Language Log

As advertised in a “Note to Potential Contributors” from the editor in chief in Sungkyun Journal of East Asian Studies (SJEAS 19, no. 2), since autumn 2019 SJEAS has redefined and narrowed its focus to concentrate primarily on pre-1945 topics on East Asia in the humanities writ large, wherein East Asia is construed as the former “Sinographic sphere” or “Sinographic cosmopolis,” including notably Vietnam. Since then, SJEAS has begun to receive several submissions related to Vietnam, and has thus far published two articles on Vietnamese topics: Hoàng Yến Nguyen (2022) and Trọng Dương Trần (2023).

With the assistance of John Phan, associate professor of Vietnamese humanities at Columbia University and member of the SJEAS editorial board, we present in this special issue five new articles by an international group of authors that examine in one way or another Vietnam's experience with literary Sinitic (LS) as an active member of the Sinographic cosmopolis. The lead article by Dr. Nguyễn Tuấn Cường of the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies, Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, is titled “Vernacularization of Literary Sinitic in Early Modern Vietnam's Confucian Texts” and queries specifically how Vietnamese readers and commentators understood (and sometimes deployed) not orthodox LS but so-called baihua (白話) or vernacular Sinitic elements in otherwise classically oriented texts. While on the one hand acknowledging that baihua materials are thin on the ground in surviving Vietnamese literary sources, he nonetheless excavates a number of fascinating examples of vernacular Sinitic grammatical constructions from the seventeenth-century Vietnamese text A Concise Interpretation of the Four Books (Tứ thư ước giải 四書約解) while also venturing some explanations for the relative paucity of baihua materials in the Vietnamese textual record.

The second contribution (and her second to the journal), by Nguyễn Hoàng Yến of the University of Social Sciences and Humanities, VNU-HCMC, is titled “The Persistence of Literary Sinitic in Colonial Vietnam: A Case Study of Nam Nữ Giao Hợp Phụ Luận 男女交合附論.” Professor Nguyễn introduces and examines for the first time in English this remarkable text on “Supplementary Notes on Sexual Intercourse Between Men and Women” from 1903 and seeks to explain why its author “translated” and published it using LS rather than Nôm, French, or Quốc Ngữ.

The third contribution, by Nguyễn Thị Thu Huyền, is authored by a newly minted PhD from Tohoku University, Japan. Mobilizing her expertise in analogous Japanese kundoku 訓読 glossing practices, Dr. Nguyễn examines the Luận ngữ ước giải 論語約解, a literary Sinitic/Nôm bilingual text of the Analects, to understand how proper nouns were identified, punctuated, and read in such Vietnamese commentaries of the Chinese classics. Dr. Nguyễn's article is also the first to mobilize Nôm data in the history of the journal.

The fourth contribution, coauthored by Professor Yong-tai Kim of Sungkyunkwan University and Rahel Plassen, a PhD candidate at Leiden University, surveys the sizable and growing scholarly literature on Vietnamese LS sources coming out of the Republic of Korea. Noting that for Korea and Korean scholars Vietnam “serves as a kind of historical mirror,” Kim and Plassen examine South Korean research results within the context of East Asian politics and South Korea's scholarly discourse on “East Asia,” paying particularly close attention to chuanqi 傳奇 fiction and other narrative genres on the one hand and Sinitic poetry on the other. They end with a discussion of some of the institutional challenges facing premodern Vietnamese studies in South Korea and with their hope that future research will continue to expand into examinations of the interplay between texts in Sinitic and Chữ Nôm, much as research on the interactions between cosmopolitan LS and vernacular Korean have come to occupy a central place in South Korean research on premodern Korean literary culture.

The final contribution by Alan Dai, a PhD student at UCLA, introduces and translates for the first time in English a fascinating LS fictional narrative serialized from 1922 to 1923 in the journal Southern Wind Magazine (Nam Phong tạp chí 南風雜誌). Titled Record of the History of Korean Aristocrat Lady Yi Adrift (Ghi Triều Tiên quý tộc Lý nữ sĩ lưu lạc lịch sử 記朝鮮貴族李女士淪落歷史), this curious work testifies to the “persistence of literary Sinitic” in Vietnam studied by Nguyễn Hoàng Yến in the second article, while also confirming the cross-regional—and specifically Vietnamese-Korean—imaginaries yet undergirded by LS into the 1920s.