The Vietnamese Language: Grammar Identity and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive

Dear list,

A friend and college sent me this link recently and asked for my thoughts.

I would like to hear your comments on the talk, in particular the claim

that there is no subjunctive in the Vietnamese language and its connection

to "happiness" among Vietnamese.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeSVMG4GkeQ

Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive: Phuc Tran

?Happy New Year to you and yours,

?Di?u-Hi?n

--

Hoang t. Dieu-Hien, RN, MN, MPH

How's this for a counterfactual: If he hadn't started talking about the

"countless South Vietnamese who were killed after 1975", I might have

watched until the end of the video.

It's entirely possible to express the above sentence in Vietnamese,

starting with "Neu... thi co the... " As with the subjunctive, there's no

past or future tense for Vietnamese verbs either, but Vietnamese speakers

don't have any difficulty talking about past/future events: just add a time

marker or a particle like "da" and "se".

Naturally, speakers of English as a second language might have trouble with

some English grammatical structures because these are different from their

native language. Similarly, non-native Vietnamese speakers like myself (me?

I? toi? em?) have a hard time remembering tones for some words. This

doesn't mean that non-tonal languages are deficient in any way, they just

use voice and pitch differently and rely more heavily on complex grammar.

I don't know if Phuc Tran is fluent in Vietnamese or not, but if he is were,

it would be interesting to hear him give the same TED talk in Vietnamese!

And thus disproving his argument.

With conditional best wishes,

Andrew Wells-Dang

Hoi An

I would have translated the "if he hadn't" in that sentence as "phai chi ong ta khong..." instead of "neu ong ta khong..."

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

As a linguist who studied Vietnamese for a couple of years this talk made me quickly pepper my wife who was born and raised (21years) in Vietnam a lot of questions. After that she thought this was all silly and people could express these things just fine simply with just using "neu" and "thi" making a sentence that looks almost the same as it's counterpart in English. Syntacticly I always found Vietnamese very easy to learn as an L1 English speaker because they are similar in many ways, pronunciation is another thing.

Michael

Sent from my iPhone

Dear list,

It is basically uncontroversial among linguists that counterfactuals can be

expressed in Vietnamese (as several people have already pointed out),

though it is true that Vietnamese lacks overt syntactic marking of

subjunctive mood. That is also unsurprising, however, since Vietnamese is

an isolating language with no inflectional morphology. There has been some

discussion among both linguists and psychologists as to whether this

amounts to any significant cognitive difference. Although I am not

well-versed on the syntactic side of things, my impression is that since

counterfactual expression is still possible via other means, the discussion

among syntacticians has generally been restricted to what kinds of

constraints or distinctions are enforced/possible in counterfactual

constructions when no overt morphological marker is available. But the

lack of an overt morphological marker does not at all mean that

counterfactual expression is not available in Vietnamese.

I am not a psychologist nor a psycholinguist (excuse the pun), but I did

come across some interesting cognitive studies on counterfactuals in

Chinese conducted at Northwestern University. These were conducted in

response to some controversial work by A.H. Bloom in the early 1980s, in

which Bloom suggested that Chinese speakers were deficient in

counterfactual reasoning when compared with speakers of languages like

English (which has overt counterfactual marking). This would be viewed

with extreme skepticism by linguists, and seems to have come under fire

among psychologists as well.

One<http://csjarchive.cogsci.rpi.edu/proceedings/2006/docs/p1281.pdf>

of

the Northwestern studies shows strong evidence for linguistic markers that

are regularly predictive of counterfactuality (something that would not be

surprising from the linguistic perspective). The

other<http://groups.psych.northwestern.edu/gentner/papers/YehGentner05.pdf>

article

I came across details an experiment which tried to test whether there was

an inequality in identifying counterfactual statements between Chinese and

English speakers, effectively trying to determine whether the presence of

overt counterfactual marking in English led to greater accuracy in

recognizing counterfactuality. The results showed a statistically

significant accuracy advantage for English speakers in cases where the

counterfactuality was not derivable from general world knowledge (i.e.

"non-transparent" cases), but no significant difference in other cases.

That is an interesting find, but from a linguistic point of view, this

would maybe be treated as a distinction that obtains at the pragmatic or

discourse level, and not something innate to the syntax of the language.

So I suppose I would also agree that there is no scientific basis for what

Phuc Tran is claiming about the subjunctive here, though personally, I

enjoy a good Stars Wars joke.

Best, John

Dear List,

I have been following (on and off) this fascinating discussion and perhaps I missed something, but has the construction "giá (gi?) s?" been considered. It seems to be the one that expresses the subjunctive and/or counterfactuals and it differs from "n?u... thì."

Sorry if "gia su" has already been discussed and I missed that.

With best wishes,

Olga

Dear Olga:

Thanks for mentioning this term. "giá (gi?) s?" is similar in meaning to "phai chi" (if only) to express a counterfactual. But I believe that gi? s?, does not necessarily convey counterfactuality. I may be wrong. It is also much for of a formal usage.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai

Dear Professor Hue-Tam Ho Tai,

Indeed "gia su" people tend to use in a more formal context, though we, as students, were taught to use it whenever we wanted to express something subjunctive or counterfactual.

T? Ðì?n Ti?ng Vi?t defines "Gi? S?" as "t? dùng d? nêu m?t gi? thi?t, thu?ng là TRÁI (emphasis is mine) v?i th?c t?, làm can c? suy lu?n, ch?ng minh."

Again, I suggested this expression just as an option.

Warmly,

Olga

There's another way of doing subjunctives:

"Tôi mà l?y b? th?i xua thì tôi dã thành tiên r?i."

The particle "mà" and past particle "dã" in this construction

create a subjunctive context in two phrases linked by "thì".

One is either like the European languages to mark subjunctive

by adding suffixes into the verbs… or creating clear syntactic

configurations for it… are equally effective.

In fact, I think Vietnamese is more elegant.

Being human perhaps means that one always looks at one's

conditions and dreams of other choices (that one did not

take) and their consequences.

Cheers,

Nhàn

Hello everyone,

Just a quick follow up and echo to Bac Nhan's post. I think a lot of the

confusion represented by this TED talk derives from the notion of the

"subjunctive" itself, which is a very Indo-European concept that grew out

of classical grammars. Phuc Tran seems to be well-educated in the

classical Indo-European languages, and may be influenced by traditional

grammatical notions like the "subjunctive" which don't bear exact

corollaries in modern linguistics. The closest corollary is what is called

*irrealis*, which includes any kind of non-factual statement (including

counterfactual statements, wishes, desires, intentions, potentiality,

etc.). Phuc Tran is right in the sense that "subjunctive mood" as a

morphologically-marked inflective category does not exist in Vietnamese or

Chinese (any more than a past-tense inflection does), but *irrealis*

expressions

are nevertheless absolutely expressible in these languages.

The idea that the absence of Indo-European-style inflection can be equated

with the absence of the cognitive categories they express in those

languages (as argued by Bloom) has been firmly overturned, and Bloom's

arguments are no longer accepted either among linguists or psychologists

(as far as I know). Despite this, there lingers a tendency to romanticize

surface differences between languages (e.g. presence or lack of inflection;

presence or lack of of tone) into real cognitive or cultural differences,

when nine times out of ten, the communicatory functions are virtually

identical.

Sincerely, John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Great thread! Thanks to all who have contributed. When I ran across Bloom

some decades ago it seemed to me that the problem was perhaps that he

simply didn't understand Chinese well enough, not what Chinese could or

couldn't think or say.

But I've not always been very sure of myself with these constructions in

Vietnamese, and all this conversation is like a tutorial. Many thanks!

There is one more: phai chang. Does that fit in here somewhere? Could

someone comment on that as well?

again, many thanks for this thread,

Diane

Return to top of page