In the first episode of Tìm Lại Tiếng Xưa (“Retracing Old Sounds”), Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Thị Phương Trang joins host Nguyễn Thị Phương Trâm to discuss the research, transliteration, and annotated edition of Philiphê Bỉnh’s Sách sổ sang chép các việc.

Philiphê Bỉnh, a young Vietnamese Jesuit, spent more than thirty years in Portugal at the end of the eighteenth century. Unlike Alexandre de Rhodes’s Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (1651), his 1822 work remains little known—owing to its modest scale, its character as a personal memoir by a then-obscure author, and the limited conditions for printing and circulating handwritten manuscripts in Vietnam. Yet for anyone interested in Vietnamese and its history, it is a valuable source preserving traces of late-eighteenth-century Vietnamese writing, including distinctive consonant clusters, lengthened vowels, and tone-marking conventions that have since evolved.

Read Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nguyễn Thị Phương Trang's work Dấu ấn tiếng Việt on Digitizing Việt Nam.

Read Philiphê Bỉnh's Sách sổ sang chép các việc on Wikisource.