Turning Vietnamese

Ooh, I hope rollick doesn't stand me up tonight! I even brought along my (crappy*) Vietnamese dictionary in order to unlock the mysteries of the menus. For instance, if--as I strongly suspect--the name of the "forest meat" place is correctly spelled Như ݆, then it means, literally, "like idea". A more colloquial translation would be "as one wishes". This could refer to the fact that diners apparently have the option of grilling the meat at table or it could just be an ornate name. The Chinese equivalent, ru2yi4 is commonplace on scrolls and New Year's decorations.

*It's Hippocrene!
†How I wish the whole world were Unicode-compliant! I know Vietnamese diacriticals seem nightmarish, but each serves a purpose. The difference between u and ư is whether the lips are rounded or not. The first sound is like English "oo"; the second has no exact equivalent--except in certain dialects--but it also exists in Korean. (welcomerain: It's the vowel that looks like a plain horizontal line.) Similarly, the spelling phở tells you that the vowel is also unrounded (it also has a near-equivalent in Korean), therefore more like English "uh" than "owe", and that the word ends with a glottal stop.‡

‡Whoo-hoo! A footnote longer than the entry itself! See, Ma, that's where all that tuition money went!