On April 13, a seminar with film screening about the inauguration ceremony for the Father Alexandre de Rhodes memorial at the Armenian Cemetery in Isfahan, Iran, took place at Duy Tan University, 03 Quang Trung campus. It was attended by Hero of Labor and Distinguished Teacher Le Cong Co, DTU President; Prof. Nguyen Dang Hung, Director of the Institute for the Appreciation of the Quoc Ngu script and the Conservation of the Vietnamese Language; a great many DTU staff and lecturers; as well as many interested people.
Prof. Nguyen Dang Hung talking about the Alexandre de Rhodes memorial inauguration
To start, the attendees watched a short documentary on the erection of the Father Alexandre de Rhodes memorial and the solemn inauguration ceremony held at Father Alexandre de Rhodes’s grave in the morning of November 5, 2018, his 358th deathday.
At the screening of the Alexandre de Rhodes memorial inauguration, Prof. Nguyen Dang Hung explained the long journey full of obstacles but also with a lot of emotion and significance to bring the 1.6 m-long and 0.4 m-high stone tablet from Quang Nam province to Isfahan in Iran and to solemnly erect it at Father Alexandre de Rhodes’s grave. The stele is engraved with the words “In gratitude to Father Alexandre de Rhodes for his large contributions to the creation of the quoc ngu Latin-alphabet Vietnamese script” in four languages, including Vietnamese and Persian.
DTU staff and lecturers at the seminar
As part of the seminar, Prof. Nguyen Dang Hung and many other scholars affirmed the immense significance of the perfection and popularization of the quoc ngu script to all aspects of life and to the development of culture, education, and science and technology.
“It is known that the Christian missionaries initially only wanted an efficient way to spread their faith,” Prof. Nguyen Dang Hung explained at the Alexandre de Rhodes memorial inauguration, “but their attention and scientific approach led to the creation of a wonderful cultural artifact which allowed the Vietnamese to rapidly integrate with the cultural world and Vietnamese children to learn to read and write more quickly, bypassing the headache of the ideographic writing borrowed from China"
“Father Alexandre de Rhodes made big contributions to the Vietnamese integration to the cultural world more than 350 years before other Asian nations! This is also the fruit of a clear and long-lasting Eurasian cultural exchange of first rate for mankind.”
(Media Center)