halong bay tour
0 votes
in Culture, Living by
edited by
A Chinese said: “After Vietnam changed its system of scripts, the Vietnamese people couldn't understand ancient books.Therefore, Vietnamese people are like a piece of white paper.” Is it true?

16 Answers

0 votes
by

image

Actually we have this institute and similar institutions to work out all these tasks for us. We don’t have to learn Chinese or Sino-Vietnamese script ourselves in order to learn about old literature and historical records. Obviously, we are not blank sheets of paper for anyone to write anything on!

0 votes
by

You can't say it right, you can't say it wrong. After Vietnam changed the script, ancient books can be written in the new script, and the Vietnamese can definitely understand it. But the difference between the two is equivalent to the original book and the translated book, there must be a certain difference, no matter how well you translate. In addition, the translated book may inject the translator's personal thoughts and cannot restore the original one 100%. In addition, it is difficult for ordinary people to understand the original works, which leads to the monopoly of the interpretation power of these ancient books in the hands of a few people.

0 votes
by

It doesn’t need to understand ancient Vietnamese language to people in modern vietnam to understand this legendary poem:

南國山河南帝居

截然分定在天書

如何逆虜來侵犯

汝等行看取敗虚

Guess it still kick ass and ???? slap “some one” right in the face.

0 votes
by

This kind of reasoning may be valid in China, but probably nonsense for most other countries. China is generally very different from the rest of the world. An ordinary Vietnamese cannot read ancient books does not mean the Vietnamese people is “a piece of white paper” - which implies that Vietnam has no culture. An ordinary British person does not understand old English, but does that mean UK has no culture? An ordinary Greek cannot read ancient Greek script, but does that mean Greece has no culture? The same can be applied to any other country.

Before China invaded and annexed Vietnam thousands of years ago, Vietnam used to have an ancient scripting system. When the Chinese ruled Vietnam, they destroyed anything with our characters on it, killed all literate people, forced the Vietnamese to follow Chinese culture, and forced the Vietnamese to use the Chinese language as well as its scripting system. Therefore, using Chinese characters actually caused harm to the Vietnamese culture.

0 votes
by

The Ancient Vietnamese, which eventually, after adopting Chinese character and modifying them to fit the Vietnamese vocabulary became the “Nom” script.

However, Nom script become very outdated, especially when France invasion use the Latin base character. Vietnam adopt the Latin base character, and reword the Nom into modern Vietnamese writing system. The languages is still there, what change is the character types.

Most Vietnamese doesn’t learn Nom, there are course for those, but it’s really isn’t practical's anymore.

0 votes
by

The Latin Vietnamese script has its flaws. However, to remark that we "don't understand ancient books" and "are like a piece of white paper" is going a bit too far.

Saying we "can't read ancient books" is more accurate than we "don't understand ancient books". We can understand them, with translations, of course.

Saying we "are like a piece of white paper" is also not true. A lot Vietnamese traditions from old times are still kept nowadays.

You are using Adblock

Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors.

Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker.

I turned off Adblock
...