Vietnamese Relationship with Chinese Languages

[bathrobe]

Not very convincing, where can one find examples of 古越语? It seems to me the wiki editor could just be picking out Cantonese words that don't exist in Mandarin, but that does not mean they are of 古越语 origin.

Yes, you may be right. People can interpret the 'facts' of language in different ways, depending on what they want to believe. This was my original gripe about xng and his attempt to incorporate Vietnamese into Chinese.

[Heyheyhey]

I think there is some genetic relation between Chinese and Vietnamese, but not so much that one is a dialect of one another.

Though, Vietnamese was originally a malay/mon-khmer language, it now shares many features similar to that of sino-tibetan languages, due to the constant integration of Chinese blood and influence through the 1000+ years of Chinese domination. Also, Viets also claim to be decendents of the Yue who lived in southern china pre-han dynasty.

Guess what? Yue and Viet seem to be cognates too. But even though it was originally mon-khmer it shares more similarities with the sino-tibetan languages than its other neighbors. Because the vietnamese language has changed since ancient times, just like the people. It was recorded that the people were not of "mongoloid stock" but rather a dark skinned "malayan" sort of body type, which is clearly not what the Vietnamese people look like now.

But yeah, Vietnamese has got to have some relation to chinese, but doesnt' mean its a dialect, just like French and Spanish are "related" languages but not dialects of one another.

[nnt]

Vietnamese has got to have some relation to chinese, but doesnt' mean its a dialect, just like French and Spanish are "related" languages but not dialects of one another

French and Spanish languages are cousins, because they are Latin language spin-offs ( Latin dialects).

The pair Vietnamese/Chinese may be compared with the pair English/French : different grammars(Germanic Versus latin), much common vocabulary.

That's speaking about languages. About the peoples, Chinese and Vietnamese are cousins in the same way as Europeans are all cousins( the bloodiest wars are fought between cousins, as everybody knows ).

[bathrobe]

This issue of the Vietnamese relationship with Chinese is actually fairly fundamental.

First, there is the factual problem:

* As far as we know, the Vietnamese language is NOT genetically related to Chinese (although some have posited that it may be). There is a huge amount of vocabulary borrowed from Chinese but there is a basic core of old vocabulary that has been identified as related to Mon-Khmer. Even massive borrowing does NOT constitute a genetic relationship.

Then there is the 'positioning' question:

* Chinese dialects are 'dialects' because their speakers treat them that way. Cantonese could be a separate language if it wanted to but it isn't because all Cantonese speakers consider that written Mandarin is their standard and that what they speak is only 'dialect'.

So when a Chinese speaker starts maintaining that Vietnamese is a Chinese dialect, there is a dangerous cultural implication: Vietnamese 'has left the fold' and should somehow come back in. As a dialect, Vietnamese can only be 'subordinate' to Mandarin, without separate status of its own. Like all the other Chinese dialects it will simply be a local, non-standard variant of the central theme. That is the slippery slope that these Chinese proponents of Vietnamese dialect status want to take us on.

This is related to the larger concept of what it means to be in a cultural or ethnic relationship with China:

* China has an unfortunate habit of engulfing other cultures like an amoeba and then claiming them as subordinate to or inferior to the orthodox central culture. The Vietnamese may be related to the Yue but being Yue does not ipso facto make them Han Chinese (or even Chinese). There are survivals of the Yue who have never been assimilated to the Han. The Li of Hainan are possibly survivals of the old Yue. They are Chinese but they still don't recognise themselves as Han. The implication that 'you are Yue, so you are also Chinese' is profoundly demeaning to the identity of other cultures and, I'm sorry to say, manifests one of the most unattractive aspects of the Chinese ethos, its tendency to demote other cultures into satellites of Chinese culture.

If you look at these claims from this perspective, you will understand why I earlier reacted so vehemently to the idea originally put forth in this thread.

[Ferno]

I don't understand how "word borrowing" works with Chinese.

If you look at European languages, the words have concrete meanings... ie our word "langauge" was taken from the French/Old French "langue" which was in turn borrowed from the Latin "lingua" and can be traced back even further before that.

But with Chinese, words are ambigious and mostly dependent on the context - ie how many things does zai or shi or xi mean? A slight change in tone and/or pronounciation will also make a modern Mandarin/etc... word unrecognizable with that of earlier Chinese dialect where the words might have been borrowed from..

[nnt]

In this website, there are examples of Vietnamese (Nôm) writings before latinization :

http://nguyendu.com.free.fr/nom/nom-bia-new.htm

The sixth column contains links to fac-simile of old vietnamese texts

ex : Đắc thú lâm tuyền thành đạo ca

Click on these links and you'll see what has been borrowed from chinese characters/words/expressions etc...

[Quest]

But with Chinese, words are ambigious and mostly dependent on the context - ie how many things does zai or shi or xi mean? A slight change in tone and/or pronounciation will also make a modern Mandarin/etc... word unrecognizable with that of earlier Chinese dialect where the words might have been borrowed from..

Chinese characters?

學校 --- School

is pronounced "xue2 xiao4" in Mandarin, "hok6 hao6" in Cantonese, and "gakkou" in Japanese, but they are all written with the same characters. So, next time you see "gaku" or "ko" in Japanese, with some guesswork you can map them to xue and xiao.

Also in Japanese, G is a hard K, so we can see that the consonant "x" in Mandarin is related to the consonant "h" in Cantonese, and they are related to the "k" sound in Japanese.

[atitarev]

To Ferno:

The traditional Chinese characters 學校 were pronounced as "học hiệu" in Vietnamese, which is Vietnamese for school, that is this word was borrowed from Chinese, although modern pronunciation and spelling doesn't demonstrate it. Unihan Chinese dictionary database stores pronunciation of Chinese characters by Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese speakers (if they are available). Just checked an online dictionary, it was a good guess (there are other versions of pronunciation).

In case you have garbled display fro Vietnamese characters it is "hoc hieu" with some diacritics.

Korean pronunciation must be HAKKYO of the above but I haven't checked that.

Borrowing from/into Chinese are different from European languages, sometimes pronunciation becomes quite different.

Vietnamese online dictionary:

http://vdict.com/

[nnt]

The traditional Chinese characters 學校 were pronounced as "học hiệu" in Vietnamese which is Vietnamese for school

,

THis is not Vietnamese, this is Sino/Vietnamese (Han/Viet) .

Any CHinese text can be read (even now...) in Sino/Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese (Nôm) for school is trường học 場學 which is composed of two borrowed Chinese characters with 場 instead of 校 and inverted order .

The Unihan database is very incomplete concerning "Vietnamese " pronunciation and is in gives Nôm pronunciation, not Han/Viet pronunciations.

[atitarev]

This Sino-Vietnamese version must be still in use, well the dictionary I provided has an entry, maybe it's obsolete, I don't know (the entry has (từ cũ; nghĩa cũ) written in brackets, don't know what it means). My point was to show how Chinese words borrowed into Vietnamese can sound quite different from the original, that's all.

[nnt]

maybe it's obsolete, I don't know (the entry has (từ cũ; nghĩa cũ) written in brackets, don't know what it means).

You have guessed it right. Từ cũ = obsolete.

My point was to show how Chinese words borrowed into Vietnamese can sound quite different from the original

The question is : what's the "original" . Sino Vietnamese is not borrowed from mandarin, but from middle Chinese. That's why it has some similarities with Korean, Japanesese, Cantonese, Shanghainese ,etc...

In this case ,

học 學 and "hok6" in Cantonese are nearly identical.

"hiệu" has gone it's own way : neither "hao6" (cantonese) nor "xiao4 " (mandarin)... but still, it has some relations, due to the common origins. The "h" has remained as in Cantonese, but the "i" has got into as in mandarin...

[atitarev]

Sino Vietnamese is not borrowed from mandarin, but from middle Chinese.

Yes, I am aware of this. There are still changes as you mentioned.

[Ah-Bin]

The traditional Chinese characters 學校 were pronounced as "học hiệu" in Vietnamese, which is Vietnamese for school, that is this word was borrowed from Chinese, although modern pronunciation and spelling doesn't demonstrate it.

學校 was actually a Japanese-invented compound designed for the western-style school system adopted in the Meiji period. The older Chinese words for it (still used in Southeast Asian Hakka and Hokkien in some places) was 學堂. I don't know whether the compound xue2xiao4 ever got into Vietnamese.

[Heyheyhey]

Little insight to maybe where hoc hieu came from Hok Hao?

Little thing I noticed:

The ao ending in seems to often translate into ieu ending in Vietnamese.

Ex:

The surname Zhao (mandarin)= Trieu (viet)

Few: Shao (mandarin)= Thieu

So maybe Hao - Hieu follows same pattern?

(but what do I know, I'm only 16)

[nnt]

Little insight to maybe where hoc hieu came from Hok Hao?

You're right about the similarities, but it's does not mean that the Vietnamese pronunciation "came from" Cantonese, but has the same origins , Middle Chinese.

For some other sounds, Han/Viet is closer to mandarin than to Cantonese

萬　vạn is closer to wan4 than to the Cantonese pronunciation.

I don't know whether the compound xue2xiao4 ever got into Vietnamese.

The Meiji reformation had a huge impact on the reformists/revolutionaries in China and Vietnam , and new Kanjis/compounds (or old compounds with new meanings) created by the Japanese were also introduced into Vietnam, because the CJKV region shared the same wenyan (Classic Chinese) . Around 1900 there was a big movement of Vietnamese intelligentsia : "Journey to Japan " Đông Du 東遊 to study Japanese success story in beating the Russians (1905).

[bathrobe]

With regard to whether Vietnamese is a Chinese dialect or not, the following article by American linguist Mark Alves may be interesting:

http://www.vietnamjournal.org/article.php?sid=36

The main conclusion, stated in the first paragraph (slightly edited), is:

"This study explores the ways in which Chinese has and has not affected the language spoken by the Vietnamese and their ancestors over two thousand years of language contact in what is an example of borrowing rather than shift. Based on comparative lexical, phonological, morphological, and syntactic evidence, the influence of Chinese, though lexically significant, is best viewed as structurally superficial. This paper demonstrates that, at each linguistic level, Chinese influence is primarily restricted to non-structural aspects of Vietnamese, and the various linguistic elements of Chinese have been fitted onto a primarily Southeast Asian and Mon-Khmer linguistic template."

(Incidentally, this article by the same scholar is also rather interesting:

Problems in the European Linguistic Analyses of Southeast Asian Languages

http://www.hawaii.edu/cseas/pubs/explore/v1/v1n1-art1.html

As well, this brief abstract also brings into question the European view of 'language families' (genetic relationships) as the only way of looking at languages.

AREAL LINGUISTICS AND MAINLAND SOUTHEAST ASIA

http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120406?cookieSet=1

Unfortunately the full article is not available)

[Heyheyhey]

http://www.vny2k.net/vny2k/SiniticVietnamese.htm

This is kinda like the essays by Mark Alves but debates that Vietnamese should be included as part of the sinitic languages but not as a dialect. Very intresting read. Mark Alves has even commented on the forums, but the forums take a good amount of Viet understanding to read, some posts are in Chinese too but mostly in Vietnamese.

"The fact, as presented in this study, that the nature of linguistic attributes of Vietnamese is so similar to Chinese in most of the aspects that make what a language of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family looks like should also make Vietnamese a class of the same linguistic family. Sidelining the main objective to prove the Chinese origin of thousands of Vietnamese words, this study is also an attempt to answer the question: "Is the Vietnamese language is characteristically more close to the Chinese language than to a Mon-Khmer language such as Khmer?" This paper will demonstrate that it is much more like Chinese, which is so obvious, above anything else, e.g. grammar, tonal system, phonology, peculiar experessions, etc. with so many Vietnamese words that, at first sight, seem to be "pure" Vietnamese, or indigenous, but actually virtually all has a Chinese origin."

http://www.glossika.com/en/dict/dialectv.php

Some other info.

[nnt]

As for the problem of Chinese and Vietnamese, you might like to look at this web site:

http://vny2k.net/vny2k/SiniticVietnamese.htm

This has been debated a few pages above... This is perpetual vicious circular movement . :mrgreen:

[Ferno]

Chinese characters?

學校 --- School

is pronounced "xue2 xiao4" in Mandarin' date=' "hok6 hao6" in Cantonese, and "gakkou" in Japanese, but they are all written with the same characters. So, next time you see "gaku" or "ko" in Japanese, with some guesswork you can map them to xue and xiao[/quote']

Really? And which one of the many definitions of "xue" and "xiao" will you map them to?

[bathrobe]

http://www.vny2k.net/vny2k/SiniticVietnamese.htm

To be frank, I find it very difficult to follow the arguments in this article.

Has anybody (including the person who so blithely posted the link) read it through carefully enough to see whether this particular thesis holds water? Just because the author is convinced that Vietnamese is Sino-Tibetan does not necessarily mean he has proved his case.