If you live in a major U.S. city with a high concentration of Vietnamese immigrants, you might have been dumbfounded by the sights of signs in Vietnamese. On one hand, they are written in “our” alphabet — a gift from Vietnam’s former colonial master France — yet on the other hand, the letters are surrounded by incomprehensible squigglies.
The current system of writing in Vietnam, known as Quoc Ngu 国语 (literally, “national language”) was introduced after centuries of using Chinese characters (plus a set of locally invented Chinese-derived letters called Chu Nom 字喃).
Linguistically, Vietnamese is somewhat of a hybrid between the Sino-Tibetan family of languages and the Mon-Khmer group of languages. Due to its proximity with southwestern Chinese provinces, nearly 70 percent of all Vietnamese words are Chinese in origin (however, the word order is actually the opposite of Chinese; for example, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam is Cong Hoa Xa Hoi Chu Nghia Viet Nam, which would literally be 共和社会主义越南, Republic-Society-Doctrine-Vietnam, rather than 越南社会主义共和国, Vietnam-Society-Doctrine-Republic).
Personal names reflect the Chinese heritage of Vietnamese lexicon, and is usually a three “letter” (when written in Chinese characters) name with the first letter representing one’s family name.
The most common family name in Vietnam is Nguyen 阮, which is pronounced Ruan in Mandarin Chinese. The Nguyen/Ruan 阮 family name is rare in China itself, concentrated mostly in the south. In Australia, however, it is now the seventh most common family name.
Ho Chi Minh is written 胡志明 (Hu Zhiming), making his family name same as that of China’s current president 胡锦涛 (Hu Jintao). This, of course, does not automatically make them distant relatives any more than Denzel Washington and George Washington are related.
The second “letter” (or syllable) of Vietnamese name was traditionally used to denote one’s ranking or generation in his or her family, in a way how some Korean names are structured.
* Click here to visit the website of the Nom Preservation Foundation. Note how the organization’s name is written in Chinese/Chu Nom: It is “會保存遺産喃” (Society-Preservation-Heritage-Nom), rather than “喃遺産保存會” (Nom-Heritage-Preservation-Society), as it would in Chinese.
