Chinese for "Vietnamese"

[weenstan]

I was thinking of getting a Chinese character word for "Vietnamese" as a tattoo, or something roughly close to that. The reason being pre-romanization of Vietnamese, Chinese was mostly used as influence of the language.

Any help would be great!

Thanks in advance.

[imron]

In English, Vietnamese can refer to the language, or it can refer to the people. In Chinese however these terms are different. Which one were you referring to?

[liuzhou]

Can I just ask a simple question out of intellectual curiosity?

Why do you want to tattoo yourself with the name of a language which you don't know, expressed in yet another language you also don't know?

Just wondering.

[weenstan]

@imron, I meant it for the people.

I stated the reason in my post, our language and culture are greatly influenced by the Chinese culture; there is no "Vietnamese" writing system pre Romanization of our language, since China controlled Vietnam for almost a thousand years, our language is just a variation of it. I am still contemplating the idea of course so its not set in stone, but I guess I have to start somewhere, by finding if there's a character similar to that meaning so I can get a general picture of it.

Thanks again in advance.

[HashiriKata]

@ weenstan: Here is some help for you:

For "Vietnamese" in the sense of people in general, it should be " 越南人 ". However, from your patriotic tone, I guess " 越南民族 " (= Dân tộc Việt Nam) should carry your sentiment better.

[xiaocai]

Well, here in China the local Vietnamese is officially named as "京族" as a nationality, but I think "京人" would be more appropriate if you are referring to an individual.

Also you can take a look here to see how the Vietnamese themselves see this word, also to make sure it doesn't carry any negative connotation. (Sorry I can't read Vietnamese so you have to figure it out yourself.)

[imron]

For "Vietnamese" in the sense of people in general, it should be " 越南人 ". However, from your patriotic tone, I guess " 越南民族 "

Did the Vietnamese people write "Vietnamese" using these Chinese characters back when they still used a character based writing system? That would probably be the most appropriate thing to use.

[ABCinChina]

I often see and hear the term "Viet Pride" back in the States. I think it'd be better to translate this instead of Vietnamese. 越南自豪！hehe

[weenstan]

Thanks a lot for the help guys, and "Viet Pride" is a bit corny hehe.

[Hofmann]

Wouldn't that be "người Việt" in Vietnamese? Someone know the người part in Chữ Nôm?

[HashiriKata]

Someone know the người part in Chữ Nôm?

The attachment below is the Nôm character for "người" (The Unicode point for the character is U+2029b, but how do you get it output?)

Anyway, for this character, the left part is supposed to be relating to the pronunciation and the right part to the meaning.

As for the character for "Việt", since it's a Chinese borrowing, it's written just as in Chinese: 越

[weenstan]

I like the last one cuz of the Nôm character, so if I were to write it out, it would be top to bottom as it is to left to right.

[trien27]

@Hoffman

người means "男人" or "man/men" in Chinese.

Source: http://vdict.com/?autotranslation

Where it says Translated from leave as Automatically Detected, where it says Translate to, choose the language/writing system to be translated to.

copy & paste người into the box, and click on Translate.

Here's a Vietnamese to Chinese to Chu Nom online translator:

The homepage has Vietnamese to Chu Nom translator:

http://sager-pc.cs.nyu.edu/~huesoft/tracuu/vietnom.php

In the box under Từ cần tra :, type in the Vietnamese word with accent [must have accent, otherwise it won't work!] , and click on the >> button to translate from Vietnamese Quoc Ngu into Chu Nom.

If you want to translate any Chinese words into Vietnamese, click from menu on left where it says "Tra âm Hán - Việt" & In the box under Từ cần tra :, type in the Vietnamese word with accent [must have accent, otherwise it won't work!] , and click on the >> button to translate from Vietnamese Quoc Ngu[National Language: The modern one written with Latin letters.] to Han/Chinese characters

One bad thing about the above Chu Nom site: You can't copy & paste the translated words. From http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/viet/nom-ng.php, it's the Chu Nom character with the Unicode codepoint U+2029b [either press Ctrl F or Find "người "] to find the Chu Nom character that everyone's talking about in this forum. Sorry, but you can't copy & paste the character at this site either.

One interesting note: Like Japanese, and Korean, the Sino-Vietnamese word "tu" for "four" isn't used, but rather the native Vietnamese word "bon" is used. This is because if you say the Chinese word for "four" with the wrong tone, it will become "death", especially from beginners learning the Chinese language. It's the same situation for most Chinese dialects. In Vietnamese, they are probably just following the Chinese model, and has no "wrong tone and the word becomes 'death' pun."

Edited November 7, 2008 at 04:27 AM by trien27
additional information

[trien27]

HarishiKata, you beat me to it.

[Hofmann]

Finally found it. It's an Extension B character.

[weenstan]

Nice hoffman, so the first character is in chu nom and the second in classical chinese?

[HashiriKata]

so the first character is in chu nom and the second in classical chinese?

Yes and No! Chử Nôm is a system of writing Vietnamese, with a liberal use of Hán-Việt characters. Hán-Việt characters are Chinese characters as used in Chinese today but prounounced in Vietnamese.

So what is the difference between Hán-Việt characters and Nôm characters? The Nôm characters are the modified Hán-Việt characters, used to write indigenous Vietnamese words whereas the Hán-Việt characters are used to write Vietnamese words of Chinese origin.

[lauren]

for vietnamese people, it's 越南人

for vietnamese language, it's 越南语

and others uses, it's 越南的

You see, it's somehow intuitive.