Blessed
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Vietnamese Calligraphy Scroll

A little Vietnamese language lesson...

For a long time, the Vietnamese language was written using Chinese characters. These are known in Vietnamese as chữ Nôm. Each Chinese character represented a word. Many Chinese sounds were incorporated into the Vietnamese language over the centuries, so many words have similar root sounds between the two languages. This is especially true of Buddhist words and titles. This is because the flow of Buddhism came from India, through Tibet, and China, then arrived in Vietnam directly from China.

In the late 1500's and through the 1600's, Jesuit missionaries from Portugal and France created Romanized versions of Vietnamese sounds to teach newly-arriving missionaries how to speak the language. The effort was innocent enough, but things changed in the 19th century. The French were now ruling much of Indochina. Both missionaries and French rulers wanted to suppress Confucian thought, and influence of Chinese culture on their Vietnamese subjects. By 1917, Chinese characters were virtually banned in Vietnam.

The Romanization scheme left some lingering problems for Vietnam. There are many homophones in the Vietnamese language, for which the meanings can be established by the context of the conversation. However, when Vietnamese was written in Chinese characters, any text made it obvious which word was being used. However, it can be very confusing as the romanized versions are written exactly the same.

If you know your history, there was much resentment for the French colonizers in Vietnam. This forced change to a Romanized written language was a point of contention for many Vietnamese. Of course, this was not the only reason that many Vietnamese people rose up against the French.