In an article entitled “On the Title ‘Hùng King’” (Về Danh Hiệu ‘Hùng Vương’”) in the third Hùng Vương Dụng Nước volume (this volume was published in 1973, but the article was presented at a conference in the late 1960s), Trần Quốc Vượng argued that “Hùng” was perhaps the ancient Việt pronunciation for a word which signified a leader of a nation/ality. This is similar, he notes, to the term “khun” which is used by various Mon-Khmer and Tai speakers.
Trần Quốc Vượng also says that it is related to the Mundari term, “khunzt.” Mundari is an Autroasiatic language spoken by a people in the area of what is today northeastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal known as the Munda people.
Trần Quốc Vượng then uses this information to say that this demonstrates that in antiquity, during the period when the “Hùng Kings established the country,” there was a close relationship between the speakers of Austroasiatic and Tai languages.
There are numerous problems with Trần Quốc Vượng’s linguistic argument here, which I’ll turn to below. Ultimately, however, this article is not about linguistics, but is nationalist propaganda posing as a scholarly study. What Trần Quốc Vượng wanted to demonstrate was that the various peoples who inhabit the modern nation-state of Vietnam have been in close, and friendly, contact since the beginning of time.
In 1983, Keith Taylor cited this article by Trần Quốc Vượng when he wrote in his The Birth of Vietnam that “According to a recent Vietnamese study, the name Hùng derives from an Austroasiatic title of chieftanship that has persisted up to the present time in the languages of Mon-Khmer-speaking peoples living in the mountains of Southeast Asia, as well as in Mường, the upland sister language of Vietnamese; the title is also found among the Munda of northeast India, who speak the most western of the surviving Austrasiatic languages” (3).
Taylor left out mention of the Tai, probably because his mission in this book was to demonstrate that there was a direct line which linked the “Vietnamese” of the period of the “Hùng Kings” with those who emerged “independent” in the tenth century with the “birth of Vietnam.” Taylor was not as concerned with the non-Kinh population. He simply wanted to demonstrate that the Kinh had their own language and culture prior to the period of Chinese rule, and that they persisted and survived through that thousand-year period.
Let’s now look at Trần Quốc Vượng’s evidence. He says that the following three words are related: hùng, khun, and khunzt.
First of all, words do not simultaneously appear in languages from different language families. A word must appear in one language first, and then it can be adopted in others. When this happens, some sounds might change. However, linguists establish rules for this.
Trần Quốc Vượng says that linguists argue that the initial “h,” “kh,” and “k” are all interchangeable. To some extent this is true, but linguists establish rules by looking at multiple examples to say, for instance, that when a word which begins with “kh” in language A is adopted by speakers of language B, the initial “k” gets dropped and they keep the “h.” The same holds for the endings of words, such as the very different “n,” “ng,” and “nzt,” which Trần Quốc Vượng does not address.
In other words Trần Quốc Vượng did not make a believable argument in this paper. He has three words which seem to resemble each other, but he doesn’t explain what the original word was, which languages it was adopted into, and what linguistic changes took place when this happened.
Finally, the source for the Mundari term, “kunzt” (Bhaduri’s, A Mundari-English Dictionary, 1931) which Trần Quốc Vượng used is not the best source for that language, but it was probably all that was available to him at that time. A better source is John Hoffmann’s multi-volume Encylcopaedia Mundarica (1930-79), where this term is transcribed as “khut,” a transcription which lessens the similarity with “khun” and “hùng.”
Now that I have criticized Trần Quốc Vượng linguistic knowledge, I am going to put forth my own undocumented argument, but it is one which I have had confirmed by Tai linguists. The term “khun” is a term which we find in Southwestern Tai languages. Southwestern Tai languages started to develop separately from other Tai languages around the time of the ninth or tenth century or so. In Vietnam today, the languages which are spoken by “Thái” are Southwestern Tai languages.
So while “khun” is in Southwestern Tai languages, it is a word which was borrowed from the Chinese 君. This is pronounced “jun” in modern Mandarin, but in the middle period it was pronounced differently, and it is where the “khun” in Southwestern Tai comes from, as well as the “cun/khun” in Mườmg, and even the “kun” in Japanese, a term which is today used as a particle which is added to names when referring to someone in an informal manner, such as “Koji-kun,” but in centuries past it had a different usage.
In other words, there is a term which was historically shared by Tai and Mường speakers in Vietnam (and probably by proto-Việt speakers as well). However, it has nothing to do with antiquity, the ancient Việt language, or the Hùng Kings. My guess is that it was a word which entered these languages near the end of the millennium of Chinese rule in the region, when Southwestern Tai was starting to develop.
Regardless of what I think, it is clear that Trần Quốc Vượng’s linguistic argument is unfounded, and yet this point has been repeated over and over and over in Vietnamese texts (for a recent example, see page 25 of Nguyễn Quang Ngọc, ed., Tiến Trình Lịch Sử Việt Nam).
This is one small example of a problem which is ubiquitous in Vietnamese scholarship. Someone comes up with a crazy idea. Scholars might know that it is incorrect, but no one writes anything which directly refutes it. And then since there is no peer review process, the idea can easily get repeated and re-published over and over and over again. The result is that scholarship never progresses. The same bad ideas stay in circulation for decades.
Trần Quốc Vượng:
Bhaduri:
Hoffmann:
This Post Has 10 Comments
Nicely said, I still enjoy reading these posts. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks. For the record, I don’t like to complain all the time. I just feel that there are so many problems which no one ever talks about, so the situation never gets any better. I would prefer to have more positive posts, but some of these things need to be said.
Crazy ideas also get replicated because hardly any Vietnamese scholars can go back to the original sources in Classical Chinese, (and those who do usually write about other things) so scholars have to continually rehash whatever Dao Duy Anh or Tran Quoc Vuong wrote! Dao Duy Anh was a much more conservative scholar though, I believe in his Lich Su Co Dai Viet Nam (apologies for the lack of diacritics) he subscribed to the idea that hung 雄 was a mistake for 雒 which makes a lot more sense to me. Thanks for the wonderful blog. I hope more people come to read it.
Yes, you are right.
As for Dao Duy Anh, in one of the “Hung Vuong dung nuoc” conferences, he talked about how “hung” is likely a mistake for “lac” and then he concluded by saying, “In any case, I guess we should continue to use ‘hung’ as we traditionally have” (!!!) or something like that.
If there is a single moment when historical scholarship in Vietnam was killed, I think that was it. There were plenty of things which Dao Duy Anh had wrong prior to that point, but he at least tried to think and figure things out. He was not alone. Plenty of people were thinking and debating in the 1950s and 1960s, both in the South and the North. However I think the message at the end of the 1960s in the North, and manifested in those conferences, became “stop thinking and just say that the Hung kings created the nation and that it has existed since the first millenium B.C.” With that, “the Hung kings built the nation,” and history came to an end as there was nothing more to say. . .
Oh my goodness….and I had held him up as a model of good (if dated) scholarship before the rot set in! I quite enjoyed Lich Su Co Dai Viet Nam, but I couldn’t bring myself to read all four volumes of Hung Vuong Dung Nuoc!
It constantly amazes me how wide the gulf is between the work of scholars outside Vietnam and those within the Vietnamese system. As you no doubt know, a similar and depressingly large gulf exists in the field of Chinese history. They also have their oft-lauded 5000 years of history….when actually 3500 years of written record (if you include oracle bones) and the rest is about as reliable as the Linh Nam Trich Quai!
So … from a strictly “I like reading about monsters and ghost stories in history books” point of view, is there any version of Lĩnh Nam Trích Quái I can get my hands on that is in quoc ngu, French, or English?
There is a quoc ngu version right here:
http://www.dunglac.org/index.php?m=home&v=detail&ia=7390
But to be honest, there are not many (are there any?) monsters and ghosts in that text. It’s kind of a letdown in that respect.
🙂 Thanks! I just remembered you picked out some passages on giant man eating alligators and figured with a title like that…
Please keep on reading and complaining on what you do not see right. For folks like this reader who cannot read Chinese (be it classical or not) your blog is a good insight.
I do hope that there are more studies as yours. And hopefully it will initiate more discussions, more debate on what the “real” history” of Vietnam is.
For a non-academic, I found that there are too many things that are “not right” in our official records of history.
I digress, would a “Vietnam Genome Project” help answer many unanswered questions about the origin of Vietnamese? What I have been reading are either very confusing or not at all convincing.
Thanks for the nice comments.
Ahhhh, a “Vietnamese genome project”. . . actually as I guess you know, genetics are being used these days, and the popularity of the book “Eden in the East,” is a big part of this. That is a topic I want to know more about. You’re right, it’s totally confusing. I was talking to an anthropologist about this, and she was telling me that the genetic science is really problematic (and she was referring to that book in particular), because the way in which scientists choose their “sample population” can often determine what the results will be. With regard to that book, I think her complaint was that “unrelated” populations should have been tested for comparison, as the information from this might undermine the argument that the author made.
I’m getting more confused the more I write, but hopefully you see the point. Yes, genetics have promise, but it’s going to take a while still to figure out how to use genetics effectively.