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(Continued)
II) THE CHINESE CONNECTION
The section below depicts an overall picture of Chinese immigrants' full integration into Vietnamese society since the ancient times, which will help explain why there exist so many Chinese words in the Vietnamese language, including numerous basic vocabularies. It is an attempt to explain the reasons that underline the similarities between the two languages where contemporary Vietnamese carries virtually most of the traits and peculiarities of many Chinese dialects, that should place Vietnamese on par with other languages in the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family.
The purpose of this discussion, in any cases, is not to draw direct genetic linguistic affinity of Vietnamese and Chinese but to demonstrate their linked kinship. Metaphorically, "direct genetic linguistic affinity" here is like a well-written storyline that reads: "Once upon a time there was the mother Sino-Tibetan who gave birth to proto-Sinitic children, ancestors of the Ancient Chinese and Vietnamese..." However, the task of proving this relationship, admittedly, has never been satisfactory, it only to lead to more speculations, not definite answers or significant results in a well-defined manner.
In the meanwhile, for their "linked kinship", as the meaning of this term being conveyed in itself, we could only sort out their entanglement and puzzles with a few findings scarcely available at our disposal so far. The whole picture of the core matter from the start has been presented to us in this case, literally, is exactly like that of an old and faded painting. Accordingly, in the same manner as we would try to restore and rebuild some sketchy details from it, we shall first try to envision the whole picture based solely on revealing transient shades of diminishing colors overlapping each other that try to convey to us anecdotal sketches of the bygones: "More than three thousand years ago the mother proto-Taic had given birth to one hundred children, of whom fifty were married to the orphans of the formerly powerful Shang family and founded the Kingdom of the Zhou. They gave birth to the Qin, the Han, the Chu..., and then when they fought against each other, some moved south to join their long lost cousins, who were later called by the name the BaiYues, including the XiYue, LuoYue, OuYue, MinYue, YueChang... They were descendants of the other fifty children who had gone there in the earlier breakups. All together they joined and, in turn, gave birth to the Dai, the Zhuang, the Yao, the Miao, the Mon, the Austroasiatic stocks, the proto-VietMuong groups, etc... They, again, fought among themselves and only, in 208 BC, ended up to be ruled by a former Qin's general called Trieu Da (趙陀 Zhao Tuo) who had formed a short-lived NamViet State which later was conquered and annexed to the greater empire of the Han Dynasty and a part of it became Annam Protectorate (Annam Dohophu 安南都護府). In Annam the Vietmuong groups further broke up to form, linguistically, the proto-Vietic speech, spoken by those who chose to stay behind under the ruling umbrella of the Han Dynasty, and the proto-Muong linguistic form preserved by those who fled into the remote mountainous areas. The former, having endured further the imposition of the Han's culture and language, had blended itself with the Han dialectal form known as the Ancient Chinese, gradually gave rise to the Vietic linguistic form, which undoubtedly was the ancestral language of today's Vietnamese. So to speak, the "linked kinship" between the Chinese language and Vietnamese was dated back not only from the periods of the Zhou Dynasty, of which proto-Taic remnants had scattered and merged in all languages spoken by descendants of the BaiYue, including those of the Austroasiatic stock, but also continued on and further blossomed into a new linguistic form spoken by the Kinh. Albeit, that is how Vietnamese has anything to do with the Sino-Tibetan lnguistic family from ancient times since the pre-Sinitic linguistic form encountered the proto-Taic elements onward. We will discuss those descriptive details again, intentionally emphasized, more than once since they are the most important factors along with other historical facts of more than 1000 year domination of the ancient land of Vietnam by the Chinese.
A) Hypothesis of Chinese origin of Vietnamese
Historically, the fact that Vietnam had gone though a millennium of Chinese domination, from 111 BC to 936 AD, not to mention short inverals of other Chinese invasions long after that until the end of the 19th century, is enough to ascertain the active linguistic roles that had facilitated the integration of Ancient Chinese (AC) words into, supposedly, the proto-Vietic (PV) speech. In its evolution such earlier form of the Vietnamese language (Vietnamese for short) had absorbed thousands of them from ancient to contemporary and dialectal variations of the early Chinese language (as usual, to be mentioned only as "Chinese" in this general context throughout this paper) in different historical stages, from the early Han to the end of the Tang Dynasties, by way of both borrowing and localizing a great number of Chinese vocabularies. Many Ancient Chinese glosses in Vietnamese since then had undergone a great deal of sound changes in colloquial speech throughout the ages, mostly without recorded local phonetic transcriptions before the emergence of the Nôm characters (see below), and they eventually have emerged as impartable elements in Vietnamese as they appear at present time. In our modern time, like those written languages of the Indo-European linguistic family, the force of sound changes have slowed down considerably since the adaption of Romanized Vietnamese writing system in the early twentieth century.
In addition, factors of waves after waves of Chinese migrating population from China should also accounted as direct result for their bringing Chinese vernacular linguistic influence into Vietnamese. Their emigrating path is a sure southward movement that might have continuously taken place in any given period over the past 3000 years in Chinese history given the hypothetical assumption that today's composition of the Vietnamese anthropology, as figuratively mentioned previously, has been a mixture of Chinese immigrants from further northern territories with one of the local Yuè 粵 (or 越, Yue, Yueh) of the larger tribal groups of BaiYue 百越 or BáchViệt , whose descendants, being known as the Dai 傣 ("Tày"), Máonán 毛南, Zhuāng 莊, Tóng 垌 ("Nùng"), Shuǐ 水, and many others, diverged from an earlier stock of proto-Taic people as previously mentioned. Periods prior to 3 millennia B.C. the Proto-Taic people had been the masters of those vast southern regions, embracing today's China's provinces including those of Sichuan, Yunnan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Jiangsu, Fujian, and Guangdong, stretching from both of the banks of the Yangtze River all the way to the seas, east and south. They presumably had been the ancestors of the Kings of the Zhou and their subjects, the pre-Chinese and other ethnic stocks, whose generations later made up the Chinese and other ethnic minorities still living there nowadays.
Long after having emerged from the proto-Taic groups toward the end of the Zhou Dynasty many tribal groups of the BaiYue were constantly on the move southwards. Archaeological findings in the last five decades reveal that the proto-Taic aboriginals had long been in contact with the people in the far north, in this case, the original, pre-Sinitic, or "Chinese" people prior to their nation's expansion to the far south, as early as 4000 years ago (Shifan Peng, 1987). Descendants of those earlier northerners might have later become subjects of the Qin State, a powerful one among six other ancient states during the Warring Period after the breakup of the Zhou Dynasty. Portions of all other tribal groups living with those states, for the reason that they could have not been able to protect their farming land and to assimilate to the early Chinese culture, ran away from the advancing force of a much more powerful people from a newly unified Qin Empire. Those who fled to the south were undoubtedly ancestors of the so-called proto-Austroasiatic peoples whose variant speeches had eventually formed the Austroasiatic linguistic family in the farther vast southern regions as classed by other modern western scholars.
In a later development starting from the Han Dynasty, during the span of one thousand years of Chinese domination of Vietnam before her independence from the Tang Dynasty in 936 AD, from where was now known as China more immigrants from north and south, just like their predecessors, generally, had been of a mixture of poor peasants fleeing from ravaging wars and hunger back home, exhausted long-march soldiers on endlessly conquering and pacifying missions, and a great number of disgraced political exiles along with their accompanied family purged and punished by temperamental dynasties that they had served (Bo Yang. 1983-1993. Zī Zhì Tōngjiàn) (1) Many of them, probably mostly men, had chosen to settle in places of where today's Vietnam's northern territories are. Most of them might have been married into Vietnamese families and they never returned to their homeland. Over the years and many generations later they had been totally assimilated into the newly emerged Annamese society by having blended within the dominant ethnic group later identified as "Kinh", or Vietnamese. At the same time, those newcomers had brought along with them their own dialects -- of which the linguistic sub-strata had already absorbed some of the proto-Taic vernacular elements, e.g. the Amoy (廈門 Xiàmén) or Cantonese groups -- which continued injecting their fresh colloquial elements into the local speech in their new resettlement. This assimilation process must have been occurring rather slowly and gradually among the majority descended from the original "Pre-Kinh" who had long resettled there ("resettled" here means that the local people might also immigrated from regions further in the north before the Chinese expansion to the south.) These gradualness and majority factors help explain why today's Vietnamese could not be considered as a Chinese dialect of the same nature as Cantonese or Fukienese (Amoy) since it demonstrates clearly an outstanding local grammatical order, prominently and dominantly, that is, adjectives being placed after nouns. This grammatical characteristic had certainly been inherited from the original proto-Taic speech along with the later Archaic Chinese grammatical forms (this reverse word order still can be found in many Chinese dialects.) Albeit, its other peculiar linguistic characteristics and vocabularies are mostly on par semantically and phonologically with those of Chinese(2).
On becoming a majority, the new racially mixed populace later called themselves "NgườiKinh", or the Kinh, (literally meaning "the metropolitans"), whose dominant presence and establishments along the Red River's Delta and low fertile plains along the eastern coastline had further pushed and displaced indegenous stocks, believed to have spoken Mon-Khmer languages, among other languages of Daic origin as spoken by 1.2 million of Tay and other ethnic groups living in the northern parts of today's Vietnam, farther into remote high plateaus in western mountainous ranges. Those tribal groups later on practically became minorities in their own ancestral land(3). For that reason, it is not hard to understand that if those ethnic groups had been of the same anthropological composition as that of the Kinh, they might not have been badly treated with such a harsh way while the much later racially and culturally distinct Chinese ethnic immigrants have been treated fairly well, of whom the population growth and social integration must have been a much later development (4). This fact mentioned here is only to reinforce the idea that all Chinese immigrants who came to this nation would eventually become native in a span of time as short as within three generations -- many living Vietnamese could be your active informants of this subtle reality. It is so due to the cultural factors that easily submerge the Chinese newcomers into the melting pot that readily to welcome those new arrivals of the same Confucian culture. Partially linguistic similarities facilitate the assimilation process at a faster pace as well. As we cann see the same process could hardly take place in those countries where Austroasiatic or Autronesian languages are spoken. Statistics of the so-called overseas Chinese in those countries in the Southeast Asian regions point to that fact very clearly, i.e., percentage of Chinese minority is significantly higher than that of Vietnam.
Historically the Kinh people had continued to expand vigorously and moved further to the south away from the confined regions around today's Vietnam's Red River's ancient fertile delta. Archaeologically excavated evidences found there now include all bronze drums, which had long been forgotten lying deeply in the earth, bearing similar decorating carving of cultural motifs such as wooden boats and long feather birds, etc., similarly as those appear on the bronze drums of the Zhuang ("Nùng"), the largest ethnic goup with a population of more than 20 million people in China's southern Guangxi Autonomous Administrative Region. Contrary to the fact that while the fate of their siblings' bronze drums buried dead and forgotten in the Vietnam's soil, those same type of bronze drums have been continuously used by the contemporary Zhuang descendants of their ancestral creators as culturally and ritually ceremonial objects since ancient times until the present time. As a matter of fact, we can assume that the masters of the Dongson's and Hoabinh's bronze drums had been genetically related to those of the Zhuang, who, some hundred years later after mixed up with other indegenous peoples, including those of both Austroasiatic and Austronesian groups, and the later Chinese immigrants, have completely forgotten the technology of how to make those drums. The Chinese cultural factors could also to blame for their extinction since the conquer of the Annamese land initiated by the Han Dynasty that had totally rendered them meaningless culturally. It is only in that context that the claims made by today's Vietnamese archaeologists are valid, that the bronze unearthed in those areas belonged to "Vietnamese ancestors" who actually had been on the becoming until the coming of the Han's soldiers as accounted for in the recorded history of this nation. For the same reasons, any other claims appear irrelevant, amusingly enough, with the same statement that artifact findings excavated in the much farther southern parts of today's Vietnam's territories also belonged to the "Vietnamese ancestors". It is simply because no Vietnamese "ancestors" had ever been existant in those streches of land which have been only annexed to the Vietnam nation as lately as five centuries ago after further expansion of the Vietnam's empire into the south when its southern neighbors had been weak from the start of the 12th century. In fact, it was only from that period the Vietnamese people have begun emmigrating en masse to have crossed far beyond the province of Thuanhoa, where many centuries later the Old Capital Hue was established, and continued to expand all the way to the southern tip of Camau Province and, literally, kept stretching out into the Gulf of Cambodia and Thailand. Of those pieces of annexed land that formerly used to be parts of the now extinct Cham, Funan, and Khmer Kingdoms, whatever remains today belongs to the nation of Cambodia.
This hypothesis of the Chinese racial integration into the Vietnamese society, rather controversal though, where there existed already racially mixed groups of diffrent peoples of the ancient Yues, former Chinese immigrants, and aboriginals dated back from ancient times, will shed lights on the physical traits of those populace living in the far northern part of Vietnam who look much more like Chinese than those of the indigenous people or those of Polynesian and Malay (of the Austronesian stocks) or of the Mon-Khmer descents (of the Austroasiatic stocks). The melting pot ideas can also be used to explain why all Vietnamese carry Chinese surnames, and, geographically, that is also the reason why virtually almost all the place names where wthose earlier settlers and the Kinh have ever lived bear all the names of those places in China, eg., Hànam 'Henan', Hàbắc 'Hebei', Sơntây 'Shanxi', Hànội 'Henei', Tháinguyên 'Taiyuan', Quảngnam (or 'Guangnan' as opposed to Guangdong and Guangxi), Bắcninh or Tâyninh (or 'Beining' and "Xining" as opposed to Nanning), and so on (just like the English geographical names in existence in the US east coast.)
To prove this hypothesis we will face the problem that the historical records, that the Vietnamese are still having, dated only from the 10th century until now, do not cover that. Any anthrologists who wish to study the origin of the Vietnamese people, must dig into Chinese ancient records to find out. As a result we are back to the square one where we have started with our biological traits and the language itself to fondle. Anthropologically, hopefully, in the near future new DNA bio-technology will certainly help anthropologists discover more scientific facts about the Vietnamese people's biological composition. For the latter, that is what I am trying to do, it is no doubt that modern Vietnamese shares its linguistic characteristics in its large stock of vocabularies with those of Chinese than any other sources.
How do we build that linguistic hypothesis? In Vietnam's contemporary history, the fact that the colonization of the country by the French colonists from 1861 to 1954 had produced a nouveau class of intelligentsia, including the Vietnam's last King, Bao Dai, who could barely converse in their mother's tongue, would not surprise anybody when it comes to the Chinese origin of Vietnamese etymology with the same Chinese analogy. That mutational reconstructive theory is highly plausible if we compare that to the hypothesis based on the fact that in Vietnam's recent history from 1965 to 1975, the presence of Americans soldiers on the Vietnam's soil had produced nearly 50 thousand Amerasians mothered by Vietnamese women in such a short period of time. Elsewhere in the world, in modern time, we can still find the transformational and mutational, genetically and linguistically, similarities in the biological and linguistic compositions, such as those of Spaniards and their influence of less than 500 years of colonization which make up the peoples currently living in all the South America's countries.
In the case of Vietnam, while most previous Chinese immigrants have successfully blended themselves into the general local population, many of the more recent ones from Guangdong (Canton), Fujian (Fukien), and other parts of China's southern provinces who had migrated to Vietnam later for the last past four hundred years especially since the fall of the Chinese Ming Dynasty might have still remained distinctively Chinese and have been identified as of several different Chinese ethnic groups, namely the "Minhhương" (descendants of the Ming's subjects), Chaozhou (Tcheochow), Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, and Fukienese. For a large majority of these later groups, many of them might also have already fully absorbed into Vietnamese society. Just ask a Vietnamese, chances are that three or four out of ten persons will be still able to tell you how they bear a Vietnamese version of their Chinese last names.
In addition to the Chinese immigrating factor, the linguistic penetration of vast Chinese lexicons into Vietnamese vocabulary stock had been also the results of forceful imposition of the use of the Chinese language on the local people under the rule of Chinese invading authorities during their one thousand (1,000) years of domination of the then Vietnam. During that time, "Vietnam", which was then called under the several names including Namviệt, Annam, Giaochỉ, Giaochâu, ÐạicồViệt, ÐạiViệt... had long been considered as a protectorate or prefecture of China. Inevitably, the Chinese influence had gradually found its way into all arrays of the Vietnamese language permanently, from basic linguistic stratum, distinguishable from the core indigenous remnants originated from the proto-Taic forms as pointed out earlier, to an upper scholarly vocabulary stock, which have been used by the Vietnamese widely in all walks of daily life up to the present time.
In modern time, again, look at the Spanish influence that exist in those Latin nations and you will see clearly the parallel development. Even in the case of today's Taiwan, if we frame this "nation" back in time into Vietnam's 2nd century historical setting and assume that it had survived until this day as an independent nation, we will understand this matter better by imagining how it would become today and how enormous the influence that the mainland's Chinese have asserted onto the approximately 25 million people living on this island linguistically. This Taiwan's analogy is helpful for us to appreciate how the sinicization of the then Vietnam would have come about during a time span of 1000 years and why she had continued on with the same self-inflicted sinicization for another 1000 years presumably with a very much smaller population than that of Taiwan at present time. Keep in mind that she had to accomodate a larger number of Chinese invading armies, amounting to hundred of thousands in numbers, having continuously advanced southwards since the Han Dynasty in the 2nd century B.C.
Indeed, this linguistic adoption process had been occurring long before and after Vietnam's having victoriously gained independence from China in the tenth century, yet the influence of Chinese kept going on even until this day. From that time on Vietnam had also voluntarily adopted the Chinese writing system in full at first as the official written language of the land. That is what I called "self-inflicted sinicization" which also included other aspects of cultural values such as Confucianism, Taoism, and even Buddhism. In a later development, the creation of Nôm characters based on Chinese ideograhic block writing system with modifications had been put into unofficial use in Nôm literature until the end of the 19th century. Consequently, there have emerged in Vietnamese two sets common vocabulary stock, the first one widely known as the HánViệt (Sino-Vietnamese) -- mostly appearing in dissyllabic usage -- and the HánNôm (Sinitic-Vietnamese or Vietnamese lexicons of Chinese origin, including those older loanwords from ancient Chinese).
B) Core matter of Vietnamese etymology
Cao Xuân Hạo (2001), a renown Vietnamese cultural and linguistic theorist, in his "TiếngViệt là TiếngMãlai?" (Can Vietnamese be of Malay origin?) states that most of the Vietnamese words which have been considered original -- từ thuần Việt -- are actually not indigenously pure. According the author's view, in linguistics, there is no such thing called "pure". He emphasizes that it does not matter much to which origin, be it of Chinese, Thai, Mon-Khmer, or Austroasiatic cognates, Vietnamese should be classed, the core matter is the same as in the case of many basic words that he cited: chim bird (of Mon-Khmer origin), vịt duck (of Thai origin), cá fish (of Austroasiatic origin), thỏ hare (of Chinese origin) are still considered "pure" Vietnamese (p. 90).
In fact, what is in existent essence that makes up the whole body of the language is what that matters the most. We cannot solely base on cases of isolated words of Mon-Khmer cognates, as many have done previously, since they were mostly taken out of the context of the language as a whole. Etymology involves a lot of other factors much more significant than being limited to a fractional share of tiny basic stock to reach such a superficial conclusion. We can use the influential factor to say that languages of the Mon-Khmer origin could have also borrowed many words from Vietnamese just as Vietnamese has done so from Chinese. Mostly, as we all may know, the most advanced and powerful people are likely to influence the least developed ones. Unfortunately, until these days specialists of Vietnamese always think that those Vietnamese words must have been from a Mon-Khmer source other than the other way around whenever any words were found being cognate to those of Mon-Khmer. Is it the only way the research for Vietnamese etymology ought to be done? Can it be done with a different approach with a new perspective?
Again, the purpose of this research is not to prove the Sino-Tibetan origin of Vietnamese genetically and to denounce the Mon-Khmer theories, but only to present a new approach to help find the etymology of thousands of Nôm words of Chinese origin. That approach can also be used to evaluate most of the words that previously have been speculated by many distinguished linguists in the field that they were of the Mon-Khmer origin, which might not be the case at all.
Chinese is a language belonging to the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. Could Vietnamese have been also a language descended from the same root if most of its words proved to be of Chinese origin? If many of those proven lexicons are of basic vocabulary stratum, they could not be considered as loanwords but must be cognates originated from the same source. That is possible given theories about the proto-Taic elements and the pre-Sinitic forms were in contact some time during the Zhou Dynasty from 1122 BC to 256 BC. Of course this is indeed a controversally interesting topic that needs to be re-examined with further research in order to re-establish that long old reckoned connection which I called the linked kinship.
It should be so because, again, the two languages share most of the linguistic attributes including those unique characteristics, i.e.,
These illustrated examples demonstrate lexical transformation by means of semantic analogy approach. It can be used to find candidate patterns of sound changes of related words in addition to another dissyllabic sound change approach as to be discussed in detail later on. The overall purpose is to draw the rules for all possible alterations of other words from Chinese to Nôm, i.e. Vietnamese of Chinese origin in restrictve sense, based on the assumption that if most of the proven loanwords appear in one category and of the same class, even of dubious origin because of discrepancy in phonology, it, etymologically, is likely that they are possibly of the same origin as long as they carry all traits with the same phonological peculiarities and underlined contextual connotation, e.g.,
In the meanwhile with the new approaches suggested in this research paper, while inheriting the merits of achievements accomplished by forerunners in the field by embracing whatever traditional methodologies have been followed so far, we will go a step further by treating related dissyllabic words as baseline units in search of sound change patterns instead of their old monosyllabic and one-to-one correspondent approach as has been normally done in past by the old school, and then from there we will trace back to the original monosyllabic unit. This mothodology will be applied equally to the finding of those words in basic vocabulary stock as well, for instance,
from which we can easily induce to confirm the etymon "Tết". In V there is a compound "ănTết" (to selebrate the Spring Festivals), which is equivalent to for "guòjié" 過節 and Mandarin for 過 is "guò" (to pass), or Sinitic-Vietnamese "quá" [wá]. Suppose that 過, in this case functioning as a affix for many other compound words with related meaning, is cognate to "ăn" as in "ănTết" while the meaning of "eating" in "ăn" has been generalized and "sublimated" to another level to denote the concept of "celebrating" for this dissyllabic word "guòjié" 過節. That is to say "quá" [wá] has given rise to "ăn" despite of semantic disparity etymologically in each respective stem. We can then say that in this case, 過 "guò" has been likened, or associated and identified with "ăn". In other words, an "affix" in a Chinese dissyllabic word, regardless of the meanings in its original root or dissyllabic form, could converge existing form in Vietnamese and then diverge a newly-found concept with the very same loaned element. That is what I call principle of sandhi process of association, that the affix "ăn" then becomes a "prefix", an indispensable tool to create more new words, carrying more extensive meaning such as "take in", "take part in", "engaged in". In the same manner we can further explore other passibilities as those in with the extended prefix "ăn":
which are in line with
and futher development as a suffix like
We can see that the affix "ăn" in these examples is centered around the vocalism of both the initial y-, w-,... substituting "ăn" and sh-, ch-, j-,.. for 吃(喫) chī [ M 吃(喫) chī < MC ʔjet < OC *ʔrjət | MC reading 梗開四入錫溪 | The actual character is 喫 chǐ. The loan character 吃 chī is used only in modern Mandarin. The new reading is based on 乙 yì < MC ʔit < OC *ʔrjət , with the phonetic stem ~ 乙 ất, and ¶ -t ~ -n, which gives rise to 'ăn' | Dialects : Chaozhou: ŋjək41 || 喫 chǐ < MC khiek < OC *khe:k. (吃 originally means "stammer") || Also: M 吃 jí < MC kit < OC *kɨt | According to Starostin : to eat, drink, swallow (Han). Karlgren gives a LZ reading *khra:ts (MC khaj) 'energetic' - very dubious and not attested elsewhere. The reading *khe:k is attested since Han; modern chī is quite irregular.] In short, 吃(喫) chī, a basic word that means "ăn" (eat), has become a prefix in Vietnamese to take on different meanings (swallow, consume, take in, endure..) which can be associated with other sound bits that center around the initial CH- as well as twisted variations of the Viet. "ăn".
More of this matter will be explored in the following sections.
C) Chinese and the basic vocabulary stock
It is of no surprise that many of the Vietnamese basic vocabularies, to say the least, seem to have originated from the same linguistic roots as those of Chinese since they had long been in close contact at least 1000 years before the confirmed influence of the Chinese language on Vietnamese started in 221 BC in China's Qin-Han Dynasties. In fact, culturally inundated words of ancient Chinese origin such as
However, the vocabulary list will be much densely populated if we are to include more of old-time words that both Chinese and Vietnamese are still using now. Some of those words are
as well as those of numerous basic vocabularies which might have originated from the same roots such as
Many of these vocabularies in Vietnamese clearly show traces of both common root and loanwords in both Vietnamese and Chinese. They are considered as of common root since some of them are basic words which must have existed in any languages before any loanwords were introduced. To be treated as loanwords they must be obviously of Chinese or "Yue" origin. While there have been studies being done on "Yue" loanwords, also known as Austroasiatic in linguistic circles, in Chinese, there is no doubt that the Vietnamese language has been aquiring many Chinese words of the same nature since ancient time as seen in the aforementioned examples. This linguistic adopting proccess had been continuously going on long after Vietnam's gaining independence from China. Evidences carved on tablets, unearthed in Vietnam in the late 1970's, reveal that many Nôm words were adopted from the Chinese lexical usages as late as of China's Ming Dynatsy in the 16th century (Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, 1979). That is to say, Chinese words kept infiltrating into the Vietnamese vocabulary centuries long after its independence from China, which would probably have been in some form of vernacular Mandarin.
Indeed, the linguistic influence in this respect has continued all the way to the modern time with those up-to-date words such as
For those words of basic vocabulary stratum, pending more needed substantial work on linguistic genetic affinity of both Chinese and Vietnamese, the underlined commonality purposedly raised here is merely provisional, an attempt to establish a lexical connection between the two languages. The fact that the existence of many words in all linguistic categories that have Chinese roots, dated as far back as hundreds of years before the first Han Dynasty's invading army ever set their feet on the ancient Vietnam's soil -- being called NamViệt 南越 NánYuè at that time with its capital 番禹 Fànyú situated in today's Guangzhou 廣州, the provincial capitol of today's China's Guangdong Province -- until this day, is what has made Vietnamese as it appears today and that fact should be what matters first in any studies of Vietnamese etymology. In other words, Vietnamese, characteristically, is undoubedtly more close to Chinese than it is to any languages in Mon-Khmer linguistic family.
D) A new dissyllabic sound change approach to be explored
Today's Vietnamese vocabulary stock consists of a great number of two-syllable or dissyllabic words. This characteristic of dissyllabics -- of language with dominant words composed of two syllables -- has become prominently one of the main characteristics of present-time Vietnamese. Recognition of this natural evolution will let us learn how to appreciate more exotic tastes for the tongue. Being much more than that, this is an intellectual revelation that will incite an urge inside us to explore more etyma and seek a better new tool to cultivate this monstrous monosyllabic-stemmed tree, deeply rooted in so rich a fertile soil mixed with thick layers of both Sinitic and indegenous strata, now to have been overgrowing with dissyllabic leaves and dotted with polysyllabic fruits of completely different textures and look and feel.
Do yourself a favor by starting exploring the Vietnamese etymology in the realm of polysyllabics. This historical linguistic expedition will enable you discover a whole lot more than what you have ever known about this language. The message that I am trying to get across now is that Vietnamese is no longer a monosyllabic baby; it has fully grown up into polysyllabic adulthood on a par with any other languages on earth, polysyllabically, not "mo no syl la bic al ly". Swear on the faces of those who, for their just being truely ignorant themselves, are trying to fool you into believing that misconception, synomynously Vietnamese being a momosyllabic primitivity. Inspecting it under the perspective of polysyllabics, the same attitude as you do with English, French, Chinese, or Korean, etc. will inexhaustibly take you much further from where you have been confined for so long by antiquated linguistic wisdoms that show clearly their aging time. Once you have got out of the old dormant shell, you will have a whole ocean to venture.
In fact, modern Vietnamese appears to show clearly that it is a language of dissyllabics in nature as plentiful with commonly used dissyllabic vocabularies of different types. Categorially, there are those dominant two-syllable words built with two word-syllables which can be either synonymous, opposite, parallel in nature, or simply compounds constructed with existing lexical material. These compounds have been coined the same way as those of modern Chinese, if not to say they have simply mirrored lexicons of the Chinese counterparts. They are comprised of two elements of word-syllable, which are almost synonymous with each other, e.g., tức|giận (mad/angry), trước|tiên (firstly/initially), cũ|kỹ (ancient/old), kề|cận (by/near), tôm|tép (shrimps), xe|cộ (automobile/carriage), etc.
Besides, there are also dissyllabic words of innovation which use the same existing glosses to carry new meanings and present themselves as different lexical entities as in the cases of cámực 墨魚 mòyú (~ modern M 魷魚 yóuyú 'squid', which becomes "condiều" 'kite' in Vietnamese), thươnghại 傷害 shānghài (~ modern M 同情 tóngqíng or SV 'đồngtình' 'symphathize'), tửtế 仔細 zǐxī 'kindness' (as opposed to VS 'tỉmỉ' as originally conveyed in M), cậunhỏ 小舅 xiăojìu 'little boy', chúnhỏ 小叔 xiăoshù 'little boy', cônhỏ 小姑 xiăogū 'little girl' (as opposed to the original meanings that denote husband's siblings being called by their bother's wife), khốnnạn 困難 kùnnán 'miserable' (as opposed to 'difficulty' in modern Mandarin), etc.
Why do all these matters have to do with the Vietnamese etymology? The anwer is they show that dissyllabic words have originated from the changes either in semantic, as just mentioned, phonological, or lexical aspects, all having been built with the Chinese material.
Phonologically, close examination of the previously cited examples will reveal some sound change patterns that underline the etymology of those Vietnamese words that apparently have been alternations of Chinese dissyllabic equivalents. To refresh our memory, here are some more examples:
Lexically, as disscussed earlier in the lexical and semantic analysis, these compounds may have different composition showing that the two monosyllabic words that make up the dissyllabic words are variations of different Chinese word-syllables, either being likened or associated with. Let's take some aforementioned synonymous dissyllabic words as examples.
In all probabilities, dissyllabics was a later development in both Chinese and Vietnamese. However, the words "trước", "cũ", and "gần", as opposed to the Sino-Vietnamese "tiên", "cựu", and "cận", respectively, are old materials which point to the same stems used to make those dissyllabic words with the same contextual denotation in both languages.
From there we can see more reasons why it is so Chinese about the Vietnamese language, both so intertwined with each other that sound changes from one language to another must have occurred in the context of characteristics that both languages share, in this case, the dissyllabic features of the two.
For the time being, just take some of many sound change patterns at their face values, e.g., -eng for (>) -e, -ang > -ac, -ong > -aw, n- > đ-, -n > -i, -k > -ng, etc. Sound changes of this kind do follow linguistic rules in which, phonemically, changes occurred in the realm of neighboring sounds which have the same attributes in articulation, e.g. 生 shēng ~ đẻ (cf. Hainanese /te/), 忙 máng ~ mắc (also: bận), 痛 tòng ~ đau, 尿 niào ~ đái (also: tiểu), 蒜 suàn ~ tỏi (qián 前 ~ Hai. /tai/, VS 'trước'), 幕 mù (SV: mạc ~ MC mak) ~ màng. The main point to bear in mind is that sound changes in syllabic formation did occur in "phonological batches" or cluster of sounds as whole syllabic units such as -ong > -aw, -ang > -ac, -wan > -oi, -u > -ang, etc., but not just phonemically n-, đ-, -c, -u, -i, -ng, etc., as they had taken place in a much later development. As Chinese has become more and more dissyllabic in nature at a later time, approximately from the Tang Dynasty, when its dissyllabic words changed into Vietnamese they also changed in dissyllabic clusters of sounds, in a whole entity of paired syllables, not singly as simple vowels into other vowels or an initial into another initial, or not even syllable by syllable on one-to-one correspondences.
Dissyllabic sound change patterns are an important point in my new approach used in this research of Vietnamese etymology of Chinese origin. The logic behind this argument is, in terms of historical evolution and linguistic characteristics, Vietnamese and Chinese are polysyllabic, or to be exact, disyllabic languages. Nowadays, Chinese has already been classified by the world's large universities' renown linguistic circles as a polysyllabic language (Chou. 1982, p.106), then Vietnamese should be formally reckoned as such, too. Only in this context and premise can one be able to see how sound changes from Chinese to Vietnamese have taken place and why dissyllabic words should bear the apprearance as we see them here in this paper. In other words, dissyllabic words have carried along their dissyllabic attributes when transforming themselves into Vietnamese, so that is why with
Here are some other examples:
As we can see, the magnitude of sound changes are multi-faceted and diverse when dissyllabic words are treated as the whole unit. In the process the same syllabic portion in the dissyllabic word could have altered its vocalic shell differently when stading alone as a monosyllabic word. So the phonological constraints that may exert on each independent syllable would not effectively restrict what sound changes would become of other dissyllabic word in the targeted language. In reality they could occur and affect the whole string of sounds bound in the dissyllabic formation and the result, in most of the cases, is not same as that of the monosyllabic morph. If one still considers Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, then s/he will never fully appreciate the underlined notion of this theory which is now used in our new dissyllabic approach in studying this behavior of sound change.
Once accepting that as a rule of sound change, one will never wonder why -ư corresponds to variants of -a, -iê to -a, -au ~ -ông, -at ~ -an, -an ~ -ôt, -ai ~ ua, etc, and will not insist on -a- must be -ươ-, -ng must be -ng, or d- must be n- and so on as commonly characterized in one-to-one relationship.
In reality, at the time when Chinese loanwords found their way into the Vietnamese language, sound changes could have already taken place inside the Chinese language itself first or would have happened later after they were borrowed in Vietnamese. In any cases, sound changes might have occurred within certain linguistic contraints, including cultural factors, such as the case of "mẹ" to have become "mợ", as well as local speech habit, e.g. 手板 shǒubăn ~ #"bàntay" instead of "taybàn".
Variant morphs of the same word reflect the fact that, even when they were first loaned they might have followed certain phonological and phonetic patterns, sound changes might not have just caught on first articulations and frozen there, but they could have continued to change due to cultural factors such as localities, social status, education, time frame, e.g. 他 tā 'he, him' (SV tha) nẫu, nó, họ, 我 wǒ 'I, me' (SV ngã) tôi, tao, tui, tớ, qua, 咱 zá 'I, we, us' ta, 咱們 zánměn 'we' (exclusive) chúngmình, tụimình, etc. Additionally we can see Vietnamese is so reluctant in borrowing words of other close neighboring Mon-Khmer languages, even in settings of mixed social interactions among larger multi-ethnic populace in those high plateau or southermost provinces where place names bear indegenous marks notably but not the living tongue. Contrarily, Vietnamese is readily to import and use words from Chinese, even, sometimes, words of the same meanings have already existed, e.g. "mìchính" 味精 wèijīng (for 'vịtinh' or 'bộtngọt' MSG), "suỉcảo" 水餃 shuíjiăo (for 'taivạc, quaivạc' rice dumpling), "vằngthánh" 餛飩 húndùn (for 'hoànhthánh' wonton), etc. There is no doubt that cultural factors have actually facilitated the selective borrowing and sound change process.
This phenomenon is understandable given the the historical context of linguistic development of Vietnamese which has been going hand in hand with the evolution of the Chinese language, of which its vast vocabularies have penetrated widely and deeply into the Vietnamese language with various dialectal contacts in different periods of history. With the same words, if they entered the Vietnamese language at different times, they might have also carried different pronunciations depending on from which Chinese dialects that they had come from. Naturally, they could easily occur following certain custom norms and acquisitive models, of course, within a linguistic kinship boundary. That is why English "cut" and Vietnamese "cắt" obviously are not cognates, but 隔 "gé" [kə2] and "cắt" are.
Putting all together, that is how our new dissyllabic approach has come about after a long study of the process of sound changes of hundreds of Vietnamese words of Chinese origin based on their naturally characterized dissyllabics, rationalization, and generalization. This new tool will be utilized in this research paper by analyzing more etyma to further confirm the resoucefulness of its methodology. In summary, by centering on the recognition of dissyllabic nature of both Vietnamse and Chinese, we will no longer look at sound change patterns as an isolate phonemic sound change event, but as a dynamic process in which a whole sound string, or cluster of sounds, all has changed together, invariably in all shapes and sounds, independent of monosyllabic word equivalents contained therein.
Comparatively, these sound change patterns have occurred just like those of Latin polysyllabic roots that have given rise to many variations and forms penetrating into the vocabulary stocks in the Indo-European languages. That is much easier to recognize since they are all written in Latin alphabets. We will try to do the same while handling the Vietnamese etyma by treating them as phonetic clusters instead of ideographic blocks as they appear in Chinese which can distort our view conceptually. Therefore, conventionally, in the aspect of romanized transcriptions, like their counterparts of Chinese, all Vietnamese dissyllabic words in this paper shall be written in combining formation just as those of Mandarin are being transcribed in pinyin, such as
The net result of this phoneticized presentation will enable us to absorb a piece of information quicker and easier by grasping the whole concept in the polysyllabic, or dissyllabic, for this matter especially, block in a similar fashion that we have experienced with other romanized writing systems. From there we will build foundation for the new dissyllabic approach after much of basic concepts and generalized principles have been discussed here so far. It is certainly that this methodogy will help us identify a vast majority of Vietnamese words having Chinese origin.
In fact, scribing disyllabic words in dissyllabic formation is the centerpiece of our approach. As mentioned earlier, words in combining dissyllabic formation is that when their sound changes from one to another is of dynamic phonological changes. What peculiar about them is that they have drastically veered away and been independent of the original sounds. We will continue to examine this phenomenon at length to understand why in many a case sound changes in dissyllabic words are all both phonologically and semantically distinct from what they originated from. Expectedly, seeing multiple morphs of the same syllable in different dissyllabic forms, at first sight, may help readers recognize sound change patterns that appear in its whole entirety instead of isolate syllables; however, at the same time, they may also cause confusion to the laymen and leave them with the impression that phonological variants given for the same Chinese monosyllabic stem are ad hoc cases.
Similar to the decription of dissyllabic characteristics of the examples already cited above, the following illustrations are intended to further expand and explore other venues of possible alternations of the dynamics of syllabic changes in dissyllabic formation. For instance, given acceptance of a proven case phonologically, let's say, while one may reconcile the sound variant 廢 fèi with ba, one may wonder how these two sounds in Romanized Mandarin and Vietnamese can be connected semantically. Obviously each respective word has nothing to do with ba in the sense of eithr ‘three" or "father...’ specifically. In fact, conceptually it renders both phế 'waste' and bỏ ‘abandon’ connotations in Vietnamese while the original meaning of this one-syllable word is not the same as the very same syllable that is encoded in the dissyllabic word that makes up the concept of "baphải" (non-sense). At the same time, the syllabic-word ba- as well as -hoa individually does not mean anything lexically in Vietnamese as opposed to what we know etymologically of those two syllable-words 廢話 fèihuà in Chinese. Together as bound morphs they make what the morphemic compound bahoa is as a unit in its wholeness which renders a new concept with it new vocalic shell. In this case, one plus one makes one, but not two -- one new two-syllable word for one new concept.
In the following expanding examples, with the same "afffix" 廢 fèi, structurally, it is the same with baphải; however, in contrast to ba it is easier to see why "fèi" has become "bỏ- " 'discard’ as in
Like ba, bỏ is not necessarily always associated with 廢 fèi. In this case it is stemmed from the process of Chinese to Vietnamese sound changes, that is manifold, especially from those of dissyllabic words. To gain more understanding of the idea that sound change is independent of etymological root -- originally of one-syllabe word or one Chinese character -- and can be greatly influenced by both phonological and semantic associative and dissimilative factors, let’s further compare some Vietnamese words derived from some of those Chinese dissyllabic compounds which have resulted in Vietnamese homophones with bỏ
or in phrases such as
The sound change to bỏ in the above examples, including the innovation of other words, too, is unquestionably owing to different contextual settings. It involves not only phonological and semantic assimilative process but also syntactical reshuttle through the reverse order of word structure as exemplified in đồbỏ and bỏhoang, which was undoubtedly a local development to fit syntactically into Vietnamese speakers’ speech habit.
Similarly, the fact that 話 huà phonetically evolves into hoa is acceptable, but in which way does it become phải ? The sound change rule { hw- ~ fw- } applies here since this sound change pattern is very common in Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Fukienese in comparison with Middle Chinese or Mandarin sounds [ cf. bông 葩 pā (SV ba) ~ hoa 花 hwā /fa/ (Cant.) ]. Moreover, in dissyllabic formation, [fwa] could easily be modified as [fai] while 話 huà in its original monosyllabic word had evolved into lời ‘spoken word’ [ SV thoại , cf. correspondent patterns: 火 huǒ lửa, 夥 huǒ lũ ].
For the same reasons,
Let compare lên in other context:
The above examples depict a picture of multifaceted sound changes from Chinese to Vietnamese, among which each of the above dissyllabic words is composed of bound morphemes, or compound morphs, that is, either or both of which cannot be separated. It is the result of the sound change of a dissyllabic word from which any syllable can give rise to a complete new sound that can be, by all means, different from the very same stand-alone syllable as a monosyllabic word. The new sound may or may not mean anything if their syllabic components are separated from the combining form depending on the degree of its association with another word that is similar in sound or meaning. Let’s examine the syllable-word mau- in mauchóng 敏捷 mǐnjié ‘quickly’, which, in fact, a variation of 盡快 jìnkuài (> chóng + mau) and its colloquial variation as 馬上 măshàng (literally means 'on the horse').
In fact, any Chinese dissyllabic words could evolve into various sounds in Vietnamese, of which the order could be put in reverse to fit into the local speech habit (this will be discussed much more later on in a different perspective.) For our previous examples, they fit into the cases of monosyllabic homophones and homonyms, which are plentiful in both Vietnamese and Chinese. As we can see may Vietnamese etyma have been missed by Vietnamese specialists for their monosyllabic misconception.
As a matter of fact, regarding to the true nature of Vietnamese, it has long been wrongly regarded as monosyllabics (tínhđơnâmtiết 單音節性), or characteristics of a language based on its dominant one-syllable words in its vocabulary. That is, Vietnamese is a language that is lexically, semantically, and syntactically composed of one-syllable words. It might have been true in ancient times, as for any languages on earth, but it certainly no longer is such a case in modern Vietnamese. We can say that this misconception on these issues in some linguistic circles of the old school has misled specialists of Vietnamese to the point that it has certainly hindered new break-through development in this field. For this reason, the result of this research is, hopefully, to correct their misconception about monosyllabics and to pave ways for new approaches to explore areas of Vietnamese etymology of Chinese origin started with this nouveau dissyllabic approach, departing from those old ones that have been limited to only isolated monosyllabic and mere basic words.
As a matter of fact, the two aspects of dissyllabics and Chinese origin are closely intertwined as much as the two languages themselves are to the point that studies in either language cannot satisfactorily be done without referring to the other. Karlgren (1915), Haudricourt (1954), Chang (1974) Denlinger (1979), Pulleyblank (1984) and many others utilized Vietnamese when they studied Ancient Chinese phonology. Specialists of Vietnamese studies such as Haudricourt (1954), Lê (1967), Ðào (1983), and some others also did the same by making use of Chinese dialects to shed light on the etymology of Vietnamese words. They all see the affinity, whether genetic or not, between Chinese and Vietnamese, but until now nobody has discovered that most of Vietnamese words are originated from Chinese since their researches are mostly based on and limited to monosyllabic lexicons. This aptitude has prevented them from seeing other variations in sound changes from those same monosyllabic stems as they are in dissyllabic formation.
Besides, this Sinitic-Vietnamese study can also be seen as an attempt to establish kinship of both Chinese and Vietnamese with some shots of historical sypnosis and linguistic proofs presented herein with all comprehensive linguistic lexical aspects. With the new dissyllabic approach, we will have an advantegous edge over the old monosyllabic methodoloy -- where, in this case, only monosyllabic words are considered as base units for examination -- because it will enable you find words that could possibly slip from your attention. Specifically, my dissyllabic approach to find Vietnamese words of Chinese origin as discussed so far is based on two premises: Firstly, both modern Vietnamese and Chinese are dissyllabic languages, or of dissyllabics, that is, lexically and semantically each of the two languages as a whole is composed of a high percentage of two-syllable words. Secondly, I started out with a hypothesis, based on what I have learned about these two languages linguistically, that there is a linked kinship of both Chinese and Vietnamese. And with my dissyllabic approach I have substantially found many Vietnamese dissyllabic words of Chinese origin. From there, I can further explore other possibilities by pinning down certain basic words, initially mostly by instinct triggered by my own hypothesis of distant genetic affinity, via their appearance in dissyllabic form, for example,
With the meaning 'animals' 禽獸 qínshòu fits into 'thúvật, convật'. But with 'chóc', is it a reduplicative syllable or originally an independent monosyllabic word having its own meaning? If it is so, 'chóc' is probably a synonymous monosyllabic word, like other dissyllabic words which have been formed with the same principle, that means the same thing as 'chim' (bird). Since 'chóc' is a basic word, etymologically as a dialectal variant in Thanhhoá and Ninhbình Provinces -- where the capital of the old Vietnam used to be located known as "Thành Hoalư" (Hoalu Citadel) after independence from China in the 10th century. This detail is to emphasize the plausibility of the basic word 'chóc' as it is still used by people living in this area, descendants of major metropolitan intelligentsia of the time -- there must be a cognate with some form in Chinese, especially OC. Therefore, with further investigation and exploration in Chinese etymology, I have found out that 'chóc' means 'chim':
From here we can see that "chả" (boiled meatcake) in Vietnamese simply a variation of 炸 zhà 'to fry', which, semantically, has developed from the original meaning 'fry'. To differentiate the new meaning, 炸 zhà could also possibly have give rise to the word 'rán' (to fry), too, which is being used along with other words such as 'chiên' 煎 jiān.
So from here we can draw the conclusion that "mắm" (fish sauce, anchovy) was evolved from "mặn' while "riêu, or 'rêu' is from 蟹 xié, which is the possible source of 'ghẹ, cua, cáy' (different inds of crabs), "ruốc" from 蝦 xiā (VS tép, tôm), and 'bún' (noodles) from 粉 fěn, which gave rise to phở (noodle), bột (flour), phấn (chalk), bụi (dust), and 肉 ròu to the morphs of ruột, rọi, lụa, etc.
With a large amount of authentic Chinese and Vietnamese basic words as cognates being found by appying this dissyllabic techniques, the implication that the kinship between the two languages is genetically related can be confirmed accordingly. Our resulted etymological findings then can be used to re-establish the genetic affiliation between the two languages, at least for certain of words. It is so because basic words were what a language originally started with after all. This new approach has indeed enabled me to find a remarkable large number, about 20,000, of Vietnamese words of Chinese origin, many of which have long been regarded as indigenous Nôm words, or "pure" Vietnamese.
Again, this new dissyllabic approach is to treat each Chinese word, which is composed of one or more syllables or morphemes, each represented by each Chinese character singly, regardless of its meanings associated with each individual morpheme whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic. This should be as a correct way to deal with Chinese lexicography. In both Vietnamese and Chinese, a morpheme usually coincides with a syllable, which is free to go with other syllables to form other words. That is why sometimes we see syllabic combinations in Chinese may convey completely different meanings regardless of its written characters (loanwords to connote certain words) and, consequently, in Vietnamese, for instance,
on the Chinese side,
and here on the Vietnamese side,
Similarly, for 順 shùn (SV thuận) [ M 順 shùn < MC tʂjwən < OC *djənh
(Schuessler : *mljuəns) ], we have
The word-morphemes 起 and 順 are in bound form and have evolved into different sounds, meanings and words in Vietnamese. Inside the Chinese language itself similar morphemes like ‘qǐ’ and ‘shùn’ are innumerable. By actively pursuing this avenue in search for words of Chinese origin, we could find that almost all the Vietnamese words could be traced to find their Chinese origin!
As we will see through all the illustrations in this paper, the deeply rooted misconception of monosyllabics of Vietnamese and Chinese, i.e., they being a monosyllabic and their vocabularies being compositions of monosyllabic wors, has prevented specialists in the field of Vietnamese etymology from seeing that sound changes of individual syllables in dissyllabic formation are independent from its original monosyllabic equivalents. Originally, in ancient times, like any other languages on earth, both Vietnamese and Chinese must have been monosyllabic. It is easier to confirm that monosyllabic characteristics of Chinese based on literary works of more than two thousand years ago than to do so with that of Vietnamese where its oldest books are only dated as far as ten centuries ago. In all possibilities, basic words that both languages seem to share in common seem to point to the direction of monosyllabics.
In modern Vietnamese, one can find thousands of dissyllabic, along with a few more polysyllabic, words in any Vietnamese dictionary even though they are still incorrectly written in separated syllables. In the past, many experts of Vietnamese insisted on its monosyllabic characteristics as represented by Barker (1966, p. 10): “With the exception of certain compounds, reduplicative patterns, and loanwords, Vietnamese and Muong are both monosyllabic languages.” If we take his saying to apply to the English language in the same respects, it is also a monosyllabic language! Also, this statemenent just makes Barker appear having superficial knowledge of the Vietnamese language. Some Vietnamese linguists might have "worshipped" him, more or less, just simply because Barker is a western linguist who knows something about Vietnamese! When he said “certain compounds, reduplicative patterns, and loanwords”, anyone who is unfamiliar with the language may feel that there are only a small number of such words exist in Vietnamese. In reality, almost a whole vocabulary stock of Vietnamese are structured as such as we can see in any Vietnamese dictionary. In other words, his statement can be used to disqualify him as a specialist of Vietnamese. Ironically, many Vietnamese linguists in the field tend to value those viewpoints made by those western specialists who simply know something, usually limited to small areas of expertise, about Vietnamese to say something about it!
It is true that many of those dissyllabic words in Vietnamese can be analyzed as combination of monosyllabic words of which each can be used independently to attach to other syllable-words to form other counpounds. Nevertheless, remember that a great number of those words are formed to connote a new different concepts and cannot be considered as compounds anymore but composite words. That is, these words are composed of two or more syllables in form of bound morphemes and they cannot be broken down further into single syllables to be used as independent words. One of the good examples is the most basic Vietnamese words about anatomy, which could have existed since ancient times, such as cùichỏ ’elbow’, đầugối ‘knee’, mắccá ‘ankle’, màngtang ‘temple’, mỏác ‘crown of head’, chânmày ‘eyebrow’, etc. All of these are dissyllabic composite words made up of bound morphemes, that is, they must appear in pairs, of which either or both syllables making up each word are unbreakable just like their English counterparts. In this respect, the only difference is, like its cousin Chinese language, each morpheme in its free form as a complete different syllable-word can only mean something else having nothing to do with the meaning of the original form. For example, đầu also means ‘head’ and gối means ‘to lean against’. Other examples of a great number of dissyllabic words are in different categories such as càunhàu ‘growl’, cằnnhằn ‘grumble’, ‘bângkhuâng ‘pensive’, bồihồi ‘melancholy’, bùingùi ‘sorrowful’, mồhôi 'sweat', mồcôi ‘orphan’, bằnglòng 'agree', taitiếng ‘notorious’, tạmbợ ‘temporary’, tráchmóc ‘reproach’, and polysyllabic words such as mêtítthòlò ‘irresistable’, nhảyđồngđổng 'jump up in protest' ,bađồngbảyđổi ‘unpredictably’, hằnghàsasố ‘innumerable’, lộntùngphèo ‘upside down’, tuyệtcúmèo ‘wonderful’. Even with those Sino-Vietnamese words such as hiệndiện ‘presence’, phụnữ ‘woman’, sơnhà ‘country’, etc., the Chinese stems as syllable-words contained in them cannot be used as independent monosyllablic words in the the Vietnamese language. (Read more details of this discussion in Sửađổi Cáchviết ChữViệt) If those words are written in combining formation instead of being singly written as separate syllables in appearance, they certainly will give foreign learners of Vietnamese a different impression, including Barker hemself. In other words, they should not base on Vietnamese orthography to determine its monosyllabic characteristics after all.
For the matter of polysyllabics, in the past renown Vietnamese linguists such as Bùi Ðức Tịnh (1966, p.82), taking side with Hồ Hữu Tường, criticized and defied the idea that Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. They both treated Vietnamese as a dissyllabic language. In Vietnamese, the sole fact that a high percentage of Sino-Vietnamese words, as quoted above, just like words having roots from Latin and Greek in the English language, being used in today’s Vietnamese sufficiently constitutes the dissyllabic nature of the Vietnamese language, in addition to other polysyllabic words formed out of fixed expressions in different categories. Many of those loanwords are unbreakable. The Koreans and Japanese have long recognized this matter and they always, scientifically, write polysyllabic words in “group”, which always appear in patterns like XX XXX XX X XX XXX XX visually. Unfortunately, in today’s writing system of the Vietnamese language each of such dissyllabic words is still broken into two syllables where each of which when standing alone may not be related to the original meanings and may not mean anything at all!
Exactly the same thing can be said about the dissyllabic characteristics of the Chinese language. Any Chinese dialect nowadays is also a dissyllabic language per se. Regarding this issue, Chou (1982, p.106) quoted others in his article:
Following Kennedy and de Francis, Eugene Chin said: ”If we admit that words, not morphemes, are the construction material of Chinese, we cannot but admit that Chinese is polysyllabic. If we may use the majority rule here, we will have no trouble establishing the fact that Chinese is dissyllabic.”
From this premise that Chinese is dissyllabic and so is Vietnamese, we can trace each dissyllabic word in both Vietnamese and Chinese and we will find that, phonologically, like many monosyllabic words, a dissyllabic Chinese word could evolve into quite a few different words in Vietnamese, including latest words downright in our modern time. For instance, one Chinese word 三八 sānbā (SV tambát to recdicule women in their March 8, International Women's Day), meaning “nonsense”, might have already given rise to tầmphào, tầmbậy, tầmbạ, bảláp, bảxàm, basạo, xàbát, xằngbậy... in Vietnamese.
As to the sound change from Chinese into Vietnamese words, those linguists, who started with the misconception that Chinese and Vietnamese are both monosyllabic languages, try to look for only one related Vietnamese word and its equivalent to one Chinese character, equally a monosyllabic word, and, in most of the cases, they seem to be able to associate only one Chinese character to only one monosyllabic word in the Vietnamese language. That is a serious flaw with the old approach. One cannot fully explore the etymology of Vietnamese words of Chinese origin by only investigating and confining oneself to the realm of only isolated monosyllabic words and expect to find all their corresponding Chinese cognates.
Once and for all, let's face it, since both languages are dissyllabic languages consisting mainly of two-syllable words, linguistic rules of sound changes from Chinese dissyllabic words into Vietnamese ones are just like those of other polysyllabic languages. For instance, in Indo-European languages polysyllabic words of the same root when changing into another language at least one of the syllables may not strictly follow the same phonological pattern in all languages, such as the word “police”: politi, polizei, policia, polizia, polite, polis, polisi, "phúlít" (old VS from French).
What does this rule have to do with Vietnamese words of Chinese origin? In the Chinese ~> Vietnamese scenario, one Chinese character, coinciding with a syllable and a word, or being just only a morpheme, when changing into Vietnamese, theoretically, only one equivalent sound (word) exists, but, in reality, in many a case there are more than one Vietnamese sound for each Chinese character, for example,
etc., or in compounds:
mùjiāng is a Mandarin sound of 木匠 (carpenter) and while there is not much to say about mộc [mokʷ] (<= Middle Chinese [mowk]) for 木 mù, "thợ" might not be a direct sound change from 匠 "jiāng" [ M 匠 jiāng < MC ʐjɑŋ < OC *ʐhaŋs ] into Vietnamese, but it could be more likely a derivative from the compound
In this case "thợ" appears to have become a free syllabic form functioning as a prefix to be combined with other syllable-words to make other compounds:
In the cases as discussed above, dissyllabic words, or polysyllabic words for that matter, with at least one of the two syllables had undergone the sandhi process of assimilation or association. To all those cases we also can apply the natural phonological linguistc rules that dictate from sound changes in polysyllabic words that one or more syllables can be deformed, corupted, dropped, contracted, associated, etc. that make the sound change transformed into another different appearance phonologically. As we can see, through this sound change process a mere original stem could give rise to more Vietnamese sound variations. In the end the absorbing language, the borrower, would gain a few extra new words and, at the same time, add more meaning to existing similarly sounding words, but of different Chinese roots. For the latter they had come into existence by means of constant association of similar sounds or meanings, or both, of existing words, for instance,
etc.
In the realm of lexical development, Vietnamese has also proved to be keen in innovation of loanwords. While a great number of words have retained their original forms and existing associated concepts, some have evolved their own way to grow by attaching new differentiation in meanings either with the old pronunciation or new articulation for resulted subtle semantic changes. This does not necessarily mean Chinese loanwords will end up richer in Vietnamese counterparts because, as we have seen in the above examples, the other way around is also proved to be true for many words as in the case that Vietnamese uses the same associative sounds to identify with other glosses (just like loan-graphs in Chinese itself). Here are some other examples:
At the same time, the sound changes that have made up the lately developed words can be independent of their original form. Historically, this development is commonplace in any language, let's say, as in the case of English, we have the word morning < morn < Old English morgen ) while evening < æfnung, a noun from the verb æfnian ‘grow towards night’. Following the pattern of evening the morn had become morning.
In Vietnamese, specifically, this assimilative sandhi occurrence, or, alternately, the sandhi process of assimilation or association, has been a very common phenomenon. It is likely products of time to have come into existence probably without much of human intervention. Let's examine a few more cases of this process:
but the sound of this character will change into some other sounds when it is in other
dissyllabic forms, or words (in this case, they are compound words) such as
(1)
Those who do not accept the fact that both Chinese and Vietnamese are dissyllabic languages may find it hard to see why the same monosyllabic word in Vietnamese originally cognate to only one character in Chinese could evolve into variable sound changes in several different dissyllabic words. Only with the recognition that Vietnamese is a dissyllabic language, one will see why two-syllable Vietnamese words of Chinese origin have their own rules of linguistic sound changes, such as the associative sandhi rule, which are quite different from those of sound change from a monosyllabic word into another monosyllabic word as in the case of Sino-Vietnamese lexicons as we usually see in historical phonology.
Similarly, many words derived from the Old Chinese and Middle Chinese may complicate the matter further with multiple lexical and phonological developments such as
in Sinitic-Vietnamese as opposed to only dà 大 ~ đại, 沖 chōng ~ xung (trùng) in Sino-Vietnamese, repectively, or as in the cases of previously cited examples of qǐ 起 ~ khởi, shùn 順 ~ thuận, chăng 場 ~ trường.
Besides, there is also a phenomenon that one word, either in monosyllabic or in dissyllabic formation, in Vietnamese can point to different sources in Chinese, depending on the context. These are cases that show dynamic sound changes that further rebut the theory that sound change must be restricted mostly on the basis of one-to-one correspondences, for instance,
"cho":
"làm":