Associate Professor Dr. Bui Hien, the 'father' of the controversial national language reform project, has just passed away.

According to information from relatives and some friends, Associate Professor Dr. Bui Hien passed away on the afternoon of May 11 at his home in Viet Tri City, Phu Tho Province, at the age of 90.

The visitation will be held at 1:00 p.m. on May 12, the memorial service and funeral will be held at 6:30 a.m. on May 13 at his hometown Vinh Chan, Ha Hoa, Phu Tho.

The project to improve the national language caused fierce controversy.

In November 2017, Thanh Nien Newspaper published an article about the reform of the national language by Associate Professor, Dr. Bui Hien (When 'Vietnamese' is written as 'Tieq Viet'), which attracted the attention of hundreds of thousands of readers. There were many conflicting views on this reformed language, and at that time, there were even fierce debates on social networks. Many people had extreme words, insulting Associate Professor, Dr. Bui Hien.

PGS-TS Bùi Hiền, — Associate Professor, Dr. Bui Hien took this photo at the end of 2023.

Accordingly, the improved national language of author Bui Hien is based on the cultural language of the capital Hanoi in terms of both basic phonemes and 6 standard tones, the principle that each letter represents only one phoneme, and each phoneme has only one corresponding letter to represent it. The letter Đ will be removed from the current Vietnamese alphabet and some Latin letters such as F, J, W, Z will be added. In addition, the phonemic values of the 11 existing letters in the above table will be changed, specifically: C = Ch, Tr; D = Đ; G = G, Gh; F = Ph; K = C, Q, K; Q = Ng, Ngh; R = R; S = S; X = Kh; W = Th; Z = d, gi, r. Because the sound "nhờ" (nh) does not have a new character to replace it, the above text temporarily uses the compound character n' to express it.

Many linguists find Associate Professor Dr. Bui Hien's proposal reasonable because this writing has a unified principle. But there are also many opposing opinions because they think that if improved like that, it will be complicated and have many consequences.

However, according to Associate Professor Hien, this improvement will unify the writing system for the whole country, eliminate most of the shortcomings and inconsistencies that previously caused difficulties for users (spelling mistakes), simplify the alphabet from 38 letters to only 31, making it easy to grasp the rules and easy to remember. In addition, it also saves time, effort, and materials in the process of creating documents on paper and on computers.

After that, Associate Professor Bui Hien continued to research to perfect his work on improving the national language. In December 2017, he received a Certificate of Copyright Registration from the Copyright Office (Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism) for the work Improving the National Language.

In early 2018, he converted the work Truyen Kieu consisting of 3,254 six-eight verses into his own improved script and self-printed it into a book. At the end of 2018, Associate Professor - Dr. Bui Hien's grandson, Bui Tien (graduated from Hanoi University of Architecture) and a close friend created a conversion software 'tiew Viet' as a gift for his grandfather, helping to convert literary or journalistic works into improved script with just a few steps.

Associate Professor, Dr. Bui Hien has devoted his life to Russian and improved writing.

Associate Professor Dr. Bui Hien was sent by the State to study Russian in China. After graduating, in 1955 he returned to Vietnam and was assigned to be in charge of the Russian Department of the Foreign Language School in Hanoi. When the Hanoi University of Foreign Languages and Education (now the University of Foreign Languages, Vietnam National University, Hanoi) was established in 1967, Associate Professor Dr. Bui Hien was assigned to be in charge of the Russian Department.

In 1973, he defended his associate doctoral thesis (now PhD) with excellent results at MV Lomonosov Moscow State University.

After successfully defending his thesis, he returned home and continued working at Hanoi University of Foreign Languages.

In 1974, he held the position of Vice Principal of Hanoi University of Foreign Languages. In 1978, he returned to the Ministry of Education and Training to be in charge of foreign languages in educational reform.

After that, Associate Professor, Dr. Bui Hien worked as Deputy Director of the Institute of General Teaching Content and Methods under the Vietnam Institute of Educational Sciences until his retirement in 1993.

During his decades of retirement and in his final years, Associate Professor Dr. Bui Hien still diligently read books, researched and was always passionate about improving the national language. He wrote many articles such as "The role of the national language in the 4.0 industrial revolution", "Handbook of improved national language"...

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/pgs-ts-bui-hien-cha-de-cong-trinh-cai-tien-chu-quoc-ngu-day-song-vua-qua-doi-1852505121000336.htm