The System of Scholarly and Popular Cultural Materials in the Artistic Language of the Tale of Kieu

Reading The Tale of Kieu, who can contain their emotions before every stage of the suffering of the victim Thuy Kieu…, who can not see before their eyes the “pale skin color”, with the vulgar words coming from the mouth of the prostitute Tu Ba! Who can not be horrified by the despicable calculations of the pimp Ma! No one can forget the “sneaking”, the “turning of the reins” and the “sneaky face” of the despicable swindler So Khanh… ” [173, p.47].

Reviewing the verses using colloquial words, we see that this layer of words has created a typical relief picture of the language of the characters in the Tale of Kieu . For example, the two words " this this " in the speech of Madame Tu have proven that those words are no longer the opening words for commands or threats, but they have become words of criticism and accusation coming from the collapse of all the plans that Madame Tu had arranged for Kieu Nhi:

"This is what happened,

"Stop robbing my husband of his life! "

(Questions 0963 - 0964)

Next came the insults, curses, vulgarity and the strong imprint of professional jargon: walking around picking up people , picking up customers to make a profit , capital gone to hell ... there were truly no words more suitable for those who specialized in the business of selling sex, stealing and robbing.

Regarding the empty words (a class of words that only have grammatical meaning but no lexical meaning) in the Tale of Kieu , Pham Dan Que in his work The Artistic World of the Tale of Kieu gave a statistical figure of 105 words [122, p.181]. Based on that specific statistic, we surveyed and recorded the number of appearances of 105 empty words in 3,254 verses of Kieu as 1,736 times. When surveying the colloquial language system, we also found that there was a large number of empty words used by the author. The problem raised here is that the author's rather flexible and reasonable use of the art has turned empty words and conjunctions in spoken language into words with real artistic functions in the colloquial cultural language of the Tale of Kieu . The empty words such as then, that, but, are ... even in colloquial speech, if not used properly, also create verbosity.

The system of words is unnecessarily wordy, not fluent, and cannot express the continuity, transition, and inheritance of ideas in the utterance. However, in the dialogues of the characters in The Tale of Kieu , this system of words has been conveyed quite naturally and reasonably, expressing the logical flow of thinking of the words and the content of the utterance.

Among the 105 function words that Pham Dan Que has surveyed and verified,

In our work, the function word “ đà ” appears 136 times, “ trung ” appears 69 times, “ mà ” appears 27 times, “ bánh chậy ” is repeated 12 times, “ nhung là ” is repeated 06 times… and at least the function words “ chi ngày ”, “ nuẻ đâu ”… only appear 01 time. With 1,736 such appearances, this system not only demonstrates flexibility in expressing the use of function words but also contributes to diversifying the word classes in the work’s artistic language, expressing the rustic, colloquial nature - a factor that makes this work very close to the majority of workers. For example, the function word “ hê cùng ” expresses a negative intention towards what is about to be stated by the interlocutor, in the form of almost acknowledging something and comparing it with the opposite to express disagreement. That was when Kieu was slandered by So Khanh and she exclaimed:

" She said: Well, then,

If no, then obey no .

(Sentence 1175 - 1176)

This empty word was used by Nguyen Du in Hoan Thu's plea:

" That I am a bit of a woman,

Jealousy is also human nature .

(Sentence 2365 - 2366)

And in Hoan Thu's confession, Thuy Kieu used this word twice in a pair of six-eight verses to express hesitation before making the final judgment:

" If you let me go , I'll be lucky."

Doing it makes you a petty person .

(Sentence 2375 - 2376)

Nguyen Du is not only a great artist of language but also a great culturalist with his artistic ways of dealing with the national language and its effectiveness. At the same time, in the process of creation, the writer's ingenuity is to flexibly transform that precious folk capital, bringing out the words

The voice of the people is among the most beautiful and effective words. Nguyen Du used all the words of the masses very artistically, all have a worthy position in the language of the Tale of Kieu and all promote their aesthetic effects. Through his system of words, Nguyen Du created realistic verses that vividly depict the reality of the mood and objective reality of society. These are probably the cultural traditions that the poet inherited from the Nom poetry of Nguyen Trai, Nguyen Binh Khiem and Vietnamese folk artists.

2.2. The system of scholarly and popular cultural materials in the artistic language of The Tale of Kieu

2.2.1. Survey and comments on the system of learned cultural materials

Up to now, according to our survey, the problem of classifying the system of linguistic materials in the Tale of Kieu and some other Nom stories has been paid attention to by many researchers of Classical Linguistics. From the perspective of Vietnamese history, we see that building a classification criterion from the phonetic form of the linguistic materials is one of the ways to generalize the process of shifting from Sino-Vietnamese linguistic materials, originating from classical Chinese literary language, to pure Vietnamese or semi-Sino-Vietnamese linguistic materials (referring to linguistic materials with one element being Sino-Vietnamese and one element being pure Vietnamese). With this criterion, we can learn about the transformation and movement of the national literary language from reception, influence to Vietnamization and creation.

The works used for statistics and comparison in this section belong to two groups: scholarly Nom stories and popular Nom stories. The system of words listed in the statistical table below objectively reflects the situation of using allusions, poetic materials, person names, place names and the system of socio-cultural words in the Artistic Language of an endogenous genre of national literature. The use of this system of words is one of the literary techniques to ensure the normative and elegant nature according to the characteristics of classical literary poetics. The increase or decrease in cultural significance and quantity of Sino-Vietnamese, semi-Sino-Vietnamese and pure Vietnamese linguistic materials not only depends on the system of topics, themes or content of the work but also has a close relationship with the process of resisting Sinicization, nationalization, reception and inheritance.

national culture. These are the author's innovations and creations of vocabulary originating from Chinese culture and its flexibility in classical Vietnamese literary language.

To have a comprehensive, scientific view of the issue of word usage in Nom stories, according to the survey results of Doan Anh Loan [87], Nguyen Thuy Hong [75], Nguyen Quang Tuan, Nguyen Khac Thuan [160] and our statistical results, we can preliminarily identify and classify the forms of the linguistic material in the language of some Nom stories from the perspective of the reading form of the material as follows:

Table 2.1. Scholarly cultural data in some Nom stories

Work

Number of sentences verse	Sino-Vietnamese phonetic corpus	Semi-Vietnamese phonetic data	Pure Vietnamese phonetic data
Fairy flower	1766	37 (19.7%)	83 (44.3%)	67 (35.8%)
Bi Cau's Strange Encounter	608	23 (24.2%)	38 (39.1%)	33 (34%)
Second degree	2826	33 (36.6%)	42 (46.6%)	15 (16.6%)
Refurbished glass	1484	63 (45%)	42 (30%)	23 (16.4%)
Phan Tran	940	34 (49.2%)	27 (39%)	08 (11.5%)
Quan Am Thi Kinh	788	38 (36.8%)	49 (47.5%)	14 (14.2%)
Stone Sanh	347	11 (57.8%)	07 (36.8%)	01 (5.2%)

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Through initial survey, research and analysis, we found that semi-Sino-Vietnamese phonetic materials (also known as semi-Vietnamized phonetics, which are data composed of two components, one of which is Sino-Vietnamese and the other is Vietnamese, this is a proof of the transition from Sino-Vietnamese to pure Vietnamese) are used relatively commonly by authors, for example in Quan Am Thi Kinh , there are 49 data out of a total of 788 verses, Hoa Tien has 83 data out of a total of 1766 verses or So Kinh Tan Trang has 42 data out of a total of 1484 verses. This shows that the transition from Sino-Vietnamese to pure Vietnamese requires an intermediate step of semi-Sino-Vietnamese phonetics.

Besides, the uneven distribution between linguistic components in Nom stories has shown the process of nationalization of allusions, poetic materials, and literary terms.

Chinese culture, faithfully reflecting the ancient viewpoint but still ensuring aesthetics and art in the context of the special exchange of culture, literature and language of Vietnam and China.

Surveying the artistic language of Truyen Kieu , from the viewpoint and the unified connotation of the concept of cultural material, in the total of 972 Sino-Vietnamese words counted [65, p.230], we have counted 626 original cultural materials, accounting for about 67.3% of Sino-Vietnamese words appearing in Truyen Kieu and 169 translated and simulated materials, accounting for 39.5% compared to the number of 440 Vietnamese words quoted from popular and scholarly culture that author Nguyen Thuy Hong surveyed. This difference is due to the concept of Sino-Vietnamese words.

In our opinion, from the perspective of the pronunciation of the corpus, words originating from classical Chinese literary language, read according to Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation and without changing the semantics compared to the original word, are called Sino-Vietnamese corpus. The remaining cases, we temporarily call them corpus with Sino-Vietnamese elements.

Regarding the scholarly cultural corpus, inheriting the research viewpoint of some previous authors, we conducted the steps of assessment and classification into two basic components: Original corpus (or original Sino-Vietnamese, which are words originating from Chinese literary language and expressed in the form of Sino-Vietnamese words) and translated corpus (also known as semi-Sino-Vietnamese, pure Vietnamese translated corpus, which are words originating from classical Chinese literature, translated into Vietnamese and expressed in the form of words with Sino-Vietnamese and pure Vietnamese elements).

The division of cultural materials in the artistic language of the Tale of Kieu into two systems of scholarly and popular is the result of a process of examining the text based on the criteria of combining the origin, source and forms of expression, pronunciation of words. The classification criteria we used in the process of studying this cultural material system is one of the reference systems that many Kieu researchers are interested in. To see the development process and use of national language, the process of Vietnamization of cultural materials in Nom poetry, in addition to the Tale of Kieu,

Kieu , we choose Hoa Tien and Luc Van Tien . These are two works representing two

The period before and after the Tale of Kieu . The results are as follows:

Table 2.2. Cultural data in Hoa Tien, Truyen Kieu and Luc Van Tien

Work

Quantity	Cultural data
	Original form		Translation
	Quantity	Proportion	Quantity	Proportion
Flower Fairy	392	288	71.4%	103	28.6%
Tale of Kieu	795	626	87.2%	169	22.8%
Luc Van Tien	691	212	30.01%	479	69.99%

Based on the statistical results, we can see that in phase 1 (tentatively called the initial phase), the number of original cultural words used is quite popular (288 documents, accounting for 71.4%), then in Truyen Kieu (tentatively called the climax phase), the number of original and translated documents both account for a large proportion (626 original documents, accounting for 87.2%; 169 translated documents, accounting for 22.8%) and by Luc Van Tien , this system of documents tends to decrease. That is the most objective expression of the process of nationalization of literary language. Therefore, the learned cultural documents in the language of Truyen Kieu are not only recognized as the pinnacle of the national language but also a typical representative of the process of transformation from original documents to translated documents. It can be said that, through statistics, we can see a quite important feature in the journey of nationalizing the national literary language, the system of translated linguistic materials gradually replaces the system of original linguistic materials in the initial reception stage.

From Hoa Tien , through Truyen Kieu to Luc Van Tien , the cultural vocabulary in the treasure trove of Vietnamese literary language gradually became richer. Although it had not yet escaped the " shadow " of ancient Chinese culture, the language in later learned Nom stories became more and more national conscious in expressing the thoughts and feelings of the Vietnamese people.

Regarding the translated corpus, from 103 corpuses in Hoa Tien to 479 corpuses in

Luc Van Tien is a step forward in the national literary language. The growth in number

That quantity has demonstrated the process of Vietnamizing words of Chinese origin in the artistic language of Nom classical stories in general and the Tale of Kieu in particular.

During the survey process, through the criteria of classification, survey and annotation of the Nom language documents, realizing the need to build specific data to prove the objective existence of cultural documents, we have classified them, specifically as follows:

Table 2.3. Scholarly cultural data in the artistic language of The Tale of Kieu

Linguistic components

Quantity	Origin
Quantity	Classics	Poetry, Document	On behalf of, place name	Literary words culture, society...
Original form	626	145	28	69	384
Translation	169	61	40	8	60

From the above statistics, we can see that, regardless of the form, the cultural materials in the Artistic Language of the Tale of Kieu are rich and diverse. In this system, words belonging to the fields of culture, religion, politics, military... characteristic of feudal society account for a relatively large proportion (384 original Sino-Vietnamese materials; 60 translated materials, including semi-Sino-Vietnamese and pure Vietnamese). Meanwhile, materials originating from classics (145 original, 61 translated), allusions, poems, names of people, and places also account for a relatively large number (69 original, 08 translated).

The presence of this system of documents has contributed to affirming the profound cultural factors that have influenced the artistic language of the work. Although the division of the origin according to the above components is only a relative convention, it can also ensure the recognition of the cited documents more clearly, reflecting Nguyen Du's profound level of Chinese studies and inheritance and learning from the ancients in the creative process of the work. It contributes to diversifying the components that create the beauty of the artistic language of the Tale of Kieu .

2.2.2. Survey and comments on the system of popular cultural materials

As a highly aesthetic linguistic signal, in the popular language of Hoa Tien , Truyen Kieu and Luc Van Tien , the system of idioms, folk songs, empty words, colloquialisms, local words, ancient words... are relatively flexible and creative components. It can be said that, compared to the scholarly corpus, these units function as concrete words, are used in life and enter literature to create a class of words with high expressive nuances, contributing to the successful expression of the emotional levels or thoughts, hesitations of each character, describing different spaces and states of mind. In particular, with this system, the artistic language of Nom literary works has contributed to expressing the popular cultural imprint of the Vietnamese people.

According to the survey results, the quantity as well as the composition, origin and source of the linguistic system in Nom stories are relatively rich and diverse. However, according to our survey in the artistic language of the works Hoa Tien by Nguyen Huy Tu and Luc Van Tien by Nguyen Dinh Chieu , the results are as follows:

Table 2.4. Folk cultural materials in Hoa Tien , Truyen Kieu and

Luc Van Tien

Work

Quantity	Origin of the corpus
Quantity	Song knife	Wall language	From local, ancient	Mouth language	Broken from
Flower Fairy	509	51	215	48	127	68
Tale of Kieu	1102	83	445	139	331	105
Luc Van Tien	614	48	244	75	126	121

Through the above table, we can see that the number of cultural corpora influenced by popular culture is not uniform in the three works surveyed. With 509 collected corpora, the number of words influenced by or bearing the style of folk songs (51 corpora), idioms (215 corpora), local words, ancient words (48 corpora) and colloquial style corpora (127) and 68 empty words have participated in building the unique features of the Artistic Language of the Hoa Tien story - a work that has a great influence on the Tale of Kieu of

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