Ancient Chinese spoken language?

[nnt]

The "chữ nôm" is the old way of writing Vietnamese language before its romanization. It's now used mostly in calligraphy or traditional painting. You can write modern Vietnamese the old way, but the "chữ nôm" is not Hán Việt, which is Chinese characters pronounced Vietnamese way.

[nnt]

To be more precise, the "Hán Việt" is Chinese words and grammar (either 文言 or 白话) but only with Vietnamese pronunciation.

The "chữ nôm" is Vietnamese words and grammar using Chinese-like characters (even if many words are directly borrowed from Chinese). Le "chữ nôm" is now replaced by roman alphabet, and the "Hán Việt" is just now a dead language, known by Vietnamese linguists and historians.

[1%homeless]

To be more precise, the "Hán Việt" is Chinese words and grammar (either 文言 or 白话) but only with Vietnamese pronunciation.

Since it uses Chinese characters, how do you know the original pronunciation of Han Viet?

[nnt]

"Hán-Việt" does not "use" Chinese characters, it is Chinese (words and grammar), with Vietnamese pronunciation.

How this Hán-Việt pronunciation has evolved in 2000 years is a matter of research, but what we can be sure of is how it was as far as 150 years ago.

Throughout history, there were many Chinese dictionaries, all of them include indications of how to pronounce each character: "like" another word, and most of all 反切 fan1 qie1 combining two words: one for the tone and one for the rime.

Of course, there is a set of "reference" characters, upon which the system is based. The references for Hán-Việt pronunciation are now the KangXi (康熙) dictionary, the Ci2 Yuan2 词源 and the Ci2 hai3 词海.

[Guest timc18]

There is a language tree at http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/index.htm (on the home page..scroll down a bit..under "Historical Chinese"..click "chinese language trees")

According to this tree, the min dialect is the dialect that is closest to ancient chinese because it evolved first and is still in use today. The "Middle Chinese" languages all evolved to other dialects, so "Middle Chinese" is no longer in use today (although I read that cantonese is closest to Middle Chinese).

Other evidence that min is the dialect that is closest to Ancient chinese is that korean pronunciations of chinese characters are very very VERY similar to min nan yu (I speak taiwanese and have many korean friends)..the pronunciations of chinese characters in korean are basically the same as the taiwanese pronunciations of the characters. (for example..票 is piuh, 學生 is hak shin in both korean and taiwanese and my friends' korean names are very close to their taiwanese names..isnt that cool??). Of course, not all pronunciations are exactly the same, but they are all very similar. Now, I admit I don't know when Korea was first influenced by China, but I imagine it was very early on ~the confucious period. Linguists have said that Confucious most likely spoke something close to min nan yu.

ps. please correct things if anything is incorrect. Another tree on the site above shows that hokkien (min nan) developed from wu and gan dialects..is this correct?

[nnt]

The link is interesting, but it makes the confusion between Vietnamese language and Hán-Việt.

Vietnamese language include Hán-Việt words and expressions, but is not Hán-Việt.

One of the examples mentioned in the link is interesting:

越北自治区 is given with the transcription "Khu tự trị Việt Bắc"(autonomous region of Viet Bac) which is incorrect.

"Khu tự trị Việt Bắc" (romanized Vietnamese) written in chữ nôm, is : 区自治越北 (Vietnamese syntax)

In Hán-Việt,the same words are in different order: Việt(越)Bắc(北)tự(自)trị(治)Khu(区) in pinyin : Yue4 Bei3 zi4 zhi4 qu1 .

Hán-Việt and Vietnamese syntaxes are different.

[Ian_Lee]

Korean also shares many common vocabulary with Cantonese.

The word congee is pronounced as "zhuk" in both Cantonese and Korean while Mandarin and Minnanese are not.

[1%homeless]

Korean also shares many common vocabulary with Cantonese.

Hmm... this gets more and more intersting... It's too bad there isn't more linguistic research going on... but anyways, if Cantonese and Min has cognate words with Korean, then probably other Chinese dialects would have them too.

[nnt]

Korean also shares many common vocabulary with Cantonese.

The word congee is pronounced as "zhuk" in both Cantonese and Korean while Mandarin and Minnanese are not.

If you mean 粥 (zhou1), it is also pronounced "chúc" in Hán-Việt (上入声), which seems similar to your "zhuk", because "ch" in Hán-Việt is zh in Pinyin.

[Ian_Lee]

My Korean teacher told me that Chinese loan words were mostly borrowed during the Sung Dynasty.

Since Korea was hindered by land communication with Sung Dynasty because the Liao Dynasty founded by the Khitan had occupied territory of northern China, probably Chinese loan words were borrowed from languages spoken in Sung's coastal cities of Zhejiang, Fujian and Guangdong when the Korean mercantile traders conducted business there!

[XiangYu]

why do u guys even bother to talk about this topic? you do know there are more than 200 diaclects today...i'm sure there are more during the "ancient" times... so have fun figuring out all the dialects.