Vietnamese and Chinese syntax?

[felixthecat]

ncao ...

I,too am a full blood ETHNIC Chinese born and raised in Chinese district of CHOLON in former Saigon/S Vietnam.

Those Vietnamese DON'T EVER REGARD themselves as Chinese in Vietnam,but there a few dedicated psycho-pathe Viet-troll FAKING AS Chinese air fictitious theory of Viets/Chinese are the same family root crap talk.

[nnt]

I heard 老爷

Was that all? At least half of Vietnamese vocabulary is composed of Hán/Việt expressions.

老爷 lão gia, 贵妃 quý phi are Hán/Việt words, following Chinese syntax within the word.

Hán/Việt words and set expressions are molecules, but sentences are organic composites which can combine them differently according to different syntaxes.

[Zhao Hanqing]

Dear Felix,

You are right. I believe what you've said. Vietnamese hate Chinese because our ancestors bullied them again and again in the past. When Vietnamese emperors called their country Zhongguo or Zhonghua they did not mean Vietnam was China. By doing that they meant Vietnam is a civilized country. To them Zhongguo and Zhonghua are synonyms of a civilized country.

Hopefully you are persuaded.

[felixthecat]

Zhao

With all due respect ......

Nearly all you posts here are from out-dated Chinese Sino-centric perspective.

Korea prided itself as " little CHINA " for many centuries,never resorted to have it written as such in their history texts or diplomatc documents.

[tsuialex]

I'm a Cantonese native and I can say that 99% of the time we say A (adj.)過B instead of A比B (adj.) which sounds quite odd in spoken Cantonese. And such usage can apply to nearly all kinds of adjectives, like 大(big),快(fast),勁(powerful),好(good)etc., besides 高(tall).

So, we can say A勁過B (A is more powerful than B)

(quoted from Quest)

"過 turns the adjective into a verb, in a sense like A 超過 B."

I think this is not true. Normally for comparative purpose, 過 sounds more like 'than' in English rather than turning an adjective into a verb. Concerning the example you quoted, I don't think it's really a comparison structure grammatically. 超過 as a whole is actually a compound verb in Chinese which cannot be broken down as 超+過. I mean it is wrong to say that 超 individually is an adjective and then because we want to make a comparison sentence, we add 過 following 超. Individually, 超 is meaningless if considered to be an adjective, at least in modern Chinese. Analogically, we can say A exceeds B in English. But the verb 'exceeds' can tell nothing about the comparison structure. As a result, the nature of 超過 is different from those of 大過,快過,勁過,好過,ETC.

[Quest]

I wasn't saying 超过 was the same, just that "in a sense" 高过, 大过 etc were like 超过。过 expresses surpassing or exceeding.

[bhchao]

But who helped Koreans drive away Japanese?

Yi Sun-shin. Ming did send troops to Korea to help the Koreans, but it was the naval victories of Admiral Yi that helped the Koreans achieve control of the sea and cut off all supplies and reinforcements from the Japanese home islands.

No matter how strong or battle-hardened your army is, you cannot advance further if your supply lines are cut. That is why US forces were able to advance rapidly to Baghdad, because they had a long line of uninterrupted supply/reinforcements stretching from Kuwait across miles of desert to Baghdad.

Admiral Yi's control of the sea isolated Japanese land forces and prevented them from completing the conquest of Korea, and advancing into China.

Ming by the way suffered heavy casualties at the hands of the Japanese army in Korea. That was one of the reasons contributing to Ming's decline. Same thing goes for Sui. Sui's attempts to conquer Koguryo resulted in 90% of Sui's forces being decimated, and also helped bring Sui's collapse.

Ming forces got bogged down in the jungles of Vietnam during their struggle with Vietnamese resistance fighters, and had to complete a full withdrawal during the reign of Xuande. Of course Ming claimed victory, just like the Americans five centuries later, but both had to withdraw after years of stalemate with heavy casualties.

Deng Xiaoping made the same mistake as his Ming predecessors, the French, and the Americans by invading Vietnam in 1979. The PLA claimed victory, but in fact they had to withdraw after suffering heavy casualties from Vietnamese forces.

BTW Zhao, you seem like Tommy79.

[HashiriKata]

I wasn't saying 超过 was the same, just that "in a sense" 高过, 大过 etc were like 超过。过 expresses surpassing or exceeding.

I think Quest may have a point here. If the behaviour of "adjectives" in Cantonese is similar to those in many other East Asian languages (I don't know Cantonese), then the Cantonese adjectives should have a lot in common with verbs (and they're normally called "verbal adjective"/形容动词).

[tsuialex]

Quoted from Quest:

"I wasn't saying 超过 was the same, just that "in a sense" 高过, 大过 etc were like 超过。过 expresses surpassing or exceeding. "

You're right in this sense! Earlier on I just wanted to point out that 過 does not necessarily turn something into a verb, and it should not in a comparison structure.

Quoted from HashiriKata:

"I think Quest may have a point here. If the behaviour of "adjectives" in Cantonese is similar to those in many other East Asian languages (I don't know Cantonese), then the Cantonese adjectives should have a lot in common with verbs (and they're normally called "verbal adjective"/形容动词)."

Yes. In Cantonese or Chinese, adjectives are sometimes quite related to verbs. In some cases, the roles of adjectives and verbs are interchangeable. e.g. 豐富 can mean rich (adj.) or to enrich (v.).

We can also add 化 after some adjectives or even nouns to turn them into verbs. e.g. 醜 means ugly and 醜化 means to uglify.

However, to my knowledge, there are only a handful of examples showing a close relationship between adjectives and verbs. Above all, I think the comparison structure we're talking about should not be a case of verbalization of adjectives.

In fact, A高過B actually means A是高過B to make a 'complete' sentence. But 是 is understood in Chinese so omitted most of the time. As a general rule for many languages, there can only be one verb in one simple sentence. So you can see that 高過 would not be another 'verb' other than the verb 是 (to be).

[gamerfu]

I can sum this post in one word.

France.

[HashiriKata]

I think the clearest example of difference in word-order between Chinese and Vietnamese can be seen in common phrases such as shop names:

中国农业银行 (Chinese word-order)

银行农业中国 (= Ngân hàng nông nghiệp Trung Quốc, Vietnamese word-order)

This word order 银行农业中国 is typical of Vietnamese, and I don't think any of the Chinese dialects would have this order as a typical example. This alone shows that Vietnamese is quite a different kettle of fish compared to Chinese (dialects).