I’ve said many times before that the most important period for understanding all of Vietnamese history is the one period that has been studied the least – the early twentieth century. At that time the Vietnamese worldview changed so radically and so completely that today very few Vietnamese realize how differently they think from their ancestors.
One way of gaining an understanding of the changes that took place at that time is by looking at language. When the journal Nam Phong started to be published in the late 1910s, it included a supplement that defined new words that had recently entered the Vietnamese language.
These words were created by using classical Chinese terms (and many of them were created by Japanese reformers in the 19th century) to translate terms in Western languages that did not have counterparts in East Asian languages.
The editors of the journal explained that some of the words might seem strange, but that after they had been used a few times they would become natural, just as words such as “civilization” (văn minh 文明) and “society” (xã hội 社會) had seemed strange a mere ten years before.
It is interesting to look at these lists of words. On the one hand, it is easy to see that some of these terms were new, like “nhân-quyền-tuyên-ngôn” for “Declaration of the Rights of Man [and of the Citizen]” (Déclaration des droits de l’homme [et du citoyen]). On the other hand, other terms seem so natural today that it is hard to imagine that they were new concepts a mere 100 years ago, such as “phong trào” for “a movement.”
How many books and articles, for instance, have been written by now about the late-eighteenth-century “Tây Sơn movement” (phong trào [nông dân] Tây Sơn)? But if the concept of a “movement” (phong trào) didn’t exist at that time, was it really a movement?
Does this term which was developed in a Western context really describe the Vietnamese context in the late eighteenth century? How do we know? Has anyone asked that question? Or have people just uncritically used modern Western terms to talk about the premodern Vietnamese past?
In looking at zdic.net, it’s clear that the term “phong trào/fengchao” was used in the past, mainly in poetry, but it meant something very different from “a movement.” In particular, it was a term that carried negative connotations and was used by the ruling elite to refer to “political unrest.”
That’s very different from “a movement.” The concept of “a movement” did not exist prior to the 20th century in East Asia. It is a Western concept that was introduced into East Asian languages.
Another such word is “đồng hóa” for “assimilation.” I have read countless times in the writings of Vietnamese authors over the past 50 years of how “the Chinese” have always tried to “assimilate” (đồng hóa) “the Vietnamese.” Well if the term for this phenomenon did not exist until it was introduced from a Western language in the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth centuries into East Asian languages, then how do we know that this is what “the Chinese” tried to do?
“Assimilation” is used in various contexts in Western languages, but when it is used by Vietnamese authors to talk about Chinese intentions, it refers to “cultural assimilation.” That is a meaning which seems to have appeared in Western languages very late. Looking at the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest meanings of “assimilation” are more philosophical, linguistic or medical.
In conducting a Google ngram search for the two terms “cultural assimilation,” we see that those two terms together only started to be used extensively in the 20th century.
Meanwhile, the definition of the Chinese term “tonghua” indicates that this term came to be used during the Qing Dynasty period (very late) to mean that people had “together received the same moral teachings.” Is that the same as “cultural assimilation”?
My point here is to say that the Westernization of Vietnamese thought was so thorough in the early twentieth century that it has completely disconnected (many) historians from the Vietnamese past, such that today the Vietnamese past is represented in Western terms. We read about “movements” and attempts to “assimilate,” etc., but those are all Western concepts that were introduced in the early 20th century.
To represent Vietnamese history in a “Vietnamese” way it should be “de-Westernized.” The way to start doing this is by looking at those lists of new words that Nam Phong compiled in the early twentieth century and to start thinking about how those concepts changed the Vietnamese worldview.
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What a great post to start the New Year! Thank you.
I am curious if other journals published in Vietnam at the same time with Nam Phong did the same thing. If I remember correctly a more recent journal in Vietnam entitled “Ngon ngu va Doi song” also provides a list of glossary to help introduce new terms and words into Vietnamese. The current issues may not do this but the earlier ones did.
How about the word “cai cach” (reform)? Was it on the list of new terms as well?
Thanks and I hope 2014 will be great for you. This blog is indeed really stimulating!
Yes, that was in one of the lists: Cải-cách, 改革 = Đổi cũ thay mới, bỏ những điều tệ trước mà đổi cái mới vào. ; Réforme. – Change for the better, as a step in progress, is a Western concept.
Happy New Year. Well done, Sir 🙂 Please keep it up.
It’s interesting that a little more than half of the words have “taken” – are still in common use — and about half haven’t. That’s actually a pretty good measure of potency.
One fascinating inclusion on the list is hội họa – nghề vẽ họa. It’s interesting that there was a need for this word, that there was perhaps not a way of viewing artistic activity as an occupation? Prior to the adoption of the term hội họa there had to be something happening that contemporary people would agree was professionally produced art, but it does not seem to have been conceptualized in that way.
The conception and valuation of the creative professional (artist, musician, actor, actress, dancer) certainly underwent enormous changes from the beginning of the 20th century.
I think the idea of the individual painter who paints a picture for the purpose of expressing something personal/creative was new. There were folk prints and images of some people were made, but those were more “utilitarian” than what European “painters” were supposed to be about.
This is the short bio of Prof. 岩月純一 (IWATSUKI Junichi), we can see some of his publications are relevant to Vietnamese new vocabulary in Nam Phong:
http://park.itc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/furuta-semi/member/iwatsuki_junichi.htm
I wonder how historians work around the vocabulary obstacle. A funny idea occurred to me: what if a historian is asked to write a research paper on the Tay Son topic and is only allowed using the Vietnamese vocabulary at that time. But wait, the word “research” itself probably didn’t exist back then. So we have to use new concepts to probe the past. Seems like there needs a comparative study between the past’s “moral teachings” with today’s “culture”. They could be the same in 5 aspects and different in 3. Then each time a historian needs to use one for the other he must be very specific. Is it how it works?
Thanks for the post 🙂
Very good points!!
Yea, I don’t think that we can totally escape using present terms, but we just have to be very aware of what they mean, and when we use them to talk about the past, we have to explain in what way we are using the terms – or what meaning we are giving the terms.
As for this point, “I wonder how historians work around the vocabulary obstacle,” Vietnamese historians rarely even acknowledge that there is an issue of vocabulary. So in most scholarship from Vietnam, this issue is not even recognized.
In North America, people have largely dealt with it by doing what I said above. It is easy to find works on “Chinese” history, for instance, which have a footnote at the beginning that says something like, “In using the word ‘China,’ I am not suggesting that there is some coherent entity that has existed throughout history that we can clearly identify as a single nation with a single ethnic group. I am simply using this as a convenient term to refer to the polities that have existed on the eastern edge of the Eurasian landmass. . .”
I went back and read some of your posts about the same topic (mostly covering the word “sovereignty”). There are more questions than answers (which is fine, of course). The topic of vocabularies is very interesting and I’d love to read more about it (the link above to the Japanese professor’s page doesn’t work for me, I wonder if I just don’t have access – if you have any recommended books, please let me know). They are two different languages and someone needs to build a dictionary to explains whether a new concept/word, such as sovereignty, exists in some relevant form in the past. Like when you translate a word that does not exist in the target language, you’ll either have to create a new word or use an approximation.
Just my 2 cents.
This book talks about how the Western concept of sovereignty did not exist in China in the 19th century and how the concept was translated. The way this author writes is not super clear (quite academic), but at the very least I think it talks about the first attempts to translate that concept.
http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Clash_of_Empires.html?id=zxPpHkumqbEC