Vietnamese, a language that had centuries ago been cast into a neat Romanized script, chased with tildes, circumflexes, breves, acute and grave accents, an oblation from the Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes. The Jesuit, like all missionaries after him, understood the power of literacy. The written word never stops proselytizing, never dies of malaria, and has an uncanny tendency to reproduce, an act that he as a man of God was not privy to. The Jesuit dismantled the ideographs of Vietnam and taught his converts their catechisms in a language reconfigured for the sake of simplicity. Easier to learn
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