Vũ Trụ Việt Ngữ: A Universe of Vietnamese Astronomical Terminology Like I once did, you might think a third world agricultural society would have no need for words about outer space.  You’d be wrong; the planets, the space shuttle, astronauts and almost every other word we have for space science can also be found in Vietnamese.. But the cool thing isn’t just that Vietnamese has space words.  A look at where they came from tells us loads about how languages create terms for fields of knowledge new to them.  And the real surprise here is that not only do the Vietnamese have a name for each planet, those names show that they’ve managed to create an alternative to English science vocabulary which nonetheless correctly preserves the original meanings they were translating from.  That isn’t always true: even though they knew Western languages had named the days of the week after the planets, the Vietnamese names translate simply as Day Two, Day Three…, with the only preservation of the Western meanings being  Chúa (Chủ) Nhật – The Lord’s Day. First off, let’s take a look at the Vietnamese names of the planets: Mercury                Thủy Tinh             Glass/crystal/Mercury/vitreous Venus                   Kim Tinh              Gold/Metal/Modern Earth                    Trái Đất                 Sphere of Earth Mars                     Hỏa Tinh               Fire Jupiter                 Mộc Tinh              Wood Saturn                  Thổ Tinh               Soil Uranus                 Thiên Vương Tinh God of Heaven Neptune               Hải Vương Tinh     God of the Sea Pluto                     Diêm Vương Tinh  God of the Underworld Planet                   Hành Tinh            marching star Originally, like the rest of the world, the Vietnamese only knew five other planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, which in addition to the more familiar name above is also sometimes called: Hành Tinh Nhẫn (Ringed World).  And they named them after the five traditional elements used in Chinese cosmology: earth, water, wood, metal and fire.  But they didn’t assign these manes arbitrarily or according to the cycles of these elements they’d learned from the Chinese.  Instead, they named them intuitively – using common sense criteria to name some, and associating the rest with the correct Greek and Roman deities.  Mercury flows like water.  Venus’s clouds are indeed golden and Mars looks red (like fire).  When news of the discovery of the planets beyond Saturn reached the Vietnamese, they named them for the appropriate mythical figure using the fancy-sounding Sino-Vietnamese terms they’d used for centuries. Some other Vietnamese space words are more colorful and less systematic: viễn vọng kính (distance looking glass)=telescope; phi thuyền (nothingness boat)=spaceship; hành tinh nhỏ (small planet)=planetoid/asteroid.  An astronaut is a phi hành gia (nothingness marcher).  Outer Space is simply: không gian (nothingness space).  All galaxies are named after our own dải Ngân Hà or Thiên Hà  (Silver River) after a Chinese myth about a star-crossed couple separated forever by that mysterious band of stars (“sao” in  native Vietnamese, “tinh” from the Chinese on calendars and in horoscopes).  The word for “station” or stop for a bus or train on Earth is trạm, from the Chinese.  So, logically enough, the word “space station” in Vietnamese is “trạm không gian.”  The words for sun and moon (whether it’s our moon or the satellites of other planets) have the word face in them: mặt trời (face of the sky) and mặt trăng (face of the moon).  There are a couple other words for moon, like nguyệt (the Chinese word) and Chị Hằng Nga – a goddess from Vietnamese mythology.  The words for eclipses of the sun and moon reflect the idea that the eclipsed body is being eaten: nhật thực and nguyệt thực respectively, with the Chinese words for the bodies and food respectively simply grafted together.  Another phrase, gấu ăn trăng, means literally: bear eating the moon.  Phan Ngọc Lũy’s autobiography, Hồi Ký Một Đời Người, shows how traditional northern Vietnamese villages used to deal with these events.  Every family hastened to bang loudly on water buckets to get the bear to cough up the moon he’d just eaten.  It’s less clear where vệ tinh (satellite) comes from, though perhaps the sense of “protective star” makes sense, since vệ means both “to protect” and “a group of five hundred soldiers.” Vietnamese, then, has its own words for scientific and far-off phenomena.  Like every tongue on Earth, it is capable of expressing any idea and naming any object its speakers deem important.  Browsing the best Vietnamese-language astronomy sites is a fun and edifying evening’s work.  But if you don’t have that kind of time, or you need a first class technical or scientific translation yesterday, see the “Business Services” area of my site, and drop me a line!