Vietnamese double meanings/coded critiques

From: Hue-Tam Tai via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2025 8:38 AM
To: jack.sidnell@utoronto.ca; frank.proschan@yahoo.com
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Vietnamese double meanings/coded critiques

Hi, all

Apologies for the lack of diacritics (for such a discussion, nacht!)

Besides noi lai, there is noi long and noi bong. The latter is more specifically about double entendres and can work through whole paragraphs, even stories.
Ho Xuan Huong's poems about food were read as images of women's bodies.
My father's "Con than lan chon nghiep" (The ghekko chooses its destiny, 1953) was on the surface a Buddhist short story but readers knew it was  about the need for Vietnam to make the right political choice.

Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Harvard University emerita

From: Jack Sidnell via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2025 7:51 AM
To: frank.proschan@yahoo.com
Cc: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Vietnamese double meanings/coded critiques

Hi Seb and all, 

There’s an article about nói lái by Marlys Macken and Hang T. Nguyễn published in Linguistics of the Tibeto-Burman Area (Volume 29.2 — October 2006) titled, "Nói Lái and the structure of the syllable.” It’s mostly about syllable structure and phonological constituency but also includes lots of examples and some discussion of “double meanings” etc. 

There’s also a mention of this in Phan Khôi's, “Nói thế nào là khiếm nhã”, (Phổ Thông, 72, September 1930). His interest is in the way speakers must adjust what they say in order to prevent the inference of word play. I discussed his example in a paper published in JVS in 2023 ("The Inconvenience of Tradition”, see pp. 71-72, notes 44-46). There’s some related discussion in a few of his other essays, references to which you can find in my paper. 

The classic analysis of this from an anthropological perspective is, as you know, in the writings of James Scott, especially his Domination and the Arts of Resistance and Weapons of the Weak. Linguistic anthropologist Susan Gal has a somewhat critical discussion of Scott’s analysis in an extended review of the former book. 

Language and the "Arts of Resistance"

Susan Gal

Cultural Anthropology

Vol. 10, No. 3 (Aug., 1995), pp. 407-424

All best wishes, Jack

Anthropology, U. Toronto

From: via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2025 6:52 AM
To: 'Seb Rumsby' <210972@alumni.soas.ac.uk>; vsg@uw.edu
Subject: Re: [Vsg] Vietnamese double meanings/coded critiques

The classic study of Vietnamese nói lái play language is:

Cheon, Jean Nicolas. 1905. "L'Argot annamite." BEFEO 5:47-75. (Also in Revue Indochinoise, series 3, no. 40. 30 August 1906. pp. 1269-1297.)

Enjoy,

Frank Proschan
Independent curmudgeon

From: Seb Rumsby via Vsg <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, January 22, 2025 5:23 AM
To: vsg@uw.edu
Subject: [Vsg] Vietnamese double meanings/coded critiques

Hi all, I have a request for the collective VSG hive mind: I'm trying to find something I read (or I think I read) 15 years ago, back in my bachelor's course on Vietnamese literature... About this idea of a Vietnamese linguistic tradition of double meanings and hidden message, i.e. concealing a political/critical voice through wordplay/slang - often in order to avoid censorship. E.g. thinking along the lines of Hồ Xuân Hương's sexual innuendos critiquing patriarchal norms within poems ostensibly about something else. I feel like this is a longstanding phenomenon and am wondering who has already written about this?

Thanks in advance!

Seb Rumsby

University of Birmingham