Trao or Giao?
From: Adam Fforde @ UoM [mailto:fforde@unimelb.edu.au]
Sent: Saturday, 6 December 2008 12:05 AM
To: 'Vietnam Studies Group'
Subject: Trao or Giao?
Can any of our clever Han-Viet experts out there clarify the distinctions
between 'trao' and 'giao' and so perhaps illuminate just why the current
translation of 'empowerment' in the Vietnam aid universe (and related
'coi') is 'trao quyen' and not 'giao quyen'? There is a wider issue that
arises from why it is not 'trao quyen luc', but that seems perhaps obvious
under the circumstances ...
Trao doi? Is that the same character? I hope not ...
Thanks
Adam Fforde
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 1:55 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I think "trao" means to turn over permanently, "giao" is to give something in the care of someone temporarily as in baby sitting (giao con cho nguoi khac coi) or to assign responsibility as in "giao pho trach nhiem." Adam is right that "trao" involves an exchange as in "trao doi" or "trao tra "(hoi).
Hue-Tam
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From: Liam C. Kelley <liam@hawaii.edu>
Date: Fri, Dec 5, 2008 at 2:14 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
This is probably another case of a term which entered Vietnamese twice (like nha and gia, ve and hoi) and which has resulted in two terms with similar meanings but which are used in different contexts. I just checked some dictionaries (because of course I needed this excuse to procrastinate), and no character was given for trao, only for giao 交. In any case, I don't think that there are two separate Chinese terms that these terms are based on.
Liam Kelley
University of Hawaii
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From: David Marr <david.marr@anu.edu.au>
Date: 2008/12/10
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I wonder if giao and trao may be another example that goes back to name avoidance, like hoang/huynh and vu/vo? On the other hand, it's more like the two words for moon, mat giang and mat trang. How did that get started?
David Marr
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: 2008/12/10
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
mat giang and mat trang came about because of differences in local dialect, I believe, rather than because of name avoidance as in the case of hoang/huynh. I once listened to a northerner carry on about trung thuc and chung thuy as if the first term was the same in both cases (southerners would know that they are supposed to be pronounced differently and would not have made the same speech).
But trao and giao do carry different connotations. They may well have the same origin, but over the centuries, they have come to mean slightly different things.
For example, if you put check your bag before entering the library, you may say "Toi xin giao tui sach nay." When you go and pick it up, the guard may say "Toi xin trao lai tui sach cho ong/ba"
On the issue of perceptions of mountains, there is a real ambivalence. As others, especially David Biggs have noted, mountains have been places of religious refuge associated with the eremitic tradition in East Asian Buddhism particularly.
But for many lowland kinh, they are also dangerous and desolate places, as captured by popular phrases such as "rung thieng, nuoc doc" (forests full of spirits and unsalubrious water); or "noi khi ho co gay" ( places where monkeys cough and herons crow).
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Adam Fforde @ UoM <fforde@unimelb.edu.au>
Date: Wed, Dec 10, 2008 at 6:17 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Two further inputs to this -
I recently met up with Theresa Halik, the Polish scholar, in Hanoi. Originally a Sinologue, she said empathically that 'trao' and 'giao' in these contexts are <<different>> characters.
In Vietnam, I took part in a discussion where these issues were real (in Vietnamese and at the local level), and I had the difference explained to me by a practitioner who was not an academic. From this explanation I concluded that a start at this would be to think that 'giao quyen' is <<within>> a unit, whilst 'trao quyen' is <<to>> something understood as autonomous (my gloss) so that in chewing this around I found (my observation) that 'tu' kept coming in to the Vietnamese discussion (as in - 'vay no phai tu giai quyet'). For them 'giao quyen' and 'trao quyen' were evidently and obviously - and interestingly - used in different ways.
This is then for me reminiscent of linguistic markers of the emergence of 'autonomous' business activities in the 1980s - 'von tu co', 'luong do xi nghiep tu lo' and so on.
Thus Tam-tai's point related to 'trao doi' is that 'trao' here is kind of thought of as being between two separate or bounded things (chu the) rather than <<within>> a single thing.
Whether it is right or wrong to translate empowerment as 'trao quyen' them seems rather a silly question. The Sino-Vietnamese poses questions about who or what is doing the empowering that seem linguistically embedded in ways that 'empowerment' in English lacks. Quite apart from the implications for use of the term 'quyen'.
I will now seek out and grapple with my Vietnamese-Chinese Dictionary.
Cheers
Adam Fforde
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From: Dinh Lu Giang <lugiangdinh@gmail.com>
Date: 2008/12/10
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi David Marr and all
I don't think trao/giao is from the phenomenon of name avoidance, even for hoàng/huỳnh or vũ/võ. As for trăng/giăng or trời/giời, just like professor Hue-Tam wrote, are caused by dialectal differences. In case of trao/giao, they may belong to the group of gan/can (liver), tim/tâm (heart), in which one word is chinese and another is the vietnamized form. Usually, when the second from occurs, there is functional redistribution: we say "chuyển giao quyền lực) but not "chuyển trao quyền lực", or "giao hoán, and not "trao hoán". So, based on Liam Kerry's remark "no character was given for trao, only for giao 交" and the possibility of combination of trao and giao, I suppose that giao is the early (chinese) form of "trao" which occurs later.
Giang
--
Dinh Lu Giang,
PhD student on Viet - Khmer bilingualism and bilingual education
Dept. of Vietnamese Studies,
University of Social Sciences and Humanities, Vietnam National University - HCMC - Vietnam
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From: Adam Fforde <adam@aduki.com.au>
Date: 2008/12/10
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Very interesting.
It becomes still more interesting, then, to know whether there are two Chinese characters or not that this discussion may refer to, and to see whether this clarifies the different uses, both for us and for people actually making these distinctions. I recall the opinion that definition of terms as Han-Viet by language users (if and when asked) does not always prevent linguistic historians from arguing that words of Chinese origin in Vietnamese exist but are NOT marked as such by educated Vietnamese.
My working interpretation would suggest that definitive transfers of <<powers, rights or whatever>> between entities viewed as sovereign (possessing chu quyen) would be treated as 'chuyen trao quyen luc', and those seen as being within what is seen as a <<single>> sovereign power or entity (chu the) as 'chuyen giao quyen luc'. At least I think that that distinction could without too much difficulty be made in that way, and could have been done in the conversation I reported earlier.
Thus when they left the French 'chuyen trao' something when they agreed to sign, and had they insisted on 'chuyen giao' it would have implied that only a limited sovereign power was what they were dealing with, and so the term would and should have been rejected.
Thus 'trao doi'.
Is there anybody in the VSG who can enlighten us as to what the formal international relations language actually tells us?
Adam
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From: Dinh Lu Giang <lugiangdinh@gmail.com>
Date: 2008/12/10
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Let's google them:
"Chuyển trao quyền lực": Results 1 for "chuyển trao quyền lực". (0.10 seconds)
"Chuyển giao quyền lực": Results about 371,000 for "chuyển giao quyền lực". (0.24 seconds
Giang
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From: Oscar Salemink <OJHM.Salemink@fsw.vu.nl>
Date: 2008/12/11
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Adam,
I don't know about Chinese origins or characters but remember discussions in the mid-1990s in NGO circles about how to translate empowerment, as "giao quyen" (never heard "trao quyen") or as "tao. quyen" (as in "sa'ng tao."). I am not a linguist, but it seems to me that the connotation is very different. "Giao quyen" would suggest a subject who would transfer power to somebody else (empowering somebody else), while "tao. quyen" would suggest a subject empowering herself. The implications are rather interesting, I would say. Has "tao. quyen" disappeared from our developmentspeak since the 1990s, Adam?
Oscar Salemink
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From: Adam Fforde <adam@aduki.com.au>
Date: 2008/12/11
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Hi
The history of these words deserves loads of research, especially in the dev-world.
I don't know whether 'tao quyen' is part of the d-speak, but in the part of it I was in, and the Vietnamese I was speaking with, it was not evident. Maybe I am ignorant, though.
I think the point I am trying to get at is that 'giao quyen' is not, so far as I can see, powerfully to do with empowering another and separate subject, whilst 'trao quyen' is, or may be.
Regards
Adam
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From: Oscar Salemink <OJHM.Salemink@fsw.vu.nl>
Date: 2008/12/11
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
I don't think it's got to do with anybody's ignorance, Adam, rather with 'new' concepts that are introduced and for which new words must be "invented". People in different corners come up with different inventions before some form of standardization is achieved. So it depends with whom you converse at a particular moment in time; after all, the concept of 'empowerment' entered into the Vietnamese language via various discursive fields, not only in development but also in women's studies and gender studies, and probably more.
I think that for a concept like 'civil society', finding a suitable Vietnamese equivalent was equally difficult to achieve.
Oscar Salemink
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From: David Marr <david.marr@anu.edu.au>
Date: Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 5:07 PM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Has anyone checked to see if `trao' is blessed with a nom character? It would seem to follow, given the interesting discussion to date. Who knows, it may also be in Alexandre de Rhodes' dictionary of 1650.
David Marr
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From: Bradley Davis <bcampdavis@gmail.com>
Date: 2008/12/15
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
A quick glance at the _Đại Tự Điển Chữ Nôm_ by Trương Đình Tín and Lê Quý Ngưu (Huế: NXB Thuận Hóa, 2006) reveals the following:
p879 - ��: variously pronounced "Rao," "Trao," "Trau," "Lảo," and "Lau." The "Trao" reading carrying the meaning "to give something to someone" ("đưa một vật gì cho ai.")
p900 - 捞: variously pronounced "Rao," "Trao," "Trau," "Tráo," "Lau," "Rào." The "Trao" reading carries the same meaning as the previous chữ in p879.
For textual evidence, the editors cite a passage from the Quan Văn Đường _Kim Văn Kiều_ for the first chữ ("Với cành thoa ấy tức thì đổi trao") and the _Lục Vân Tiên_ (1883 Abel des Michels edition) for the second ("Vân Tiên họa lại một bài trao ra").
Other sources may give different explanations. Both chữ seem to be Nôm, ie not Nôm readings of chữ Hán but distinct graphs, from my admittedly quick check of a couple of "Classical Chinese" dictionaries, but perhaps a rigorous philologist/dialectician can affirm or disprove this. Their common meaning hints at the sort of plurality and complexity that happened when individual authors and publishers did not adhere to a rigid codification of written language.
Bradley Davis
Bradley C Davis
Instructor, Winter-Spring 2009
Department of History
Eastern Washington University
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai <hhtai@fas.harvard.edu>
Date: 2008/12/16
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
On my side, I consulted two dictionaries which include Chinese characters: The Viet Nam Tu Dien published in 1954 by the Hoi Khai Tri Tien Duc and Dao Duy Anh's Han-Viet Tu Dien (sorry, my keyboard allows neither characters nor diacritics). In both dictionaries, "trao" does not include a Chinese character. The character for "giao" is the same as in "giao thong." As you know, DDA included French translations. Two compounds that would be relevant here would be "giao hoan" (with a grave accent), glossed as "tra lai cho" and translated as "retourner, rendre;" and "giao pho" glossed as "dua cho, chuyen cho" and translated as "transmettre, delivrer."
Hope this helps.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: T. Nguyen <nguyenthanhbl@yahoo.com>
Date: 2008/12/16
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Trao and giao are written as two different characters in Huynh Tinh Cua' s Dai Nam Quac Am Tu Vi. Giao is written as a Chinese word, Trao as a Nom character and it has three parts: hand, mountain, and buffalo.
Best,
Thanh Nguyen
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From: Mark J. Alves
Date: 2008/12/19
It’s rather surprisingly this form hadn’t been previously identified. I would rate “trao” as a highly likely Han Dynasty era nativized borrowing. While the apparent “trao/giao” pair has not been identified by the most well-known researchers of the Han Dynasty Chinese loanwords (Nguyen Tai Can, Dao Duy Anh, Haudricourt, Wang, Pulleyblank, among others), it corresponds rather well with an Old Chinese/Han-Dynasty era reconstruction.
Character: 交
Modern (Beijing) reading: jiāo
Eastern Han Chinese: krāw
Vietnamese reading: giao
(Chinese reconstruction by Starostin at http://starling.rinet.ru)
Note the consonant cluster initial */kr/ in Old/Eastern Han Chinese. While the digraph “tr” in modern Vietnamese does represent a single consonant phoneme, it was quite likely a cluster several centuries ago, as noted in various historical reconstructions of earlier stages of Vietnamese (Ferlus, Nguyen Tai Can, Davidson). Unfortunately, the Nôm character only really shows a likely /l/ or reconstruction Chinese */r/ sound and does not indicate what the initial consonant was. However, it still reasonable to assume that /k/ was present as such consonant clusters with /k/ did merge with the retroflex “tr.” Finally, The social context in which a word meaning in a general sense "exchange" is reasonable as well.
Such early borrowings from Chinese (as noted in various previous e-mails on this topic, such as those of Liam Kelley and Dinh Lu Giang), which were borrowed primarily via spoken transmission at that time (in contrast with the Middle Chinese loanwords which are recognized in Vietnamese dictionaries as Chinese) were apparently considered native forms. Thus, at the time that Nôm characters were created, the usual process of formation (combinations of sound and semantic elements) was applied to these originally Chinese words: “hand” radical plus “lao” = trao. Having two different historical paths, some semantic and usage differences, as noted by Hue-Tam, are almost inevitable.
As for the question of trao vs. giao in modern compounds involving Chinese morphs, I don’t believe Chinese has a form (it’s not in any quality Chinese dictionaries). The Vietnamese language has a rich source of morphological material to create new forms.
Chúc Mừng Năm Mới!
Mark Alves
Montgomery College
Rockville, Maryland
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From: Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Date: 2008/12/19
This makes eminent sense. I was more focused on meaning than etymology, but I am well aware that pronunciation changes enormously and that certain "native" words are actually of Chinese origin and are used along with the Sino-Vietnamese version (tim and tam, huong and hong come to mind) I don't have the Alexandre de Rhodes dictionary to hand, but it would be interesting to check what the pronunciation was in the 17th century.
Hue-Tam Ho Tai
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From: Ngô Thanh Nhàn
Date: 2008/12/20
Dear Mark,
Thank you. I am impressed with the analysis you had below.
Từ nguyên of Lê Ngọc Trụ has simply trao < 交 giao.
Here is what I found on trao just for fun (note that all phonetic
forms of giao (交 giao, 覚 giác, 翏 HV reading not found) do
not share any phonetic forms of trao (lao, tảo, triệu, chiêu, trác):
1. Trần Văn Kiệm: (trao = thủ + lao) and 搔 (trao = thủ + tảo)
2. Huình Tịnh Paulus Của, (trao = thủ + lao)
3. Vũ Văn Kính, 招 (trao = thủ + chiêu, in Kim Thạch kỳ duyên), 牢 (trao = lao), and 捞 (trao = thủ + lao)
4. Nguyễn Quang Hồng, 召 (trao = triệu, in Chỉ nam ngọc âm),
招 (trao = chiêu = thủ + triệu, in Chỉ nam ngọc âm, Lý hạng ca dao, Sơ kính tân trang),
(A. de Rhodes, tlao = thủ + lao), 捞 (trao = lao = thủ + lao, in …)
5. I have found one form of trao, 掉 (trao = thủ + trác) without source.
Suppose we theorize that a Vietnamese ideogram is composed of a radical and
a sound ideogram, from their sources (resources containing these ideograms)
we have those coming from the southern part of Vietnam (Kim Thạch kỳ duyên),
and those from older times (Chỉ nam ngọc âm, etc.), we draw the sound
elements: 牢 劳 lao, 蚤 tảo, 召triệu/chiêu (Mandarin zhao4, Cantonese jiu6 siu6),
卓 trác.
One may say trao and giao are linguistically related but the Han Nom ideogram
phonetic compositions on the surface do not seem to show this relationship.
Happy Holidays!
Best,
Nhan
--------------------
From: Adam Fforde
Date: Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:58 PM
I came across some intriguing doggerel - I would like to share.
Trao quyen, nhan uy
Giu quyen, mat long
This seems to work (my Vietnamese colleagues tell me). Broadly - if you
empower, you gain authority; if you disempower, you loose the confidence of
the people. But this is really terrible English and basically dull, so I
doubt it would work in Chicago. What would? Ask Barry?
Why does it work?, Maybe because of the strongly physical metaphors behind
the ideas - so the 'verbs' are all tight, physical and neat - 'give,
receive, keep, loose'
Also, the 'nouns' are also tight and neat in their physical origins - fist,
?, fist, gut.
This may explain why the meaning can be put across in eight words.
Interesting that the English political equivalents are now so far from their
physical roots that a tight translation would probably have to use some
aping of Shakespearean English to 'frame the frame' - 'There is a canker in
the body politik, and I would have it out'.
My question is - what (if anything) is the physical metaphor behind 'uy'? It
is probably distant as my friends tend to prefer putting it with 'tin' as in
'uy tin'. The classic way to pose this question is to ask what the Chinese
character is. As usual!
My challenge to the group is to secure an effective translation (in terms of
doggerel) that is as tight as the Vietnamese. Rap?
One can note that any 'punch' in 'mat long' may come from 'end stress'
combined with the Vietnamese equivalent of switching from 'fancy' to
'Anglo-Saxon' words. From courageous to plucky. 'Mat long'.
Xin
Adam Fforde