What’s in a name?

…Well, a lot, apparently. Juliet had no idea what she was talking about.

Along with globalisation, there comes a rather long-winded debate in Vietnam that I just find slightly silly and a bit like arguing that an apple is a fruit and an orange is a fruit but an apple is not an orange (that’s not really a saying, I made that up :P).

So, should Vietnamese (or Chinese or Thai or X nationality, for that matter) people take on English names when living overseas/working with foreigners/not working with foreigners and not living overseas/ever?

I’ve been called Hen or something that rhymes with Heinz ketchup. And regardless of famous English rule of “i before e except after c”, I’ve lost count of the number of time people have spelled my name Hein. Trust me, I know it’s annoying when people mispronounce/misspell your name. But maybe my name is still a relatively easy name to write and pronounce, I don’t see the fuss adopting or not adopting an English name. But other people apparently do put up a fuss.

There are two arguments to this debate:

• Yes, when you live overseas and your name can be mispronounced into something rude/unpleasant then by all means, go by some other name. 
• No, even if you’re threatened with death you still should not change anything about the name that your parents gave you because you should have pride/be patriotic/not do it just because having an English name is cool

And then there’s the stance of “Who cares? No one makes a fuss over foreigners adopting Vietnamese names, we even find it interesting/intriguing. Why do we discriminate against Vietnamese people who adopting foreign names?”

You know what, all three points are valid, and yet there are people who just don’t get that!

As I understand it, one of the things that stirred up this debate is a fad amongst Vietnamese Paris Hilton-like celebrities who are famous for being famous who all have English names regardless of there being no need for it. They live in Vietnam, they “work” (whatever that work is) in Vietnam with Vietnamese people, so why? Indeed.  And this, I must say, is a case when it’s really stupid to adopt English names because it doesn’t stem from consideration and respect for others or for yourself, it’s a fad that is …well, pointless. 

A friend of mine worked in a company (in Vietnam!) where it is compulsory for you to have an English name. I think this is ridiculous because 1) even if the company is foreign, they have a base in Vietnam, so deal with it! When in Rome... and 2) it's forcing one culture on another. I'm not going to compare it to the Chinese Qing-dynasty queue order because it's a rather slippery slope, but it is nonetheless, not very respectful of the home culture.

Personally, I think that even if you live overseas, but you have a relatively innocent name like mine, you shouldn’t feel the need or pressure to adopt another English name. I think if foreign people are capable of pronouncing your name in your native tongue and it doesn’t get mangled into something too unpleasant, then they should be given a chance to show you respect by calling you by your birth name. But that’s just my opinion. In this case, if you do adopt your name, it should be considered a personal choice and because you live overseas, an English name just makes your day to day life a little more convenient.

And then there are cases of Vietnamese names when written in English (or French for that matter), just looks rude. My Dung is a Vietnamese name with Chinese roots (美容) that means beautiful countenance but it looks rather problematic on an English-language document.  And then I pity the man whose name is Le Chien who lives in France. Spelling aside, there names like Phuc or Bich that are just bad when you pronounce it wrong. These are cases when I would say, yes, for the purity of both our languages, please adopt an English name if you live overseas or interact with foreigners on a regular basis.  In these cases, it’s not a matter of pride or coolness or patriotism, it’s more a matter of being considerate of both the person who might have to say your name and of yourself, who will otherwise hear very unpleasant things when you are being called.

Not all Vietnamese names get mangled into unpleasant things though. At my office there is a girl named Quynh Anh and it gets mispronounced into Queen Anne which is rather interesting.

As to the case of expats living in Vietnam having Vietnamese names. This is the double standard. Vietnamese find foreigners who have Vietnamese names rather an exciting phenomenon. It’s a case of OMG, Western people actually wants to copy something of ours!!!

This is, I think, slightly different from Vietnamese people taking English names when they live overseas, which is all too usual, so much that sometimes it is considered the norm. Expats living in Vietnam taking Vietnamese names is a lot more unusual and it’s usually a gesture of friendship, it usually happens with expats who actually speak Vietnamese (which is not as usual as you might think) and yes, it does make people friendlier to you in certain circumstances.  

Case in point: I knew a family, whose children went to my school and everyone in their family had a Vietnamese name. Part of that was due to the fact that they’d been living in Vietnam since the time when we still see foreigners on the street and point at them yelling “Tây! Tây!” Now, it’s not so unusual to see expats living and working in Vietnam so that doesn’t happen (as often) anymore, at least in the city. Another reason, I’d hazard a guess, was that at the time when they first came to Vietnam, people were not so used to trying to figure out how to pronounce “complicated” foreign names. But maybe the most important point is, their Vietnamese names didn’t replace their real names. It was more like a nickname and most of the time they were still addressed by their real names.

I don’t think you’ve committed any kind of crime if you want an English name, but I think there should be a reason for it, even if it’s just convenience. This is such a relative issue that you can’t possibly say “you have to do this” or “you can’t do this”, which some people are trying to do.

“Phuong” was hard enough, how the heck is a foreigner supposed to pronounce “Fwong”?

In Vietnamese, there is a colloquial (and rather slangy and offensive) saying, “ngu rồi còn tỏ ra nguy hiểm”, which literally means someone who is stupid but pretending to be dangerous. It refers to somebody who talks about a matter that he absolutely does not understand in a way that is supposed to show off his knowledge on the subject but in reality just shows how ignorant he is. I have rarely seen anything that deserves that above title more than this article (it’s in Vietnamese).

This was originally published on Dan Tri, a web portal positioned towards increasing education in the population. Ironically, this is a portal that frequently publishes articles with grammatical errors, so I wasn’t too surprised that it actually published something so incredibly…stupid. But that’s another story. This above article just gets on my nerves because it shows how the author doesn’t understand both the Vietnamese language and Latin-based languages.

                                                                                                         

The general point of the article was calling for a revision and revolution of the whole Vietnamese alphabet and spelling system because the current system is “too complicated for nothing”.

The author claims that the current Vietnamese alphabet with letters that do not exist in the English alphabet (for example, đ, ư) makes it harder for Vietnam to integrate with the world. Yeah, say that to the Chinese and the Russian.

He also claims that the Vietnamese language is “wasting” letters F, J, W, and Z by using “PH”, “GI”, “Ư” and “D” respectively to represent sounds created by the former letters. He also claims that we are messing up “D”, which is normally pronounced “Z” in (standard) Vietnamese (“French/English D” is actually written as “Đ” in Vietnamese) while as a mathematical notation, “D” is still pronounced the “French way”.  Ok, so I will give him that it can be baffling to understand why the rest of the world pronounce D one way and we Vietnamese pronounce it in a completely different way and invent another letter to represent the sound the rest of the world uses for D.  However, just because it doesn't necessarily conform to the rest of the world, does it mean we have to change it? Where’s the cultural distinction in language then? Why don’t we just turn around and speak and write English if we want to pronounce it their way? (For the record, the French pronounces “I” as “ee” which is the letter “E” in English, so who’s wrong? Hehe.)

He also claims the lack of F, J, W, Z in Vietnamese can make it confusing for students learning maths and natural sciences which do use these letters. So? How is that different from learning to write squiggly Greek sigma, omega, mu, nu, which are, in fact, even harder to write properly than F, J, W, Z (theta, not so much)? Should the rest of the world incorporate these Greek letters into their alphabets now to cater to the maths language?

What gets on my nerves most is his suggestion that we replace Ư with W. Why? Because in Vietnamese there is one case where we use W to represent the Vietnamese letter Ư in an abbreviation. One. Oh and because on the Vietkey typing system, you hit the letter W on your keyboard when you want to type Ư.

Erm…dude? W is a consonant. Ư is a vowel. Just think on that for a minute.

If according to his “conversion”, then Phương, a very very common name in Vietnamese, would now be written Fwong. This is hilariously ironic.

Phuong is a very difficult Vietnamese name for many foreigners to pronounce. I have rarely, if ever, heard a foreigner pronounce it right on the first go. They usually pronounce it…wait for it… Fwong. Which is WRONG! That’s not how you pronounce it! I can’t write down phonetically how that name is pronounced, but the English pronunciation of Fwong is absolutely and 100% wrong. And here, this guy is suggesting that we change the spelling of that name to Fwong. Surely, let’s do that and then start to wonder why no one ever pronounces our name right.

I won’t go into how impossible it would be to place Vietnamese accent marks on a W.

The author of the article also has a vendetta against the letter combinations “GH”, which in Vietnamese is pronounced the same way as “G” and “NGH” which is pronounced the same way as “NG”. The use of these “silent H” combinations depends on some very simple grammar rules that you learn in about…grade 2, if not younger (I learnt it and I only went to Vietnamese school until grade 3). The author proposes we eliminate the “GH” and “NGH” combinations. I may consider the idea properly if he actually had a decent reason for this proposal. Instead, his reason is “so we don’t have to confuse for no reason over whether to write “ngành ngề” or “nghành nghề” or “nghành ngề” or “ngành nghề” .

FYI, it’s “ngành nghề” (career).

Basically, his reason is that it requires him to think and so it’s not worth it. Yeah. Just announce to the world that you can’t grasp basic, primary school grammar, why don’t you.

His conclusion is we don’t need to make our language “complicated in a stupid way”. The way this guy writes this, he apparently thinks other languages is written so simply and exactly as it sounds. He fails to realise that Vietnamese is one of the least complicated languages in terms of spelling and grammar. Once you grasp the rules of spelling, you can pretty much spell almost anything. By the time you are in grade 3, you should be able to spell perfectly, even if you have no idea what you’re spelling means. There are no such thing as “spelling bees” in Vietnamese because the sound you produce when you speak is exactly what you put down on the page. Spelling, in Vietnamese, in a concept for very young primary school students. In fact, Vietnamese, with all its “redudant” letters, is a language where if you know how to pronounce a word, you will 99% of the time spell it correctly (or at least you will spell it as you speak it, so if you mispronounce, you will also misspell). Unlike English. Colour, anyone?

The thing is, Vietnamese teenagers today need no help from this guy in corrupting our language.  The Vietnamese brand of textspeak already contorts the written language so that it almost becomes a code, already doing what this guy suggests and eliminating the “GH” and “NGH” and replacing letters with “F” etc. The result is that eventually they will carry those textspeak habits over to their academic writing, and heaven forbid, one day, my friends will be called “Fuong” instead of “Phuong”. Kind of like how “thru” is making its way to be a legit word in the English language.

I wonder if I can still blog in English?

I used to blog. That was back in...what, 2008? Yup, that sounds about right. I don't remember any proper blog entries that exist after uni first year, first semester Accounting exam. Which, for the record, was a disaster. But I l already told that story and you missed it.

Right now, I can't remember off the top of my head why I deleted that blog on Xanga. Could be a combination of things. Considering that blog spanned my last two years of high school and first year of uni, I suppose one good reason could be that I just got sick of myself complaining about IB and school in general. Venting was good. But venting about school exclusively on a blog bored both myself and people unfortunate enough to stumble on said blog.

Considering nowadays I blog (or write entries/diary) all over the place, including but not limited to Facebook notes, DAN, emails to myself, Word documents that eventually end up in the Trash, it suddenly felt like a good idea to have a blog again. Besides, Nano is coming up. This may come in useful as I attempt (or not) to win Nanowrimo again this year.

Will anyone read this? Probably not. Then again, what's new about that? It's not as if anyone ever looks at the Word documents I send to the Trash.

Nowadays, I write those entries mostly in Vietnamese. This is a slightly weird phenomenon because...well, for a variety of reasons. Being the TCK that I am, I think in English, at (most) times find myself expressing myself better in English, and don't consider myself to be as fluent as I should be in Vietnamese (both in writing and speaking). Yes, in case you are going to ask, I am born Vietnamese, live in Vietnam for a large portion of my life, but English schooling and nurture does do a lot to affect your language instincts.

I write 100k-word fanfictions in English but the idea of writing the same in Vietnamese is impossible. And yet lately, I blog in other places in Vietnamese. Well, they are not long entries by any means, but when I start typing, it's Vietnamese that comes out, slightly unconsciously. Is it just because I was posting these entries on a Vietnamese forum? Perhaps.

Whatever the reason, I miss blogging in English.

And here's another sign that I should probably start blogging again. I've been IMing too much, because as I'm writing all this, I find myself missing Yahoo emoticons. I should be able to express myself without them, darn it!