🌒 — 04/2024・The gigantic dataset of Vietnamese syllables
🌔 ⎯ 09/2024 ・ Fellows’ artworks
🌕 ⎯ 09/2024 ・ Our Vietnamese Project: A Walkthrough
🌚 ⎯ … May our language continue to thrive across all domains.
The Vietnamese language was born in the dense, misty forests that can disguise the Karst. From there, the language carried its Beloveds to the first capital and, with it, the expansion of the state. From the forest deep inland, the Vietnamese are now contemplating the vast ocean from endless sand dunes, turning the dangers in the grooves into cuisine and culture and blanketing the chilly imposing mountain ranges. Vietnamese has been going so far from its cradle. Today, Vietnamese is the star of the Austroasiatic linguistic family; it is the official language of a country that holds the sense of belonging of more than 100 million people. Changes did not just stay on maps, but also platforms. From inscribing on turtle shells and bones to marking time with stone, writing letters on paper, recording sounds, making phone calls, sending text messages, and posting status updates across the Internet. At this very moment, as we witness countless traditions either being granted wings to soar or absorbed into the modernity of the times, the Vietnamese language has long been present, quietly evolving and adapting, already there before we even noticed.
“Between the mountain ridges and sea strands, bridging two major cultures of India and China, and survived the occupations of three powers: France, USA, and Japan. Trailing the technology from USSR, and went through script transformations, twice. Vietnamese now has its own flexibility to express every concepts, ideas, movements, and feelings that it has been through.”
The formation of the Vietnamese language has long been a topic of extensive research, comparison, discussion, and systematization by both domestic and international scholars. One cannot overlook the 16th-century An Nam Dịch Ngữ (Annamite Translation) **, which juxtaposed 716 Sino-Vietnamese words, or Alexander de Rhodes’ Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary, which formalized the use of the Quốc ngữ script (the modern Vietnamese script). The contributions of André-Georges Haudricourt, who explored the etymology of Vietnamese, should not be disregarded, particularly in his engagement with the work of Orientalist Henry Maspero to demonstrate that Vietnamese belongs to the Mon-Khmer branch of the Austroasiatic linguistic family. Similarly, the work of Professor Nguyễn Tài Cẩn on the tonal richness of Vietnamese, from its Austroasiatic origins—specifically the Mon-Khmer branch—to its adoption of tonal elements from the Tai-Kadai language family, is indispensable. Equally significant is the work of Professor Trần Trí Dõi, who meticulously systematized the development of Vietnamese within the broader cultural and historical contexts of turbulent eras.
Today, the Vietnamese lexicon has been systematically organized thanks to the Vietnamese Dictionary by the late professor and lexicographer Hoàng Phê. Digital archives have also expanded into the realm of Chữ Nôm and languages within the Mon-Khmer group, such as the Vietnamese-Muong Dictionary edited by Nguyễn Văn Khang, the Katu vocabulary compiled by Nancy Costello, and the K'Ho-French Dictionary by Dournes Jacques, published in Saigon. There are numerous connections between Vietnamese and other languages, as well as between Vietnamese across different historical periods. However, to truly grasp the essence of the Vietnamese language, we must delve into its fundamental unit: the syllables.
Vietnamese lexicon has been systematically organized thanks to the Vietnamese Dictionary by the late professor and lexicographer Hoàng Phê.
Since its very beginning, computation has always been poetic. In search for a queer history in computation, Rhizome mentioned about the love letter generator of Christopher Strachey as "the first example of algorithmic or computational art”.
Danh sách các tính từ trong máy làm thư tình.
“Each letter follows a similar structure, and is full of melodramatic Victorian overtones, with pet names like "honey," "jewel," and "moppet" along with other saccharine and yearnful descriptives. The letters were constructed via a generative algorithm that produced a variety of orders and combinations.”
The love letter generator is a playful way to look into poem and language in the sphere of computation. Subtle but passionate, it is considered to be a public display of affection between Christopher and Alan Turing amid the homophobic society.
“little record survives to document more than a passing relationship between these two men, but what remains is a surprisingly poetic attempt to play at the machine.” — Jacob Gaboury (Rhizome)
Upon this inspiration of poetic computation, we navigated our research into the poetic aspect of Vietnamese — how our language invokes its flexibility and intimacy. All cues lead to its syllables. Unlike English, Vietnamese is a monosyllable language. Every syllable in Vietnamese, when pronounced, invokes a certain feeling, a certain image. “đau”, “đớn” cut deep it bleeds. “trùng”, “điệp” embark on a great odyssey. That poetic must have come from our syllables.
From that point, we delved into the syllables of Vietnamese. Upon the Vietnamese dictionary of Hoàng Phê, soha dictionary, and current NLP research of underthesea, we built a dataset of mono syllables of Vietnamese. While developing that, we published our observation in the format of 3 essays. This laid the foundation for our project and for Dmarc Lê, Đông-Trúc, and thou to extend their artistry into the poetic computation of Vietnamese.
Overview of Vietnamese Syllables and the creation of an Open Syllable Database for the community. This project compiles all possible phonemes in the Vietnamese language and cross-references them with dictionaries, analyzing how many of these sounds carry meaning and how many are nonsensical.
An in-depth exploration of the phenomenon of mono-syllabification and pronunciation conventions in modern Vietnamese, using the example of nói lái (spoonerism). From this analysis, an attempt is made to redesign the Vietnamese keyboard, structuring it by syllables rather than individual letters.
An observation of the evolution of the Vietnamese language through documents and records on consonant clusters and pronunciation in Middle Vietnamese.
The re-designed Vietnamese keyboard, structuring it by syllables rather than individual letters.
The re-designed Vietnamese keyboard, structuring it by syllables rather than individual letters.
Yui sharing his experience of reading dictionary and his takeaways: Phân loại theo thanh điệu (categorized by diacriritcs) (words about emotions and experiences)
You are free to access to: ✧ Open source of Vietnamese syllables: https://github.com/luotcode/amtiettiengviet ✧ The re-designed Vietnamese keyboard: https://tiengviet.netlify.app/