RE: Marilyn Monroe

[ianb@sun670.telecom.tandem.com (Ian Bui)]

Hello ba'c Frank and everyone,

There was hardly anything riveting about the "Ma~ Le^. Ye^'n 
Mo^.ng Lo^~" story. It got stuck in my mind simply because of 
the hilariousness of it when Mr. Le Thuong told it to the class.

It's been almost a quarter-century and I can only remember
very vaguely the lesson of that day. I think he was explaining 
the Chinese way of phoneticizing Western names and converting
them into Chinese characters. In the process somehow the "R"s
turned into "L"s; and as we converted the Chinese terms into
Vietnamese the result sometimes sounded quite funny -- as was
in the case of Marilyn Monroe :))

For a dry subject like History of Oriental Music, I think Le 
Thuong did a wonderful job of keeping us awake and interested
most of the times. He was a very humble but funny man, and he
sure knew his stuff. I only wish that I could retain more...

Ian