Hoi An, a trade centre, was also a centre of cultural contacts between Vietnam and the outside world in the 17th century. Hoi An, a gate to the sea of ancient Champa culture, war one of the first places in Vietnam that received the influence of Western modern civilization. An unexpected achievement of the meeting between the Vietnamese culture and Europe's Latin culture was the invention of quoc ngu (national language) which we will deal with in this report.

A major p remise ensuring t he success of trade transactions on a new and strange market, in the knowledge of the geographical characteristics, natural resources, the people, traditions and habits, and especially language and scripts of those places. In face of that difficulty, in Dang Trong in the 17th century, Portuguese traders enjoyed the effective assistance of their natural fellow travelers, namely Jesuitic missionaries, and were eager to preach the "Precepts of the Gospel" in far - away lands, outside Europe. On merchant ships there would be the presence of missionaries. However, at the beginning, the missionaries only came with the ships to stay for three or four months or so, then left when the ships were loaded with goods and weighed anchor. In that way, they were not bent on learning the local language, and consequently, their preaching did not bear any fruit.

In early 1615, the Macau-based Council of Bishops of Portuguese missions in the Far East, sent to Hoi An a mission of Jesuitic Fathers, to set up religious missions in Dang Trong. This mission consisted of an Italian Catholic priest, Fraucesco Buzomi, a Portuguese Catholic priest, Diego Carvalho, and three friars, two Japanese and one Portuguese. D.Carvalho stayed in Dang Trong for only a short time to seek for an opportunity to go to Japan (to be killed there in 1624). As for F.Buzomi, he was designated to stay for a long period of time. And, in fact, he stayed in Dang Trong as many as 24 years and returned to Macau to die there in 1639. Despite his ignorance of the Vietnamese and the absence of interpreters, he managed by every means possible, to carry out the preaching, starting from Da nang, his place of permanent residence. Only after a short period of time, he succeeded in building a church in Da nang, then another in the provincial town of Quang Nam, and in converting a number of believers, among whom a woman belonging to the aristocracy. Encouraged by that achievement, the Macau Council of Bishops decided to strengthen the mission by sending a younger priest, who was able to learn the Vietnamese language quickly, and to preach directly without an interpreter. It was Father Francesco du Pina, a Portuguese? and a former student of F.Buzomi in theology at the Macau Seminary. He arrived in Dang Trong in 1617, and was to be the first European who spoke fluent Vietnamese.
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In 1618, when the mission was involved in a dangerous trouble, Macau again sent to Dang Trong a second mission with Pedro Marquez, a Japanese-speaking Portuguese' as chaplain and priest Christoforo Borri, an Italian, as his assistant. Borri had been trained to be sent to China, but was eventually sent to Dang Trong to stay there for 5 years, from 1618 to 1622, where he mainly resided in Hoi An and Nuoc Man (Binh Dinh). Upon his return to Europe, he wrote a book, in Italian. entitled 'An Account of the New Mission of Jesuitic Fathers in the Kingdom of Dang Trong,' first published in Rome in 1631, one year before his death. The book, 13 by 19cm, containing 231 pages, in now preserved at the Library of the Vatican, index Barberini H-I-66. It was the first book written by a Western missionary about our country's Dang Trong, and which gives a detailed and generalized description of almost all aspects of this part of Vietnam, from its boundaries, climate, flora. fauna to the traditions, customs, costumes, language, religions, family and social structure. The reader at once takes note of Borri's curious and sympathetic view of the landscape and people of Dang Trong, when he compares the Vietnamese to the Chinese, or when he speaks of the elephant and the rhinoceros hunting, of Vietnam's ancient customs: the guests having to wash his feet before entering the house, or sharing

with the guests the food available, however frugal and scarce it might be, etc. No wonder, the book was immediately reprinted in Italian in Milan and three French translations of which appeared in the same period in Paris, Lillie and Rennes, and was successively translated into Latin, Dutch, German and English in the two subsequent years. For us, Borri was the second Western missionary who spoke fluent Vietnamese, made the first remarks and comparisons about the Vietnamese language, and who supplied us with the first, important data of the concrete forms of the quoc ngu in the first half of the 17th century.

Japan's ban on Christianity led many missionaries at the Macau's Council of Bishops to shift their direction of preaching. And instead of going to the East of the West as planned, they had to go southward, to come to Hai Nan island, Thailand and Vietnam. That was also the case of Alexandre de Rhodes, a French missionary who after a year's waiting and learning of the Japanese language in Macau, was finally sent to Dang Trong in late 1624. As he quickly mastered the Vietnamese, in 1627, he was given an important special mission, namely to go to the northern part of the country to establish a mission in Dang Ngoai. A. de Rhodes was the third Western missionary after F. di Pina and C. Borri who spoke Vietnamese fluently. This is to cite only the three most famous missionaries. In a document called minutes of the debate in 1645 by 36 Jesuitic missionaries on the formula of bapteme written by the priest Nguyen Khac Xuyen in the Van hoa nguyet san - 1960 (Cultural Monthly Review)," the author mentions the names of 5 missionaries with the note peritus linguae, versed in the (Vietnamese) language, namely Antonio Barbosa, Balthassar, Pacchus, Albertus and Gaspar de Amaral. Particularly, the last name is followed by the note peritissimus linguae, meaning deeply versed in the language. However, in the study of the Vietnamese language and invention of the quoc ngu, A. de Rhodes played an indisputably special role: not only did he practice the Vietnamese language, but he was also the first European to have dared engage in an extraordinarily difficult sphere of learning, especially in his time - the 17th century: the research on the Vietnamese language. The trilingual Vietnamese-Latin- Portuguese Dictionary and the Vietnamese-Latin catechism' published by A. de Rhodes himself in Rome in 1651, marked the actual and obvious appearance of a new script in Latin alphabet writing of the Vietnamese language, called chu quoc ngu.

We have come to see how much attention the Jesuitic missions paid to overcoming the problem of "language differences." In the first stage, there always were a few Japanese in the personnel structure of the missions: in 1615, F. Buzomi arrived in Hoi An assisted by two Japanese friars. In 1615, C. Borri was assisted by a half-caste Japanese priest named Pedro Marquez. Giuliano Baldinotti was accompanied by a Japanese friar named Jules Piani in his trip to Dang Ngoai. Gaspar de Amaral was flanked by the Japanese priest Paul Saito." This was due to the fact that the Japanese priests were able to use the Han characters in their correspondence with Vietnamese Kings and Lords. Furthermore, they could rely on Japanese residents in Hoi An to grasp Vietnam's political and economic situation. Anyhow, it only a temporary solution in the beginning. The astute and suspicious Western Jesuitic missionaries felt uneasy about that solution. Moreover, if preaching was to yield effective results, a command of the native language was imperative. A. de Rhodes remarked: in late 1624, on arrival in Dang Trong "we noted that Fathers Emmenuel Fernandez and Buzomi still had to preach through interpreters. It was not the case with Father Francesco di Pina: he spoke fairly good Vietnamese. And I saw that his preaches were more useful than those of the others.

Thus, A. de Rhodes buckled down to the study of the Vietnamese language, although he was scared from the outset by the language. He wrote: "I must confess that when I first arrived in Dang Trong and heard the natives, especially women, speak, I thought I was hearing birds chirping, and I lost all hope of leaning the language."! The French priest Joseph Tissanier (1618 - 1688), who was to Vietnam in the years 1653 - 1663, had the same impression: "I must confess that at the beginning I was scared by those sounds, for they are so different from the European language, and I almost lost all my hope of learning the language. What baffled the missionaries was the pronunciation and intonation of the Vietnamese language. A. de Rhodes related a few funny anecdotes regarding his mispronunciation of the Vietnamese language: once he asked his cook to buy some fish (in Vietnamese ca), the latter returned with a basket full of aborigine (in Vietnamese ca); on another occasion, when he ordered his men to cut bamboo trees (in Vietnamese chem tre) all the children in the parish were scared and ran away for he had mispronounced the words into "to kill the kids" (in Vietnamese chem tre).

However, besides the language problem, the Western missionaries in Vietnam in the early 17th century had to confront a more baffling problem, that of the script. In China, there is unity between the Han language and the Han character, while in Vietnam, the Han character is not the script built on the basis of the Vietnamese language. As for the Nom, it is even more intricate and complicated. Moreover, the Nom is not governed by highly united principles. It is not clear why Borri did not refer to the Nom. In Bonifacy's opinion, it might be due to the fact that the Nom was not widely used in Dang Trong.'? But he came to realize a baffling situation in which the Vietnamese spoke a language and wrote in another script. "The language they speak daily differs a lot from the one they teach and read white studying by everyone differs from the Latin which is daily used in study and in schools." Borri made a comparison, likened the relationship between the Han character and the Vietnamese language to that between Latin and the vulgar Italian language. His opinion was not thoroughly accurate, for the vulgar Italian language in particular, and the Roman languages in general, are all born from Latin. The Italian vocabulary, and the morphological and syntactic characteristics of the Italian language have their origin from Latin. In other words, these is between Latin and the Italian language a mother-child language relationship. It is not the case with the relationship between the Vietnamese and Chinese, which do not belong to the same language family. Here is only the case of a nation, which, for want of a script of its own, had borrowed that of its neighbor nation, which was widely used in the region, for use in documents and books, while the nation's own language was used in everyday intercourse.

Aware of this complicated situation, the Western missionaries made use of the experience acquired in the transcription of the Chinese and Japanese language'? by the Latin alphabet to transcribe the Vietnamese language. We can figure out this process as going through the two following stages:
- The. first stage, tentatively called transcription stage. The purpose of this stage was simple and modest. It was to supply footnotes about a few Vietnamese words to help easily to memorize them, and transcribe a number of Vietnamese geographic names, offices, personalities, for use in their narrative books. This work of transcription was to lead to a second stage: that of inventing the script. Of course, it is difficult to determine precisely the beginning and end of the above- mentioned stages, for the difference between the two stages was probably negligible. The laicization of the Japanese and Chinese language had a favorable basis in terms of experience for the laicization of the Vietnamese language. Let us study the transcription of a number of quoc ngu words as they were printed in books by C.Borri, the most ancient data on the existence of quoc ngu in the early 17th century. The following remarks may be made: Thirdly, the transcription was not governed by rigidly unified rules. In some cases, a word might be transcribed differently. For example:

Fourthly, the absence of tonic accents in Born's quoc ngu. Only one accent, namely falling tone was noticed, an accent which exists in Italian. There might be two reasons for this: first, the Western missionaries at the time did not make a clear distinction of the tonic accents and had not yet thought out any convention for the accents. This was most probable, for the tonic accents are related to the pronunciation, tone and intonation of the Vietnamese language, which fall into a complex and difficult category. Second, it might be due to printing problems. As we know, the printing workshop of the Missionary Society in Rome, built in 1627, had not yet cast quoc ngu printing types until 1651 to print the quoc ngu with accents invented by A. de Rhodes.

Fifthly, there appear in Born's books a number of complete and meaningful, though short and simple, quoc ngu sentences. For example: Da an het (already eaten up). Tuij ciam biet (I do not know). One can hardly say that these quoc ngu sentences still remained at the transcription stage, though with the scarce data acquired above, we see that they were still crude and not fully logical. From the narrative by C. Borri to the books published in 1651 by de Rhodes, the quoc ngu had made a great leap forward, and became a new, regulated, theoretically-based and systematic script. On his essay on Vietnamese grammar, an appendix to the Vietnamese- Portuguese-Latin Dictionary, A. de Rhodes makes a list and discusses the effect of the letters used to build the quoc ngu. The modem reader can read without difficulty A. de Rhodes' An Eight-day Preaching Method, provided that he is aware of a few old letters, namely b = v in bua = vua (king); II = tr in tlom = trong (in). These two consonants had appeared already in Borri's books. Besides, there are some others such as: bl = 1, gi, tr; ml = 1, nh; u = ng in tlou = trong (see); o = ong in tloo = trong (in).

The major difference between the quoc ngu in C. Born's books and those of A. de Rhodes lies in the fact that the latter's books have a system of tonic signs, similar to present-day quoc ngu. A number of French and Vietnamese researchers used to attribute the invention of the quoc ngu chiefly to A. de Rhodes. But Pham Quynh and Duong Quang Ham long ago rightly affirmed that it had been a collective undertaking. In 1927 Pham Quynh wrote in the Nam Phong review: "The quoc ngu was invented by Western missionaries in Vietnam early in the 17th century. Those missionaries Portuguese, Italian, and French - must have put their heads together to think out, correct and polish it for years. It was certainly not the work of one individual. The only thing was a French missionary, Alexandre de Rhodes, was the first to have a dictionary and a preaching book published."13 Duong Quang Ham wrote: "The invention of the quoc ngu was probably the work of many people, including Spanish, Portuguese and French missionaries. However, the greatest merit has been attributed to A. de Rhodes because he was the first to have books in quoc ngu printed.

A French researcher, Georges Taboulet, also wrote: "The transcription of the Vietnamese language by the Latin alphabet plus the conventional accents was a collective work the bulk of which was contributed by the Bishops Di Pina, Borri, Gaspar de Amaral, Antonio Barbosa. But Bishop A. de Rhodes had the merit of systematizing, regulating and disseminating this new script. Alexandre de Rhodes himself acknowledged it in the preface to his dictionary: "In the compilation of this dictionary, I have not only relied on the held of the native people who help me learn the language during the twelve years of my stay in Dang Trong and Dang Ngoai, but also have learned from, other missionaries. I studied together with Francesco di Pina, a Portuguese belonging to our humble Jesuitism. He is a man very versed in the native language and is the first man who dared to preach in the native language. Besides, I also make use of the work of other missionaries who also belonged to Jesuitism, especially Gaspar de Amaral and Antonio Barbosa. Both of them compiled each a lexicon, the Vietnamese-Portuguese lexicon by Mr. Gaspar de Amaral and Portuguese-Vietnamese lexicon by Mr. Antonio. Regrettably, both died very young. Taking advantage of the works of both of them, I compiled a new lexicon with Latin annotations. In 1912 at the Indochinese Archaeological Commission (Commission archeologique de I 'Indochine), the priest L. Cadiere, also a researcher on the Vietnamese language, read a scientific communiqué on the history the quoc ngu in which he said that having considered the collections of the Library of Vatican, in which he said that it was thanks to the great services of the French, it can be strongly affirmed that it was thanks to the great services of the French, of Bishop Alexandre de Rhodes.!? But only a survey of the first stage of the history of the quoc ngu, in concrete terms, from C. Borri to A. de Rhodes, can help us easily realize the great role played by Portuguese missionaries such as Francesco di Pina, Graspar de Amara, Antonio Barbora in laying the initial foundations for the transcription of the Vietnamese language by means of the Latin alphabet, and see the hall mark of the Portuguese Pronunciation in the transcription of the Vietnamese language. Even in the method of transcribing by C. Borri, an Italian, the transcription was mainly based on the Portuguese language. This was due to the fact that, according to Ch. B. Maybon, at the time "the Portuguese was the communication language for trading with Western people having intercourse with the Vietnamese in the 17th century. The language was not only used by foreign trades and their interpreters, called jerboas, but also by missionaries, Portuguese missionaries of course, and Spanish, Italian or French one. As a clergyman, Christoforo Borri, of course, could use the Portuguese language; on the other hand, the Italian, Spanish and Portuguese people, even when they speak in their mother tongue, can understand one another without much difficulty.

When saying that the laicization of the quoc ngu was the result of collective work, one should not forget the indispensable contribution made by the Vietnamese. A. de Rhodes spoke of the services rendered by "the native people" who helped him learn the Vietnamese language for 12 years; he also mentioned a little native boy who taught him in ' three weeks different sounds of the Vietnamese language, although he did no know French, while A. de Rhodes did no know a single Vietnamese word.Recent researches in the history of Vietnamese language also revealed some Vietnamese friars who had made important contributions to that work, such as Igesico Van Tin, Bento Thien, and Philiphe Binh. Research work should be continued. On the strength of indications about the materials supplied by previous researchers, such as Thang Lang, Hoang Xuan Han, Do Quang Chinh and taking advantage of my study tours at the Library of Vatican, the Paris National Library, I myself embarked my research upon this theme and discussed the question at the Naples College of Oriental Studies, in 1978, and at the Nice University in 1982.21 And here, in Hoi An, I would like to stay: the theme of chu quac ngu, a theme involving a huge amount of materials which any researcher needs and wishes to go through at all foreign libraries, has started on this very land of our country, on the basis of the local pronunciation of this area, with the Vietnamese geographical names which first appeared, and frequently appear, in the pages of foreign researchers' books. They are Hoi An, Da nang, Quang Nam, Quang Ngai, Nuoc Man, Qui Nhon. The Formation of the quoc ngu has evolved in a special social and political context, either in parallel of intertwiningly with complex political events - the invasion of our country by the French colonialists, the establishment of the Christian Congregation in Vietnam - but gradually as we retreat from the length of time separating us from those events, we realize that the invention of the quoc ngu was the beautiful fruit of the fortuitous meeting between Vietnam's national culture and the European nations' Latin culture. In the relationship among nations, all that ia fine in terms of culture will forever.