Three Decisions That Put Vietnamese into Latin Letters — Epoche B1
Vietnamese is written in Latin letters carrying stacked accent marks, and John DeFrancis's Colonialism and Language Policy in Viet Nam (1977) explains how a country came to write that way. His account moves in three steps, each taken for a different reason. The first is missionary. In the seventeenth century European priests worked out a spelling of Vietnamese in Latin letters so that they could learn the language and preach in it; the dictionary printed in Rome in 1651 under Alexandre de Rhodes's name rests on the work of others before him. The marks above and below the letters were not decoration. Vietnamese uses tone to distinguish words, and plain letters cannot show it. The second is administrative. Under French rule the alphabet, called quốc ngữ, became the script of offices and of the new schools, while the old examinations in Chinese characters were ended early in the twentieth century. The motive was practical: the alphabet was quick to print and quick to teach — and it separated the young from the classical learning of the mandarins. The third is national. After 1945 the new government pushed literacy classes out through villages and factories, and the script that had arrived with missionaries and colonial officials became the instrument by which the country taught itself to read. DeFrancis does not hide the price. A thousand years of poetry, records and family papers written in characters became unreadable to ordinary readers within two generations. Changing a script does not translate the past; it locks it away. The book is old and still worth the time, because its argument is larger than Vietnam: no writing system is natural to a language. Every one of them was chosen, and this one was chosen three times over. References DeFrancis, J. (1977). Colonialism and Language Policy in Viet Nam. The Hague: Mouton. de Rhodes, A. (1651). Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum. Rome: Sacred Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.