Vietnamese Relationship with Chinese Languages

[nnt]

There is a very good site for those who are interested in Hán/ Nôm :

http://nomfoundation...dex.php?IDcat=3

Many old Vietnamese books in Classical Chinese and Nôm have bên digitized. A big flaw of this site is that they don't clearly separate what is Classical Chinese and what is Nôm : I think there are many more books written in Classical Chinese than Nôm, for the official administrative language in Vietnam before 1945 was Classical Chinese.

Just an amusing example : Ấu Học Quốc Sử Ngũ Ngôn Thi : 幼學國使五言詩 ( National History in five characters verses for Elementary School ) was entirely written in Classical Chinese. Young Vietnamese schoolboys before French colonization learnt to read and write Chinese characters, not Nôm...

The first pages of a version of "Kim Vân Kiều" poem by Nguyễn Du (in Nôm) :

http://nomfoundation...at=1&subcat=931

[Ted C.]

I have seen photographs of temples and other old buildings in Vietnam bearing signs written or carved in Chinese characters. I guess those date back to before the turn of the 20th century.

Not necessarily. Classical Chinese is still used for decorative purposes on some temples in Vietnam, much like how churches in the West might use Latin decoratively.

It was called Chữ Nôm, and isn't really popular today.

Even at the time, Chữ Nôm wasn't widely used. Until the past century, literacy was very low in Vietnam, so most people didn't read or write at all. And the educated people usually wrote their documents in (Classical) Chinese.

So Chữ Nôm had a fairly narrow niche. It was mostly used for poetry.

[Learn-Chinese]

I completely disagree that Vietnamese sound like Cantonese.

I am a fluent Vietnamese speaker, and I cannot even understand basic Cantonese!!!! Not even the basic words in Cantonese.

I thought Vietnamese sound more like Mandarin, so many loans words are derived from Mandarin. But that is abot 60%-70% only. Many of Vietnamese words are made up from them and borrow from French too.

If Vietnamese were exactly like Chinese then we Vietnamese and Chinese people will have no language barrier, Lol!!! Then I don't have to here learning Mandarin, Lol!!!

[papen]

If Vietnamese still uses Chinese characters, Chinese and Vietnamese people could talk to each others through writing without any problems. Even in China, Cantonese can't understand ShangHainese. It's the case for Vietnamese during its first independent. It was considered as spoken language. Besides, in ancient time, Vietnamese used classical Chinese wen yan 文言 not modern Chinese bai hua 白话. The way of writing

Vietnamese in the old time wasn't the same as Modern Vietnamese also. I am also Vietnamese and I can show you one example, just read the story and you can straight away point out/

http://www.petalia.o.../Dacnhantam.pdf

Vietnamese is kind of like to invert Chinese. 歐洲 becomes 洲歐. 南北戰爭 becomes 戰爭南北