THE ORIGINS OF QUÔC NGU: 

 A NEW ENLIGHTENMENT ON PORTUGUESE CULTURAL HERITAGES

 

Jorge Morbey

 

(Não foi permitida a comunicação do autor, pela organização do Seminário, controlada pela “French-speaking Community of Belgium”).

ASIA-EUROPE SEMINAR ON CULTURAL DIVERSITY AND CULTURAL EXCHANGE IN THE FRAMEWORK OF GLOBALIZATION

HANOI - VIETNAM

 17-19 SEPTEMBER 2004

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

1. Old sources new doubts

During the first half of the eighties I had an opportunity to set my eyes on a fascinating collection of manuscripts named Jesuits in Asia.  

The collection belongs to the Ajuda Library (Biblioteca da Ajuda) in Lisboa. It is a main source in the Portuguese history and the Catholic Faith in the Far East. Thirty thousand pages covering the period between 1541 and 1747 and containing different matters reported from all the Asian Jesuit Missions to their headquarters in Macao – religion, education, economy, linguistics, and many others.

Some documents attracted profoundly my attention. They were in the volumes numbered 49/V/7, folios 413r to 416r, and 49/VI/8, folios 313r to 323v, among others. I immediately ordered photocopies of the manuscript pages and kept them for years.

 In fact, from 1985 to 1990, the demanding job as Chairman of the Cultural Institute of Macao did not allow me to give the required attention to the document. In the subsequent five and half years as Cultural Counsellor of the Portuguese Embassy in Beijing other priorities arose and my desire to study the manuscripts was again postponed.

After all, some superficial readings gradually confirmed my belief that something wrong was behind the idea that Alexandre de Rhodes was the father of Quôc Ngu.

 

 2. The commonly known paternity

The following quotations give us the common idea on Quôc Ngu paternity:Missionaries to Vietnam, such as Father Gaspar do Amaral and Antonio Barbosa, both Portuguese, were able after a certain time to crate a “Portuguese-Vietnamese / Vietnamese-Portuguese Glossary”. When Father Alexandre de Rhodes, a erudite French scholar of linguistics, arrived in Vietnam, he learned the language and taught religion in Vietnamese. The creation of Quôc Ngu benefited obviously from many contributors; however, it was Father Rhodes who was to be its champion and mastermind.

 (Hoàng Tiên)[i]   

Together with European missionaries he [Rhodes] set to Romanize the script of Vietnam, using the Roman alphabet to record the Vietnamese language. It took the group nearly half a century to complete this collective work in which Alexandre de Rhodes played the main role. Not until two centuries later did quôc ngu (national script) become the popular written language of Vietnam and efficient vehicle in the modernization of the Vietnamese society… Alexandre de Rhodes’s  services to Vietnam are immeasurable…

 (Minh Hiên)[ii]   

 

It is to Father Alexandre de Rhodes we owe the transcription of the Vietnamese language in the Roman alphabet that we call “quôc ngu” or national language. For that, this Jesuit who came in the past from imperialist Europe is counted among us one of the artisans of our culture.

( Hoàng Minh Giám)[iii]

 

 

3. Alexandre de Rhodes

As all the missionaries of the Portuguese Patronage of the Orient, Rhodes came to the Far East under the authority of the King of Portugal. His arrival in Goa was on October 19^th1619, and shortly afterwards he was sent to Macao. In 1624, the visitor Gabriel de Matos sent him to Cochin China where he stayed for 18 months.

For ten years he worked both in Guangdong and Macao. In mainland China he baptized more than one thousand souls. At the same time he was the father of the Christians in Macao, the one who took care of the new Chinese converted to the Catholic Faith. Captured by the Dutch in Batavia and released later, Rhodes traveled through India, Persia, Armenia, Turkey and Europe. In 1649 Rhodes was in Rome where he published the Dictionary annamiticum, lusitanum et latinum in 1651. In 1655 he was entitled on the foundation of a new mission in Persia where he passed away on the 5^th of November 1660. 

Alexandre de Rhodes had a teacher in Vietnamese linguistics whom he referred to as “the first among us”.  The teacher’s name was Francisco de Pina.

 

 4. Francisco de Pina 

Francisco de Pina was a Portuguese Jesuit since January 28 1605. He departed to Goa on the 29 of March 1608, studied in Macao and settled in Cochin China. There he was the first missionary to preach without an interpreter in Vietnamese language. He died in 1625 in a shipwreck in the gulf of Siam.

5. A brief introduction to the above mentioned documents         

The first document is a letter from Father Francisco de Pina addressed in 1623 to the visitor Father Jeronimo Rodrigues in Macao, in which he reports on several subjects including his linguistic achievements in Vietnamese language: a short treatise on spelling and tones, and a collection of files to be used in drafting the grammar.

The second document is a manuscript written in Latin and Quôc Ngu entitled  Manuductio ad linguam Tunckinensem (An initiation to the Tonkinese Language). It seems to be a method for non-natives to learn the language. The preamble states that the study of the tone is prerequisite to the study of phonetics. 

Phonetics is the point. Quôc Ngu is based on Portuguese phonetics. Was Alexandre de Rhodes more familiar with the Portuguese phonetics than with French phonetics? French was his mother language. Why did the father of Quoc Ngu, a French linguist, adopt Portuguese phonetics to Romanize the national language of Vietnam?

 

 6. The truth

 The photocopies of the manuscripts of the Jesuits in Asia were in my hand luggage when I moved from Beijing to Bangkok in November of 1995 to be the Cultural Counsellor of the Portuguese Embassy in seven countries of Southeast Asia including Vietnam. 

It was time to work on the manuscripts seriously. 

However, a few days after my arrival in Bangkok I received a phone call from a gentleman who was coming back from Vietnam and asking to have an appointment with me. We met for dinner. He was a linguist, an expert in Portuguese language and a French citizen. I showed him my photocopies of the manuscripts. He opened a file and told me: - your copies have better quality than mine. My guest was in the final steps of his research on Quôc Ngu. At the moment, I felt great satisfaction. Professor Roland Jacques is a French citizen as Alexandre de Rhodes was. He is a linguist and an expert on Portuguese Language and I am not. 

Such a good luck for my manuscripts!    

In June of 2002 Roland Jacques’ book PORTUGUESE PIONEERS OF VIETNAMESE LINGUISTICS PRIOR TO 1650 was published in a bilingual English - French edition.

Conclusion 

It is time for the international scientific community to pay attention to Quôc Ngu and its Portuguese origins. 

 

 

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[i] JACQUES: 2002: 11

[ii] JACQUES: 2002: 11

[iii] LACOUTURE: 1991: 297

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

 Unpublished sources

 Lisboa: Biblioteca da Ajuda: Jesuítas na Ásia

 Published sources: 

Jacques, Roland: PORTUGUESE PIONEERS OF VIETNAMESE LINGUISTICS PRIOR TO 1650 / L’ŒUVRE DE QUELQUES PIONIERS PORTUGAIS DANS LE DOMAINE DE LA LINGUISTIQUE VIETNAMIENNE JUSQ’EN 1650, Bangkok, Orchid Press, 2002.

Lacouture, Jean: Jesuites, Paris, Éditions du Seuil, 1991