Thread: Vietnamese Tea
View Single Post
  #10 (permalink)   Report Post  
Scott Dorsey
 
Posts: n/a
Default

Space Cowboy > wrote:
>Amazing. The official language is Guoc Ngu based on Latin character
>set used by Catholic missionaries in the 17th century. It could
>accomodate the tonal sounds. It evolved from Chinese to Western
>characters. Maybe our resident language expert can add more. Thai
>Nguyen is a province north of Hanoi noted for premium green teas. I'd
>like to find some Vietnamese form of pu from the area that borders
>Yunnan. It is part of the swath of mountainous jungle called Upper
>India which contains the tea trees which became the cultivated bush in
>China.


Originally there was a written language called "Nom" (with a circumflex
over the O), which used chinese characters but was phonetic. It was
_very_ rapidly replaced with the current latin alphabetic method... by
the late 19th century there were only a handful of historians who could
read Nom.

If you walk around cities in Vietnam, you'll see inscriptions in buildings
in Nom all over the place, and not a single one of the people passing by
know what they mean. This is kind of sad.

My suspicion is that the notation you're seeing on the tea boxes isn't
Nom at all, but is actual Chinese. It's easy enough to find out by
using a Chinese dictionary.
--scott

--
"C'est un Nagra. C'est suisse, et tres, tres precis."