…Making Sense of Vietnamese Poetic Forms

A Language with Many Rivers

To begin to understand thee history of Vietnam’s poetry, it is helpful and pretty much necesary to understand the very unusual history of the Vietnamese language. As far as I can tell, there are four basic periods: (1) the first period in which the phonetic origins of the language were born among an ancient, agricultural (“wet-rice”) people native to what is today North Vietnam but who had yet to create a written language; (2) a period during which the conquering Chinese introduced Chinese language (which the Vietnamese refer to as “Han Tu”) as the “official” spoken and written tongue of the ruling class, which started about 100 AD and ended 1,000 years later; (3) a period beginning after the Chinese left during which the Vietnamese created their own language (chư nom), using a combination of Chinese created “loan words” (characters) and characters they designed themselves using the Chinese phonetic system;and introduced into the language through a 1,000 year occupation by Vietnam’s northern neighbor; and (3) a period from the 17th century until now when a missionary from France living near Hanoi named Alexander de Rhodes designed the modern script used today called “quoc ngu.”.

Its phonetic origins (sounds) derive from a mishmash of other languages endemic to the northern region of Vietnam where the Vietnamese people lived thousands of years ago as farmers and fisherman. These people consisted of two cultures brought together by an ambitious warlord: one was a rice growing culture in the Red River Delta, and the other a mountain-based culture further north towards China. At that time, Vietnamese was soley a spoken language.

After the Chinese invaded the area in about 150BC, they made their own tongue the official language of the government and educated (maybe Rush Limbaugh would call them “elite liberals”). So while Vietnamese was still spoken by the common people, the use of Chinese as the language of the ruling class opened a linguistic spiggot which would flow for 1,000 years – the period of time China occupied Vietnam. By the time the Chinese left, about 60% of the spoken Vietnamese words were of Chinese origin, showing the impact that the written language had on the culture. (One thousand years will do that to a language. Even today, Vietnamese people use Chinese to count things.)

It was not until around the 13th century, after China was gone, that the Vietnamese began to write down a newly created set of ideograms similar to the ones used in China and created a new written language known as “chu nom.” Chu nom, which looks identical to Chinese to the non-initiated (see book cover), contained Vietnamese sounds captured in Chinese-style ideograms, and was the official written language for the next 400 years or so, providing a vehicle for the earliest Vietnamese literary figures such as Nguuyen Du (”The Tale of Kieu,” seen on book cover) and Ho Xuan Huong (a woman who wrote numerous rebellious poems) to write their still famous works.

The Tale of Kieu in Chữ Nôm

All of this changed with the arrival French and Portugese missionaries, who wanted to speed up the learning process for the steady stream of eager new arrivals from missionary colleges in Europe. This led to the creation of a Latin script known today as “quoc ngu,” which captures the rich and textured sounds of the original spoken language in roman letters and diacritics. That makes Vietnamese, as far as I know, the only language to have been written in both Chinese ideograms and Latin letters. Does any of this matter in terms of understanding the poem ? Probably not, but it is interesting to imagine that the sounds one is hearing in the poem consist of an ancient tonal language from the Red River Delta, a collection of Chinese words forced into the language by conquering invaders, and a kind of bizarre cyrillic script devised by a French Catholic Priest. At least they left out the kitchen sink.

Vowel Soup

This amalgam language create a very interesting array of sounds of poetry. The bottom-most layer of sounds consists of the letters and their pronunciation. Leaving aside the consonants, which themselves are radically different and fascinating, consider the vowels. There are 12 vowels in the Vietnamese alphabet (although only 11 vowel sounds, as two are pronounced the same), compared to the relative poverty of six in English (a, e, i, o, u and sometimes y). The French captured 11 Vietnamese vowel sounds by using diacritics to modify the six western vowels – “diacritics” being the little hooks, hats and accents attached to most vowels in Vietnamese. (See the little table down there for the twelve.) So, while the vowels look the same as Latin vowels, most of them have absolutely no similarity to the sounds in English, French or any other romance languages. This is why when I go to a cafe and order a coffee for the 300th time, the waiter will still look at me as if I am speaking the language of a small, unknown African tribe: it is extremely difficult for non-native speakers to differentiate between these sounds when they are spoken, let alone to be able to pronounce them.

Dipthong Songs

Moving up one layer up at the archeology site, we find an entirely different group of sounds created by putting vowels together, which are called dipthongs. For example, the word “gooey” in English contains two vowels sounds pronounced side by side and is a dipthong. In Vietnamese, dipthongs abound: depending on how you define them, there are anywhere from three to 23. For example, the word for milk is “sữa.” That innocent-looking three letter word is actually a piece of linguistic nastiness in disguise. It has two vowel sounds: an “u” with a diacritic, and an “a” without one. Put together these two sounds and you get a dipthong which sounds like the noise you make when you drive up a highway on-ramp for a one hour drive, and there is bumper to bumper traffic: eeuuhhaa. Add to that a tone mark – in this case the up/down “dầu ngã” – and what you get in the end is something like someone hiccupping and saying eeuuhhaa. This and the many other strange sounds in the local language are why when I go to the corner store and ask for milk, I am just as likely to get a mechanic to come out and fix my motorbike. (“sữa” is a noun and means milk, “sửa” is a verb and means to repair. In the south they are pronounced virtually identically. For earlier experiences with the word “sửa,” see this post.)

Alphabet Phỏ

Watch Your Tone with Me

Moving up to the next layer at our “site,” we arrive at the Vietnamese tone marks, which are more like musical notes, and which are added to the vowels or the dipthongs. When accompanied by one of these notes, a word can go up, go down (quickly or slowly), stay flat, swoop up and down slowly, or swoop quickly. For example, the two letters “ma” areoften used in Vietnamese class to illustrate this: they can have different meanings depending on what the tone mark is: má uses the upward rising tone and is a cheek, mà is the downward falling tone and is an interrogative particle (but), mả uses a tone that swoops down and comes back up and is a tomb or grave, mạ uses a tone that drops quickly and stays down and is a rice seedling, etc. (Although English is not a tonal language, words can have intonation (go up or down) depending on their placement and use in a sentence, which is different than having the tone be intrinsic to the word.)

Ups and Downs of Tones

Bang Trac, Trac Bang

In everyday speech, these tones are arranged in a random order. In classical vietnamese poetry, however, these tones are arranged into patterns which creates a kind of melody. (This represents the fourth level up at the linguistic “dig.”) While English poetry has meter from the use of stressed and non-stressed syllables – i.e. iambs, trochees, anapests, etc. – it is more about turning up and down the volume on different syllabes rather than tonal changes. In classical Vietnamese poems, tones are grouped into two categories: the “bằng” tones and the “trắc” tones. The former are so-called “flat” tones, and the latter are so-called “non-flat” tones. Different poetic forms demand different sequences of the two kinds of tones: two common rhythmic patterns are “Bằng bằng trắc trắc bằng bằng,” and “Bằng bằng trắc trắc bằng bằng trắc bằng.” The poem “Cô Lái Đò,” has two stanzas written in a classical seven syllable form, illustrated in the diagram “van bang.”

Bang for Your Syllables

Vietnamese is a mono-syllabic, tonal language. This means when you have seven syllables (as in each line of this poem, in the original) you can get up to seven words (the exception is when compound nouns and verbs are used, which are quite common). In English, when you have seven syllables, you will generally get many fewer words – “uruguay potato vine” has seven syllables and three words, “autobiographical” has seven syllables in one word. This means that in Vietnamese language and poetry has a density in terms of amount of “meaning per syllable (MPS?),” which of course is not a real measure but I made it up anyway (or maybe BPS, “bang per syllable?”).

The Tonal Arrangement for Co Lai Do

For a brief example on syllabic density (BPS) consider the title of the poem: “Cô Lái Đò.” This quaint sounding title is also a little piece of linguistic nastiness. “Cô” means a young woman, usually not married. It has an “o” with the diacritic “^” and has a flat-line tone and is pronounced like the English “co” as in co-dependent (interesting example…mmmmm) “Lái” means to drive, steer, or guide and has no diacritic but has an upward rising tone and is pronounced like “lie,” as in fib or go horizontal. “Đò” is an old-fashioned boat, much like the Chinese sampan and has no diacritic but a dropping tone mark. It is pronounced like “daw” as in Dawson. So the poem’s title sounds like “co lie daw.” Then add the tones, which move as follows: first flat, then up, then down which you can hum to yourself and get a sense for the music.

All of this is to provide a taste of what a Vietnamese poem can do in three syllables, which needless to say, it not easily reproduced in three syllables of English. (There are however poets that I love who write in English with very high “BPS” such as Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and e.e. cummings .)

For Further Excavation

There are other elements to these poems that I find interesting, but beyond already too long scope of this post. As mentioned, consonants are intriguing: many of them are so silent a lot of words end up being pure vowel sounds. For example, “hoc” means to study but the “h” disapears at the beginning and the “c” disapears at the end, like the “w” in “how.” The words sounds more like “ouw.” Also, Vietnamese poets make abundant use of internal rhyme and half rhyme, which is made easier by the large number of vowel sounds. For example, the most famous of all classical poetic forms (“luc bat”) uses only internal rhymes – rhymes never come at the end of lines. (The “luc bat” uses alternating six/eight syllable lines with “rhyming pairs,” except that the rhyme in the eight syllable line comes on the sixth syllable. It is the style in which “Kieu” was written.)

Chữ Nôm, is the ancient “ideographic vernacular script” of the Vietnamese language. After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, chữ Nôm, an ideographic script that represents Vietnamese speech, became the national script. For the next 1000 years—from the 10th century and into the 20th—much of Vietnamese literature, philosophy, history, law, medicine, religion, and government policy was written in Nôm script. During the 24 years of the Tây-Sơn emperors (1788-1802), all administrative documents were written in Chữ Nôm. In other words, approximately 1,000 years of Vietnamese cultural history is recorded in this unique system.

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