The "Y" and "D" in Vietnamese

[pazu]

I just wanted to check up the Chữ Nôm of yêu (love) in Vietnamese, and I was so surprised to find that there was no "Y" in my thick (1598 pages) dictionary (Ðại Tự Ðiển Chữ Nôm, Nhà xuất bản Văn Nghệ TPHCM & Trung tâm nghiên cứu Quốc Học)

I wonder why. Is the "Y" a rather recent invention?

I've also checked another Hán Việt dictionary, they have only a few pages of "Y". And I found that 厭 (yàn) & 艷 (yàn), with the same vowel and consanant in Mandarin Chinese (but different tones in Cantonese), were translated to Vietnamese as "Yếm" and "Diễm" respectively (in Southern Vietnamese, the sound of y = d). So what's the criteria for Vietnamese to decide whether they should translate a word to Y or D? Are there any rules to follow?

And how to write Anh yêu em nhưng em không yêu anh?

Is it 英愛俺(口乃)俺空愛英 ?

I found another resource (on a Chinese website that said "yêu" = 腰, so which one do you think is "more" correct?)

Again, this is a question that I think only NNT can answer me, but I hope others will find it interesting too.

[nnt]

Nothing to do with chữ Nôm. Just that in Vietnamese the Y is sometimes assimilated to the I (many words use both "y" or "i" spellings as variants) and placed between the I and the K instead of at the end of the dictionary.

Check it out, you'll find many "used as" characters to make declarations. One of them is 腰 but others are 邀 妖 幺 ("yêu" in Hán Việt) 夭 (yểu) 要 (yếu).

Invented characters can be [女要] or [要夭] for example.

Using 愛 (which is pronounced "ái", the same as ai4 in mandarin) instead of the above variants of "yêu" would sound funny:

"em ái anh..." etc.

"Chữ Nôm" is the realm of Fuzzy logic!

As for criteria for phonetic translations between mandarin or cantonese and Hán Việt, there are none (just a guesswork based on characters' pronunciation you know), you've to study historical phonetics for Chinese dialects, Vietnamese, and ... Middle Chinese, which is the common root for the CJKV pronunciations of Chinese characters.

[pazu]

Thanks for your info~

And amazingly, I found the "Y" entries in the dictionary, it's just after "I" instead of after "X"...

[DavidHan]

How amazing! The letter Y before X, . I have thought it always be put after X in dictionary, haven't I????