Lingua frankly

Vietnamese is difficult. The tones, oh the tones, the sextet of tones, the consonant clusters, and the letters. The alphabet looks sort of Western European, unlike the Thai scribble (ท ทหาร), but it does have traps like ơ and ă. And that’s even before you get to how the Portuguese and French missionaries of centuries past elected to transcribe the language. Many words I still cannot pronounce due to my own bucco-lingual stubbornness. But for other words, learning of the pronunciation was impeded for about a year by the way they are written. Words like “học” and “độc”. You concentrate on the dot which is a tone directing you to snatch at the word, say it really quickly, possibly going down in intonation while not neglecting any letter. (Alexandre de Rhodes (1651) apparently described this tone as “chesty-heavy”. Nope, that doesn’t help, Alex). No teacher was ever very pleased with the way I said “học” (or indeed “độc”). But why not? One clue was that when they said hoc or doc they would puff their cheeks out. Try it. It is clumsy. Now I have worked out what the difficulty is. The mistake is thinking of the last sound as a “c”: It should be a “p”. Thanks for nothing, Franco-Iberian monks. Words ending in “-ong” present a similar case: It is obvious how they should be pronounced, right? Except that you would be wrong. The “ong” at the end of a word you should say like a snappy “om”, as would a fish shutting its mouth after its prey has wandered in (cheek-puffing preferred but optional). Words ending in “-ang” are another kettle of fish, whereas “Ng” at the start of a word is simply another sad chapter: It is certainly not pronounced “ng” or “m”. No, it is much more like the sound you make when scraping brown Norwegian goat’s cheese from the roof of your mouth while moaning quietly.

Still, I’ve acquired a few hundred words of Vietnamese and today a translation app understood me (eh, Gunnar?). So to end with, here are some abstract, universal laws of language:

1. A person who says that a particular language is simple invariably does not speak that language

Both in Vietnam and Norway one meets visitors claiming that the local language is simple. Really, well, if so, why can’t you speak it? It’s easy to see where this comes from. It does seem impoverished to an English speaker to find out that in Vietnamese there are no definite articles. Haha, sounds a bit basic. Yes, so if the grammar is “simple”, then all you have to master is the vernacular, the prosody, the terms of address and the count nouns and you’ll soon be successfully ordering chicken noodles all by yourself (as long as you are in a restaurant with nothing else on the menu).

2. Repeating something in a loud voice when not being understood the first time is not a habit exclusive to the English

It is certainly common amongst Vietnamese speakers. OK, I’m mainly thinking of those in bia hois, late at night.

3. After the third use of the word “like”, a sentence may safely be ignored.

4. Multilinguistic people surf in n dimensions while monoglots run in straight lines

That’s not to say that monoglots are lazy imperialists though.