The man who didn't start it, but finished it
Alexandre de Rhodes (1591–1660) was a French-born Jesuit missionary from Avignon who arrived in Vietnam in 1624. He is widely — and somewhat unfairly — credited as the sole inventor of quốc ngữ (國語, "national language script"), the Latin-based writing system that Vietnamese uses today. The reality is more collaborative and more interesting.
The real pioneer was Francisco de Pina, a Portuguese Jesuit who arrived in Vietnam around 1617 and became the first European known to have mastered spoken Vietnamese. De Pina began developing a romanization system and training other missionaries to use tonal marks, but he drowned in a shipwreck in 1625, leaving his work unfinished. Rhodes, who had studied under de Pina, inherited and systematized that work.
The 1651 dictionary: a linguistic triumph
Rhodes' Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum ("Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary") was printed in Rome by the Vatican press in 1651. It is a three-column lexicon in which each Vietnamese entry is rendered in the new romanized script, then glossed in Portuguese and Latin. But the dictionary's true achievement is its phonological apparatus:
- Vietnamese has six lexical tones (in northern Vietnamese). Rhodes had to represent all six using Latin letters plus diacritic marks — a feat with no precedent in European typography.
- He used the acute accent (´), grave accent (`), hook above (̉), tilde (˜), and a dot below (.) — some stacked on top of each other — to distinguish five of the six tones. The sixth (level/flat) is unmarked.
- He also devised digraphs (nh, ng, kh, gh, ph, th, tr, ch) and modified vowels (ă, â, ê, ô, ơ, ư) to capture Vietnamese phonemes that Latin had no letters for.
The result was a script that, once learned, was far easier to read than Chữ Nôm. A European priest could become functionally literate in Vietnamese in months; Chữ Nôm required years.
Why Rhodes and not Korea or Japan?
Christian missionaries attempted romanization in Japan too. The Portuguese Jesuit João Rodrigues produced a superb Arte da Lingoa de Iapam (1604) and romanized dictionaries, but Japan banned Christianity and expelled the missionaries in 1614, barred Portuguese ships in 1639, and the romanization died with them. Korea saw no comparable attempt at all: Catholicism only reached the peninsula in the 1780s, and the earliest Western romanizations of Korean are nineteenth-century (Siebold 1832; the Ross system, 1882). By then Korea already had Hangul — a domestically invented alphabet, long dismissed by the Confucian literati as 諺文 eonmun, "vulgar script," but ideally suited to the vernacular, and the missionaries simply adopted it rather than inventing an alphabet of their own.
Vietnam had no equivalent of Hangul. Chữ Nôm was brilliant but never became truly popular: it was unstandardized, difficult, and closely associated with the Vietnamese elite. When French colonizers aggressively promoted quốc ngữ — first making it the required script for official documents in the south (1882), then abolishing the Confucian examinations in 1919 — the population simply had no alternative rallying point. The Latin script filled the vacuum.
Tone diacritics: the system that survived
The diacritic system Rhodes created for six tones is still used today, almost unchanged:
- Tone 1 (ngang — level): unmarked — ma (ghost)
- Tone 2 (huyền — falling): grave accent — mà (but)
- Tone 3 (sắc — rising): acute — má (mother)
- Tone 4 (hỏi — dipping): hook — mả (tomb)
- Tone 5 (ngã — broken): tilde — mã (horse)
- Tone 6 (nặng — heavy): dot below — mạ (rice seedling)
Six words, one syllable each, completely different meanings — distinguished purely by diacritics stacked on a single vowel. The system is elegant but typographically demanding: a single Vietnamese vowel can carry two stacked marks simultaneously (e.g., ộ = circumflex + dot below), which caused enormous problems for early Vietnamese-language printing presses and keyboard designers alike.
The irony of legacy
Rhodes was expelled from Vietnam by Vietnamese authorities in 1645 for proselytizing. He made his way back to Rome by 1649 and spent the next five years in Italy and France lobbying for bishops and funding for the Vietnam mission — the groundwork for the Paris Foreign Missions Society, founded after he left. In November 1654 his superiors sent him not to Vietnam but to Persia, where he died at Isfahan in 1660. His 1651 dictionary, published in Rome while he was thousands of miles from Vietnam, became an important early reference for a writing system now used throughout the country. Missionaries developed quốc ngữ for Christian texts; it was later adopted for secular publishing, nationalist writing, education and state administration.