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The Reverend Anthony Trần văn Kiệm, author of Giúp Đọc Nôm và
Hán Việt (GĐNVHV), is a priest, currently ministering to a
small group of Catholics residents of Seadrift, a small town on
the coast of Texas, USA.
He was born on December 31, 1920 in North Vietnam at Phát Diệm,
a small town but well known with its beautiful cathedral erected
in 1891 by Father Trần Lục, a priest interested in Vietnamese architecture.
The priest was also anxious to give a good education to his parishioners,
and so, in 1882 he persuaded Doctor Nguyễn Tư Giản, a friend of
his and also a high mandarin in the court of Emperor Tự Đức, to
retire and open a school at Phát Diệm. Among its students was the
father of the author.
The curriculum embraced both the study of Chinese characters pronounced
in the Vietnamese way or “Hán Việt”, and the study of Vietnamese
literature until then written in Chinese and Nôm, a script “designed
by the Southerners” that uses strokes found in Chinese (or Northerners’)
characters to record the Vietnamese language.
As the author reached school age, the French had long occupied Vietnam,
and schools all over the country had cast away Chinese and Nôm,
and were teaching their students French and Vietnamese written in
the Roman alphabet. Fortuitously after school, the author was taught
Hán Việt and Nôm, tutored by his own father. Too young to profit
much from that home schooling, the author at least has learned from
his father a method promoted by Nguyễn tư Giản, that would help
him later to study Hán Nôm ideograms all by himself…
While most of the Vietnamese scholars who studied Chinese, learned
it by rote through texts composed of short verses with a single
meaning assigned to each character; Doctor Nguyễn Tư Giản, a descendant
from generations and generations of academics many of whom have
their names honored in Văn Miếu or the National temple of Literature
in Hanoi, trained his students to count strokes in each character,
to write them down in their proper order, and then to recognize
the radicals, made of most recurrent groups of strokes. Also the
students were warned that a single character might have one or several
meanings. In brief, his students were taught the secrets of the
Kang Xi famous dictionary, a rarity in Vietnam at that time.
Provided with these basics, and encouraged by some occasional scholars
he would meet later, Father Anthony Trần văn Kiệm, while pursuing
his study of Vietnamese, French, Latin, Greek, German (and along
the way he has been graduated in Hanoi with a 1940-1941 French Baccalaureat,
in the US in 1951 with a BS in Chemistry, and then also in the US
in 1952 with a MS in Physics, he also has translated the New Testament
from Greek into Vietnamese in 2000) has kept learning Hán Việt and
Nôm by himself. The progressive results may be followed in three
early versions of GĐNVHV published in 1989, 1997 and 1999, with
ideograms written by the author’s own penmanship. Finally satisfied
with his last version, he contacted in 2002 the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation
Foundation led by Dr John Balaban of the North Carolina University
staff, and the Foundation has prompted Dr Ngô thanh Nhàn of the
New York University and the gentle group of Nôm Na with members
scattered all over the world, to assume the task of setting the
ideograms into digital form with computers.
The biography of the author of GĐNVHV proves that everyone fluent
in Vietnamese, can learn Hán Việt and Nôm by himself or herself,
if he or she is keen enough to use a dictionary that helps the student
to analyze each character into strokes and radicals, and then by
a process of synthesis set it back with the proper meaning into
its context.
The dream of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation is that
many young scholars would be interested in Nôm and Hán Việt, and
then using GĐNVHV as a key, they would shed light onto the treasure
of the Vietnamese literature, the major bulk of which still lies
dormant in several libraries all over the world, especially in The
Vatican, in Paris, in Lisbon, and in Hanoi.
Contact:
St. Patrick Church
P.O.Box 934
Seadrift, TX 77983 USA
Email: KVincentVN@aol.com
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