I didn’t fully learn Vietnamese, its diphthongs, its grammatical exceptions, and its history until I learned it from my professor, a man who loved German literature. His favorite book chronicled the friendship between Narcissus and Goldmund, in essence, a tug-of-war between the world of the senses and the world of the mind. He learned English by listening to the BBC, with his ear held close to the radio, volume on low. At the time, all foreign broadcasts were forbidden by the government of Viet Nam.
Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language. The same word changes meaning depending on the tone. Ma, for instance, can mean mother, ghost, which, tomb, horse or rice seedling. Vietnamese has five tones similar to the ones in Chinese, but like a child picking up strays along the side of the road, it brought home one other, for a total of six: neutral, rise, rise-high, fall-rise, fall and low. They are a handsome bunch: rise is a gentle incline, an ADA-compliant ramp for the weakest of knees; rise-high is a tilde; fall-rise is a question mark without a period to anchor it; fall is a reverse incline; low looks like the period at this sentence’s end.
Vietnamese was written originally in Chinese characters. Then, one day in the 17th century, a French missionary visited and romanized the language. He brought with him Catholicism, cà phê (coffee), bánh mì (French bread), sôcôla (chocolate), and also, I suspect, a nasal inflection upon all the words. His Latin alphabet improved the country’s literacy rate, perhaps by tenfold.
In Vietnamese, there isn’t any Z. Avocado and butter are B. There are two Ds, a hard one, as in duffle, and a soft one, as in yellow. The letter I sounds like E when you sound it out. H and K are different ways of saying a song you sing. There is no J. LMN is the best part, as in English, in Spanish, in any language. O is the sound you make when opening your mouth for the doctor. Q is the endearment for all little boys. R sounds like English’s error. T is shivering with cold. Ng is sometimes W’s stand-in. The Vietnamese Y, pronounced e-grr-rot, rivals the Spanish Y, pronounced e-griega.
Vietnamese is a language peppered with honorifics. The language acknowledges degrees of familiarity with variations of you, similar to Spanish’s usted addressed to strangers and tú addressed to friends. People are addressed according to—imagine they are color films layered over one another—gender, stage in life, and age difference. Relatives are further categorized—add another layer—by which side of the family the blood ties run, mother’s or father’s. At school, no matter how wide the difference in years, the professor respectfully calls each student em, as in younger friend, instead of cháu, as in child. In the classroom, the age gap narrows.
Immersion into Vietnamese means understanding not just the aspects that are aural, but also that are visual. My professor believed that fluency in Vietnamese meant sharing in collective memories. One day, he said we would understand how a phrase can evoke an entire world: past, future, present. Give us an example, we asked him, do you mean a metaphor? He shook his head. He said, for example: a mother with a child on her lap. A word-image is brief and universal. I didn’t understand the explanation then.
A woman marries a man. Between them, they speak several languages: English, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Vietnamese. The courtship lasted many years. At the wedding, the uncle of the groom gives a speech. He calls their marriage sacred, when no one, anywhere, calls anything sacred anymore. In that multilingual church, the word hits the right tone, in every language: Joaquim. Slow it down. Joa. Quim. Joa rises and Quim rises. Quá Hiêʹm. The uncle found the sounds to describe what they have, the intermingling of different cultures, the long, mutual wait, then finally, there, the word-image.
