Languagle #85: Vietnamese
Có công mài sắt, có ngày nên kim
"Grind away at iron long enough and one day you'll have a needle."
What it means
Keep at it and you will get there. Grind a bar of iron for long enough and you will end up with a needle. A saying about perseverance turning something unpromising into something fine.
How to say it
kaw kohng mai sut, kaw ngai nayn kim
Vietnamese is tonal, with six tones, and the accents mark them: an acute accent rises, a grave accent falls, and no mark means a level tone.
Word by word
- Có kaw (rising): to have, if you have
- công kohng (level): effort
- mài mai (falling): grind
- sắt sut (rising): iron
- có ngày kaw ngai (rising, falling): there will be a day
- nên nayn (level): becomes
- kim kim (level): needle
Where it was found
Vietnamese calls a proverb a tục ngữ. This one is from Vietnamese Wikiquote.
Similar sayings
- Chinese: 只要功夫深，铁杵磨成针 (zhǐ yào gōng fu shēn, tiě chǔ mó chéng zhēn). With enough effort, an iron rod can be ground into a needle.
How to recognise Vietnamese
Vietnamese is written in the Latin alphabet with more accents than any other language: a single letter can carry two, as in ế, ộ or ữ. It also has đ, ơ and ư. Every word is a single syllable, with spaces between them. Yoruba also marks tones with accents, but never stacks them like this.
About the Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language spoken by around 85 million people as a first language, in Vietnam and in large communities abroad. It is tonal: the northern dialect has six tones, marked with accents, so the same syllable can mean entirely different things. Much of its vocabulary comes from Chinese, and it was long written in Chinese characters. Its modern Latin alphabet, chữ Quốc ngữ, was developed by European missionaries in the 1600s and became standard in the 20th century.
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