Talk on the Wild Side by Lane Greene

Author:Lane Greene
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

khi tôi dên nhà ban tôi, chúng tôi bát dâu làm bài.

when I come house friend I, [plural] I begin do lesson

When I came to my friend’s house, we began to do lessons.8

Notice tôi, meaning “I”, three times. The first time, it’s “I”, the subject of the first clause. The second time, though, it comes as part of ban tôi–“friend I”, or “my friend”. And the third time it’s part of chúng tôi, “[plural] I”, or “we”. This really seems like Lego language.

Yet it’s not true that Vietnamese has “no grammar”; if that were the case, then learning it would simply be a matter of learning the words, and using them in any old order you please. But in fact, in any language, you have to learn which words go together in a meaningful way, like chúng tôi for “we”. And just as importantly, you have to know which order the elements of a sentence go in: you couldn’t just scramble the words in khi tôi dên nhà ban tôi, chúng tôi bát dâu làm bài and get a meaningful sentence any more than you can scramble a set of Scrabble tiles randomly and get a meaningful word. Vietnamese, like Chinese, does have grammar.

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