the-self-as-your-mother. In vivid contrast to their English cousin, the
statement-conditions presupposed by the Vietnamese mode of self-reference
would seem to assume an ontology of 'ego-profiles', each revealing the self
in one of its relational aspects. [38]

Yet again, Vietnamese has no pronoun which could represent the display of
the ego itself in self-referential sentences. And it may therefore seem
implausible that a Vietnamese ontology of self-reference could, by itself,
accommodate the Husserlian insight that ego-profiles are the various
manners in which a single ego exhibits itself to itself. And lacking any
pronoun which could represent the ego simpliciter, the only sense of 'ego'
accessible to speakers of Vietnamese might seem to be that of a mere
collection, a mere bundle, of ego-profiles. The self appears to fragment
into a multiplicity of externally related shards. [39] But in fact the
typical Vietnamese has no difficulty at all in recognising the identity of
a single self as given through the manifold of disparate ego-profiles.
The-self-as-your-mother and the-self-as-your-child are not experienced as
distinct selves, but as disparate modes of presentation of a single self.
The unity of all is a unity present in each. Vietnamese stands in no need
of a self-referential expression representing this unity as such, for the
unity as such is an internal component of each ego-profile. The English 'I'
(or Husserl's 'Ich') is lamentably impoverished. An ontology of
ego-profiles entails an ontology of the ego, but the converse does not
hold. The Vietnamese self-referential ontology thus enjoys a richness of
content which vastly exceeds that of English.

Vietnamese does not allow a direct and undifferentiated access to the self,
but requires rather that the self itself be variously presentable to
itself. The Vietnamese ontology of self-reference features a type of
self-referential act which is essentially 'mediated'. A significant
footnote of Husserl's logical Investigations advances the insight that the
self (ego) is as much an instance of transcendence as a table or a chair.
[40] For Husserl, the empirical ego is a 'pole' of reflexive intentional
reference, an 'object' (or objectivity), that is, constituted as an
identity across a manifold of alternative manners of appearing. Yet though
the Vietnamese language provides powerful confirmation of a certain
egological unity laced through the manifold manners of its appearing, it is
not clear that the pole-model of transcendence is adequate to account for
it. The 'pole', stolid, uncompromised, indifferent to its modes of
appearing, is an ideal candidate as a purported referent for the
transcontextually invariant 'I'. I submit, however, that the unitary sense
of self enjoyed by Vietnamese, no less than by speakers of English, cannot
be accounted for by a 'maypole' which tethers the coloured streamers of
alternative ego-appearances. Nor is the ego a mere button-collection of
ego-profiles. It is, rather, their Gestalt: Each ego-profile discloses, not
a pole, but rather the organically unified whole of ego-profiles itself.

The English 'I' and the self-referential expressions of Vietnamese are
'referential' only in a derivative and secondary sense. Neither 'I' nor
'me' refers, in the strict and proper sense. Such expressions serve rather
to 'reveal' or 'mirror' the self's reference to itself. The Vietnamese mode
of self-reference illustrates the self's capacity, not merely to refer to
itself simpliciter, but to refer to itself as ... Were it possible for
'reference-as' to be construed in terms of simple reference, the
V-expressions might be absorbed without remainder into English with the
simple deployment of disjunction. And if so, then V-expressions would
present no philosophical quandaries for self-reference beyond those that
surround the analysis of 'I'.

'Me suy-nghi does (propositionally) imply that I am thinking and, in the
real-world context, that I believe myself to be your mother. It is the
converse that we must reject as untenable. For what could account for the
severance of what is, in appearance at least, a single Viemamese
proposition into two English propositions? The predicate, 'suy-nghi goes
over without a complaint into the English 'am thinking'. Nothing about the
meaning-content of the Vietnamese predicate could account for this curious
episode of propositional mitosis. We must, then, look directly at the
pronoun, 'me', for the answer. 'Me', however, if it were to refer
(simpliciter) at all, could refer only to what 'I' refers to: my/self.
Without invoking 'reference-as', it is extremely difficult to see what
basis might remain for the bifurcation, if not that 'I' and 'me' reveal
different modes of self-reference. It is not that the two pronouns reveal
different selves. The one rather purports to reveal the see and the other,
the self-as. And this, of course, runs counter to an extensionalist concern