Minh’s Notes

Last weekend my family and I spent some time in Carthage, Missouri. Longtime readers might – or might not – remember that Carthage is the location of the annual Đại Hội Thánh Mẫu celebration for Vietnamese-American Catholics. It’s two parts pilgrammage, one part concert, and one part Taste of Vietnam. I described the celebration in full detail last year, my first time back there since I was an infant. You can read that entry for all the pretty pictures and thoughtful reflection.

On most vacations I go on, we spend a lot of time on the road, so I usually find some roadside points of interest to blog about after I return home. This trip was no different:

• Missouri has a state highway system almost as complex as Louisiana’s. In addition to the usual numbered state highways, the state has a slew of lettered routes. Travelling down Interstate 44, you’re likely to see the same lettered route over and over again across the state. Apparently that’s because the routes aren’t continuous: every county might have its own State Route A. Sometimes this leads to interesting combinations: one exit off of I-44 apparently leads to O Z.

• At a BP station at the edge of Rolla, I spotted the sign of a Chinese restaurant. Normally I wouldn’t be so interested in establishments that purvey American Chinese food – we’ve got plenty of that here in Cincinnati. But this sign was the very definition of pulling an “American”.

  

  Note to English speakers: that’s not how you write “Fortune Inn” – or anything, for that matter – in Chinese. Not even close. It’d probably look a bit more like 運氣客棧.

  I don’t mean to be so hard on a restaurant that probably caters to white Americans, but the three other Chinese restaurants down the street seemed to get it right, so someone in the area must’ve known how to get legitimate Chinese characters on a sign.

• As you’ll recall, I collect official state highway maps from welcome centers. Last summer, I was unable to get maps from the Indiana and Illinois welcome centers, because the Indiana rest areas were under construction and the Illinois ones had run out of them. This year I was able to get my hands on both maps. It’s funny that I finally have the entire Tri-State area only after about ten years of collecting. And that required me to request an Ohio map from ODOT’s website…

  Maybe I should scan the covers of these maps and create a gallery online.

• When we first arrived at the westbound Cumberland Road Welcome Center in Illinois, the first thing we noticed was the tall flagpole that featured a rightside-up American flag and an upside-down Illinois flag underneath. A state employee must’ve been disgruntled that day. When we passed by that stretch of highway a few days later, the flag seemed to be in correct position.

• And what’s up with all the municipal water towers disguised as small houses on poles?

The road always seems to be the main part of any family vacation I go on. You tend to notice things while sitting in a car for 12 hours straight.

Entry №1055, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 6:03 PM | Edit | Permalink
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I’m currently taking an introductory course in phonetics at Stanford, just out of interest. Our textbook, A Course in Phonetics by the late Peter Ladefoged, includes on the accompanying CD a catalog of sample sounds in different languages. I was quite surprised at the sounds that Ladefoged had recorded to represent the Vietnamese language, because he apparently chose a southern speaker with a thick accent.

I’ve often heard from my parents and others that Northern Vietnam has traditionally been regarded as the educated end of the country, just as those from the Eastern Seaboard are generally regarded as more sophisticated than Midwesterners. So it was amusing to hear the distinctive Southern dialect as if it were the dialect of Vietnamese – after all, this is a phonetics book.

Differences between dialects of Vietnamese are much more pronounced than differences between varieties of English, to the extent that speakers of some central dialects are often unintelligible to speakers of other dialects. Differences I noted in Ladefoged’s examples included (in IPA):

• /æ/ in place of /a/
• /ă/ in place of /ăi/
• /n/ in place of /ŋ/
• /ŋ/ in place of /n/ (the opposite of the previous point)

Because of these differences, anh (the masculine informal “you”) in the southern dialect is rendered identical to the northern ăn (to eat). So if a person told me “anh Minh” without context, I might not be sure if they’re just calling for me or telling me to eat myself! Well, fortunately, the latter scenario is unlikely enough that I wouldn’t end up hurting myself. :^P

Beyond the phonological differences, there are also wholly different vocabularies – for example, a word as basic as “yes” can be said vâng in the North but dạ in the South.

But the funniest thing about Ladefoged’s Vietnamese samples is that one of the words, tu is noted as meaning “to drink”. It actually means to enter a seminary. So I could just imagine a naïve phonetician, having studied Ladefoged’s materials, travelling to Saigon and telling a Vietnamese friend, “Hãy đi tu!” He’d think he’s telling his friend “Let’s go for a drink!”, but his friend might think he wants to become a priest. Oh well, there’s always church wine.

Entry №1022, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 10:35 PM | Edit | Permalink
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I don’t see how the Danes or any other European could possibly be proud of what they’ve caused, in clinging to the already-overextended freedom of speech as the end-all and be-all:

At Friday sermons throughout the city, preachers attacked satirical cartoons of the prophet Muhammad as blasphemy and urged Muslims to defend his honor. Entrances to the Al-Murabit mosque were strewn with Danish, Israeli and American flags so worshipers could trample them as they entered for prayers. Outside the mosque, banners called for a boycott of Danish, European and U.S. products “until Denmark is brought to its knees, regretting this farce called freedom of expression.”

…

The next day, thousands of protesters gathered in a main square. Under the watchful eye of plainclothes security agents, they chanted rhythmically, “We will sacrifice our souls and our blood for you, dear prophet.” They then marched to the Danish and Norwegian embassies and set them on fire.

Freedom of speech – or its more inclusive cousin, the freedom of expression – is a means to encourage constructive discussion. How this violence can possibly be classified as “discussion,” and how the original caricatures were ever constructive, is completely beyond me. According to this article by Newsday, the Syrian government might well have been behind the recent violence in Syria. This is not free speech; this is the “Hate Song” in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Entry №992, posted by Minh Nguyễn at 12:41 PM | Edit | Permalink
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