") here is a "nôm," i.e., "vernacular," character, read for phonetic value alone, but well understood in the Vietnamese spoken context
Cf. Mandarin Shèhuì kēxué yǔ rénwén dàxué 社會科學與人文大學 with the same meaning, though I think it would sound more natural to read it Rénwén yǔ shèhuì kēxué dàxué 人文与社会科学大学.
In all of these cases, we see that the modifiers are piled up after the head noun in Vietnamese, but before it in Mandarin.
For what might happen if we tried to write English in Chinese characters, I recommend John DeFrancis' delightful "The Singlish Affair", a chapter in his The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy.
[h.t. Wicky Tse and thanks to the three Vietnamese experts]
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