🔙 Quay lại trang tải sách pdf ebook Vietnamese Tiếng Việt Không Son Phấn Ebooks Nhóm Zalo VIETNAMESE Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. LONDON ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN LANGUAGE LIBRARY Editors Theodora Bynon David C. Bennett School of Oriental and African Studies London Masayoshi Shibatani Kobe University Advisory Board James Bynon, Bernard Comrie, Judith Jacob, Gilbert Lazard, Christian Lehmann, James A. Matisoff, Vladimir P. Nedjalkov, Robert H. Robins, Christopher Shackle The LONDON ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN LANGUAGE LIBRARY aims to make available a series of reliable and up-to-date descriptions of the grammatical structure of a wide range of Oriental and African languages, in a form readily accessible to the non specialist. With this in mind, the language material in each volume will be in roman script, fully glossed and translated. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. The Library is based at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London, Europe's largest institution specializing in the study of languages and cultures of Africa and Asia. Each volume is written by an acknowledged expert in the field who has carried out original research on the language and has first-hand knowledge of the area in which it is spoken. Volume 9 Nguyen Dình-Hoà Vietnamese Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. VIETNAMESE TIENG VIET KHÔNG SON PHAN NGUYEN DÌNH-HOA Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 8 TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. doi 10.1075/loall.9 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 97004965 isbn 978 90 272 3809 2 (EUR) / 978 1 55619 733 8 (US) (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 8308 5 (e-book) © 1997 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. CONTENTS Preface ix Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Vietnamese as a national language 1 1.2 Affinity with Chinese 2 1.3 Genetic relationship 2 1.4 Class-related dialects? 4 1.5 Language and religion 5 1.6 History of the language 5 1.7 Writing systems 6 1.8 Diversity 9 1.9 Kinesics 11 1.10 Syllabic Structure 11 1.11 Morphemes, words and larger sequences 15 Chapter 2. The sound system 17 2.0 An isolating language 17 2.1 Syllabic structure 18 2.2 Number of possible syllables 28 2.3 Below the syllable 28 Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 2.4 Syllable boundaries 30 2.5 Stress and intonation 31 2.6 Earlier records and recent reforms 33 Chapter 3. The lexicon 35 3.0 The word in Vietnamese 35 3.1 Monosyllables and polysyllables 35 3.2 Full words vs. empty words 36 3.3 Sino-Vietnamese (Hán-Viêt) 36 3.4 Morphemes 38 3.5 The simple word 40 3.6 Morphological processes 41 3.7 Reduplications 44 Chapter 4. The lexicon (continued) 59 4.0 Affixation and compounding 59 4.1 Prefixes 60 4.2 Suffixes 63 Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. vi CONTENTS 4.3 Compounding 66 4.4 More on Sino-Vietnamese 76 4.5 Other foreign borrowings 78 4.6 Nominalization 79 4.7 Unanalyzed forms 81 4.8 Concluding remarks about the unit called tieng 81 Chapter 5. Parts of speech 83 5.0 Parts of speech 83 5.1 Nouns 88 5.2 Locatives 98 5.3 Numerals 101 Chapter 6. Parts of speech (continued) 107 6.0 Predicatives 107 6.1 (Functive) Verbs 108 6.2 Stative verbs 119 6.3 Substitutes 123 Chapter 7. Parts of speech (continued) 139 7.0 Function words 139 7.1 Adverbs 140 Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 7.2 Connectives 162 7.3 Particles 165 7.4 Interjections 168 7.5 Multiple class membership 168 Chapter 8. The noun phrase 171 8.0 Phrase structure 171 8.1 The noun phrase 172 Chapter 9. The verb phrase 185 9.0 The verb phrase 185 9.1 Preverbs 186 9.2 The relative positions 188 9.3 Postverbs 189 9.4 The complement before and after the head verb 197 9.5 The di.... ve construction 198 9.6 The positions of postverb determiners 199 9.7 The adjectival phrase 200 9.8 Coordination Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. CONTENTS VII Chapter 10. The sentence 209 10.0 The sentence as unit of communication 209 10.1 The simple sentence 209 10.2 The subject-less sentence 210 10.3 The sentence without a predicate 212 10.4 The subject-less sentence with a reduced predicate 213 10.5 The kernel sentence 213 10.6 Adjuncts to the kernel sentence 224 10.7 Sentence expansion 230 Chapter 11. The sentence (continued) 233 11.1 Types of sentences 233 11.1.1 The affirmative sentence 233 11.1.2 The negative sentence 233 11.1.3 The interrogative sentence 237 11.1.4 The imperative sentence 242 11.1.5 The exclamatory sentence 243 11.2 The compound sentence 244 11.2.1 Concatenation of simple sentences 244 11.2.2 Correlative pronouns 245 Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 11.2.3 Connectives of coordination 245 11.3 The complex sentence 251 11.3.1 The embedded completive sentence 251 11.3.2 The embedded determinative sentence 253 Appendix 1. Parts of speech 256 Appendix 2. Texts 257 1. Folk verse about the lotus 257 2. Excerpt from a novel 258 3. Excerpt from a newspaper advertisement 261 Bibliography 263 Index 276 Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. PREFACE This is not a complete grammar of Vietnamese, but only an essential, descriptive introduction to a Southeast Asian language that has over seventy million speakers. It is based on lecture notes I prepared for Vietnamese language and grammar classes taught in several institutions, including Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where I had to earn my rice by means of courses in general and applied linguistics as my main teaching load between 1969 and 1990. The book gives a conservative treatment to phonology, lexicon, and syntax, with relevant comments on semantics and a few historical remarks, particularly in connection with the writing systems, the loanwords and the syntactic structures. Being a native speaker of it, I have made sure I trust less my intuition Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. than the early analyses undertaken by pioneer linguists from France, Great Britain, the USA, and Vietnam itself. I am particularly indebted to Le Van Ly, Murray B. Emeneau, Andre Haudricourt, Patrick Honey, R. B. Jones & Huynh Sanh Thong, and Laurence C. Thompson, etc. for their works, that appeared in the 1950s, as well as to the next wave of grammarians of Vietnamese (Bui Dúc Tinh, Truong Van Chinh, Nguyen Hien Le, Nguyen Qui-Hung, Duong Thanh Binh, Dào Thi Hoi, Nguyen Dang Liem, Buu Khai, Pham Van Hai, Tran Trong Hai, Marybeth Clark, etc.), whose publications came out in the 1960s and 1970s. While having the advantage of consulting nearly all the excellent monographs and journal articles produced by French authors of the last century as well as by Vietnamese academics around the Institute of Linguistics (established in Hanoi in 1969) , I was handicapped in not being able to use the voluminous research work by Russian linguists—my foreign language baggage being limited to French, English and Chinese, with only a smattering of Latin, Spanish and Thai. Luckily, the relevant courses (in Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. x PREFACE general linguistics, English grammar, ESL methodology, Vietnamese grammar, language planning, and lexicography) at SIU-Carbondale, provided me with opportunities to do several contrastive analyses and to learn first hand from many native speakers of non-European languages, including Chinese, Japanese, and such Southeast Asian systems as Thai, Khmer and Malay-Indonesian. I am thus very grateful for such an enriching exposure to a large variety of typological and areal features. Next I would be remiss if I failed to mention the highly significant contributions of my esteemed colleagues of the Saigon Branch of S.I.L. (Summer Institute of Linguistics), including those who did field work on the minority languages in South Vietnam between 1957 and 1975: I certainly benefited from various insights offered by Richard Pittman, David Thomas, Kenneth Gregerson, Jean Donaldson, Richard Watson, Ralph Haupers, to name only a few, regarding the salient features of Vietnamese in contrast with other languages of the region. I am also indebted to the French Bibliothèque Nationale, the British Library, and Japan's Toyo Bunko Library, to several stateside libraries that have respectable Southeast Asia holdings, and to the Fu Tsu-Nien Library of Academia Sinica in Nankang, Taipei, for many valuable materials. Finally my thanks go to Professors Theodora Bynon, Matt Shibatani and David Bennett of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. where I spent my first sabbatical leave in 1975, and to the editors of John Benjamins Publishing Company in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for their extremely helpful assistance in editorial matters. I fervently hope that this monograph—meant to be titled "Vietnamese Without Veneer" following my former supervisor Andre Martinet's Le Francais sans fard—will help both teachers and students of Vietnamese in different institutions of higher learning as well as in secondary and primary schools around the world. This compact sketch of the workings and functions of a truly wonderful tongue is dedicated first of all to my parents, uncles and aunts, brothers and sisters, cousins, children and grandchildren, and beyond the Nguyen clan, to all my former teachers of language and literature (in Vietnam and abroad), and last but not least to all my former students. Nguyen Dình-Hoa Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. Chapter 1 Introduction 1.1 Vietnamese as a National Language The language described here is known to its native speakers as tiêhg Viêt nam, tiêhg Viet, or Viêt-ng , and is used in daily communication over the whole territory of Vietnam, formerly known as the Empire of Annam (whose language was known as "Annamese" or "Annamite"), It is the mother tongue and the home language of the ethnic majority: the seventy-five million inhabitants who call themselves nguòi Viêt or nguòi kinh, and who occupy mainly the delta lowlands of the S-shaped country. The other ethnic groups such as Cambodians, Chinese, Indians, and the highlanders (once called "montagnards" inFrench, and now referred to as dông-bào Thuong, dân-tôc thhếu-sô, dân-tôc ít nguòi in Vietnamese) also know Vietnamese as the mainstream language and use it in their daily contacts with the Vietnamese, Neighboring Kampuchea (or Cambodia), Laos and Thailand all have Vietnamese settlements, just as the greater Paris area and southern France as well as former French territories in the Pacific (New Caledonia, New Hebrides) and in parts of Africa can count thousands of Vietnamese settlers. In addition, over two million people have during the past twenty-odd years Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. chosen to live overseas---in France, Great Britain, Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, etc. A large number among those recent expatriates—for instance 1,115,000 in North and South America and 386,000 in Europe, according to the United Nations---left their country following the fall of South Vietnam in 1975. After settling in those host countries, they have been trying to preserve their native language as part of their cultural heritage to be handed down to second- and third-generation community members through both formal instruction offered on weekends and active participation in educational and Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 2 VIETNAMESE cultural activities organized on festive occasions and traditional holidays. Formal courses in the Vietnamese language are taught in a number of foreign universities (in France, England, Germany, the United States, Australia, Japan, China, etc.), and some secondary schools in France, Australia and the U.S., etc. allow their students to choose Vietnamese as a foreign language. 1.2 Affinity with Chinese Vietnam was ruled by China for ten centuries, from 111 B.C. to A.D. 939: hence many Chinese loanwords have entered the Vietnamese scholarly, scientific and technical vocabulary. Indeed, until the early decades of the twentieth century, Chinese characters were used in the local system of education (with Confucian classics being the prescribed books for the grueling literary examinations that used to open the door to officialdom), and the Chinese script served at the same time as the medium of written communication among the educated people (like Latin in medieval Europe) and the vehicle of literary creations either in verse or in prose. This predominant role of written Chinese in traditional Vietnam has often led to the hasty statement that Vietnamese is "derived from Chinese" or is "a dialect Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. of Chinese". This is not true: Vietnam was merely under the cultural influence of China, just as Japan and Korea also owe several features of their culture to Sinitic culture. In fact, like Japanese and Korean, Vietnamese is not genetically related to Chinese. 1.3 Genetic Relationship Vietnamese belongs instead to the Mon-Khmer stock—that comprises Mon, spoken in Burma, and Khmer (Cambodian), which is the language of Kampuchea, as well as several minority languages (Khmu, Bahnar, Bru, etc.) of Vietnam—within a large linguistic family called the Austro-Asiatic family. The latter, first mentioned by W. Schmidt [1907-08], includes several major language groups spoken in a wide area running from the Chota Nagpur plateau region of India in the west to the Indochinese peninsula in the east. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. INTRODUCTION 3 1.3.1 In 1924, Jean Przyluski, a French scholar, after comparing Vietnamese with Miòng, a sister language spoken in the midlands of northern provinces (Phú-tho, Son-tây, Hoà-bînh) and central provinces (Thanh-hoá, Nghe-an), wrote that Ancient Vietnamese was closely related to the Mon-Khmer languages, which have several affixes, but no tones. The similarities between Vietnamese and Muòng can be seen in the following table as being closer than the similarities between either of them and other Mon-Khmer tongues (Mon, Khmer, Chrau, Bahnar and Ro-ngao, for example): Viêt Muòng Mon Khmer Chrau Bahnar Rongao EYE m t m t mat mat mat mat NOSE mui muy muh cromuh muh muh muh HAIR tóe thác sok sak sok sok FOOT chân chon jon cong jon jen CHILD con con kon koun con kon con THREE ba pa Pi bej pe pen Pi FOUR bon pon pan buon puôn puon pun FIVE nam dãm pram pram podam bod m BIRD chim chim cem sêm cim Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. BUFFALO trail tlu krobej kpu BETEL tràu tlu joblu mlu bolow bo1au RIVER sông không klang krong krong 1.3.2 Another French scholar, Henri Maspero, also using etymology to compare names of bodily parts (such as "neck, back, belly") among other vocabulary items, placed Vietnamese in the Tai family, all members of which—including Thai, or Siamese, the language of Thailand—are tonal. Maspero stated [1912, 1952] that modern Vietnamese resulted from a mixture of many elements, whose diversity is due to its long contacts with Mon Khmer, with Tai, and with Chinese. 1.3.3 Only in 1954 was André Haudricourt, a French botanist-linguist, able to trace the origin of the Vietnamese tones, arguing that, as a non-tonal language in the Mon-Khmer phylum at the beginning of the Christian era, Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 4 VIETNAMESE Vietnamese had developed three tones by the sixth century, and that by the twelfth century it had acquired all the six tones of modern Vietnamese, all this at the cost of losing final consonants /-? , -h/. This explanation about "tonogenesis" has thus enabled specialists to state fairly safely the genetic relationship of the Vietnamese language: together with Muòng, the language of Vietnam forms the Viêt-Muòng group within the Mon-Khmer phylum of the Austro-Asiatic family. 1.4 Class-related Dialects? Up to the late nineteenth century, traditional Vietnamese society comprised the four classes of scholars, farmers, craftsmen, and merchants, with the class of military men trailing behind (s , nông, công, thuong, binh). The 80-year long French colonial administration, brought to an end in 1945, had created a small bourgeoisie of functionaries and civil servants, physicians, lawyers, pharmacists, compradores, importers and exporters, etc. within and around major urban centers (Hanoi, Saigon, Håi-phòng). Until the mid 1950s the language of the working masses of rice farmers and handicraftsmen in rural areas retained dialectal particularities both in grammar and in Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. vocabulary, while that of city dwellers, including the inhabitants of Hanoi— the capital city of the whole colony of French Indochina—accepted and absorbed a large number of loanwords from both Chinese and French, the latter being the official language during more than eight decades. Since 1945, as the omnipresent tongue of wider communication, Vietnamese has achieved greater uniformity thanks to marked progress in education. Owing to increasing demographic and socio-economic mobility, chiefly as a result of the migration of rural people toward Hanoi on the one hand, and of the exodus from North Vietnam to south of the seventeenth parallel following the 1954 Geneva Armistice Agreement, on the other hand, differences among geographical and social dialects have lessened. Among other things, Vietnamese has replaced French as the medium of instruction in all the schools of the land, from kindergarten to the primary, secondary and tertiary levels. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. INTRODUCTION 5 1.5 Language and Religion Up to 90 percent of the population practice either the Mahayana "Great Vehicle" or the Hinayana ''Little Vehicle" form of Buddhism although traditionally the Vietnamese follow all the three major religions of China - Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism (Phât, Nho, Lão)—as well as the Buddhist sects Cao-dài and Hoà-hao in southern Vietnam, together with the cult of spirits and the worship of ancestors Approximately 10 percent of the population are Catholics, and more recently there has been an increasing number of followers of various Protestant denominations. The Buddhist church requires of its clergy advanced knowledge of Pali and Sanskrit, although prayers in Mahayana temples are chanted in. a mixture of Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese. The language used by Christian priests and ministers sometimes reveals distinctive features of local dialects, with natives of Bui-chu and Phát-diêm districts in North Vietnam speaking the distinct "Catholic-accent" local dialect of those areas. However, with the exception of the Taoist jargon in which a spiritualist attempts to communicate with the spirits of the dead by means of incantations and medium séances, there is no religious language which is different from the ordinary language. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 1.6 History of the Language The history of Vietnamese was sketched by Maspero in his important 1912 article. He distinguished six stages: 1. Pre-Vietnamese, common to Vietnamese and Muòng prior to their separation; 2. Proto-Vietnamese, before the formation of Sino-Vietnamese; 3. Archaic Vietnamese, characterized by the individualization of Sino Vietnamese (tenth century); 4. Ancient Vietnamese, represented by the Chinese-Vietnamese glossary Hua-yi Yi-yu [Hoa-di Dich-ng ] (fifteenth century); 5. Middle Vietnamese, reflected in the Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary by Alexandre de Rhodes (seventeenth century); and 6. Modern Vietnamese, beginning in the nineteenth century. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 6 VIETNAMESE 1.7 Writing Systems The language has made use of three different writing systems: first, the Chinese characters, referred to as chü nho 'scholars' script' or ch Hán 'Han characters', then the demotic characters called ch nôm (< nam 'south') 'southern script', then finally the Roman script called (chü) quóc-ngü 'national language / script'. 1.7.1 Chü nho or ch Hán Chinese written symbols, shared with Japanese and Korean—the two other Asian cultures that were also under Sinitic influence—for a long time served as the medium of education and official communication, at least among the educated classes of scholars and officials. Indeed from the early days of Chinese rule (111 B.C. to A.D. 939) the Chinese governors taught the Vietnamese not only Chinese calligraphy, but also the texts of Chinese history, philosophy and classical literature (while the spoken language absorbed a fairly large number of loanwords that were thoroughly integrated into the recipient language). The "Sino-Vietnamese" (Han- Viêt) pronunciation of those Chinese graphs, Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. which formed part of learnèd borrowings, is based on the pronunciation of Archaic Chinese, taught through the scholarly writings of Chinese philosophers and poets. Since these writings constituted the curriculum of an educational system sanctioned by triennial civil service examinations, the vast majority of peasants found themselves denied even a modicum of education dispensed in private village schools. Often the schoolteachers were either unsuccessful candidates in those examinations or scholars of literary talent and moral integrity; who preferred the teaching profession to an administrative career. 1.7.2 Chü nom While continuing to use Chinese to compose luât-thi 'regulated verse' as well as prose pieces, some of which have endured as real gems of Vietnamese literature in classical wen-yen (v n-ngôn), Buddhist monks and Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. INTRODUCTION 7 Confucian scholars, starting in the eleventh century, proudly used their own language to produce eight-line stanzas or long narratives in native verse. The "southern" characters, which they used to transcribe their compositions in the mother tongue, had probably been invented from the early days when Sino-Vietnamese, i.e. the pronunciation of Chinese graphs à la vietnamienne, had been stabilized, that is to say, around the ninth or tenth century. At any rate, thanks to the woodblock printing methods used within Buddhist monasteries, nom writings were already prospering under the Tran dynasty (1225-1400). Samples of these characters, which consist of Chinese graphs (or their components and combinations) and which are often undecipherable to the Chinese themselves, have been found on temple bells, on early stone inscriptions as well as in Buddhist-inspired poems and rhyme-prose pieces [Nguyên Dînh-Hoà 1990]. Over ten thousand such demotic characters appeared in Quôc-àm thi-tâp 'Collected Poems in the National Language', the seventh volume in the posthumously published works (Uc-trai di-tap) by Nguyen Trai (1380-1442) [Schneider 1987]. This 15th-century scholar-geographer-strategist-poet was the great moving force behind Emperor Lê Loi's anti-Ming campaign (1418- 1428). His 254 charming poems in the vernacular, long thought to be lost, yield ample evidence of early Vietnamese phonology, with many nôm Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. characters reflecting 15th-century Vietnamese pronunciation. It is worth noting that some features of that pronunciation were still present in Middle Vietnamese (see 1.6), as recorded in Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, the trilingual dictionary compiled by Alexandre de Rhodes—a gifted Jesuit missionary from Avignon—and published two centuries later (1651) in Rome [Gregerson 1969, Nguyên Dînh-Hoà 1986, 1991]. Some examples of nom characters follow: (1) tài 'talent' Cf. Sino-VN tài with same meaning (2) bùa 'written charm' Cf. Sino-VN phù with same meaning (3) làm 'to do, make' [from Sino-VN lãm ] Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 8 VIETNAMESE (4) mot ' 1 ' Cf. Sino-VN mot (5) biet 'to know' Cf. Sino-VN biet (6) mai 'new' Cf. Sino-VN mãi (7) trai 'fruit' (8) trài 'sky' (9) tanh 'fishy' (10) co 'grass' *the initial cluster bl- of this phonetic compound is listed in the 1651 dictionary, together with trãng 'moon', whose graphcontain s the same presyllable ba followed by lãng. **this character is a semantic compound, just like the character trùm '(village) leader' or the character seo 'village crier'. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 1.7.3 Chü quòc-ngü Vietnam owes the Roman script called (chü) quòc-ngü to Catholic missionaries from Portugal, France, Spain and Italy, who at first needed some sort of transcription to help them learn the local language well enough to preach the Gospel in it without the aid of interpreters, and in the next step to give their new converts easy access to Christian teachings in Vietnamese translation. The French colonialists, on the other hand, viewed this romanization as a potential tool for the assimilation of their subjects, who they hoped would be able to make a smooth transition from this sound-by sound transcription of their mother tongue in Latin letters to the process of learning French as their "langue de culture". The quoc-ngü script proved indeed to be an excellent system of writing that enabled Vietnamese speakers to learn how to read and write their own language within a few weeks. Not Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. INTRODUCTION 9 only did the novel script assist in the campaign against illiteracy, but it also helped the spread of basic education and the dissemination of knowledge, significantly introducing information about socio-political revolutionary movements in Japan, in China-—and in European countries. Nowadays, quoc ng serves as the medium of instruction at all levels of education, and despite its imperfections it has been groomed as the official conventional orthography: conferences and seminars have been held before and after reunification in 1976 to hear specialists from both zones discuss its inconsistencies and recommend spelling reforms, to be carried out gradually with a view to standardizing both the spoken and the written forms. 1.8 Diversity 1.8.1 Henri Maspero [1912] put Vietnamese dialects in two main groups: on the one hand the Upper-Annam group, which comprises many local dialects found in villages from the north of Nghe-an Province to the south of, Thùa-thiên Province, and on the other hand the Tonkin-Cochinchina dialect, which covers the remaining territory. Phonological structure veers off the dialect of Hanoi, for a long time the Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. political and cultural capital of the Empire of Annam, as one moves toward the south. In each of the three complex nuclei iê, uô, uo, for example, the second vowel tends toward -â in the groups transcribed iêc /iâk/, iêng /iân/, uôc /uâk/, uông /uân/, uoc /uâk/ and uong /uân/. The Vinh dialect, which should belong to the Upper Annam group, has three retroflexes: tr- [ tr ] affricated, s- [ S ] voiceless fricative, and r- [Z], the corresponding voiced one. The Hue dialect, considered archaic and difficult, has only five tones, with the hoi and ngã tones pronounced the same way with a long rising contour. The initial z- is replaced by the semi-vowel /j-/, and the palatal finals -ch and -nh are replaced by alveolars /-t/ and /-n/. The phonemes of the Saigon dialect generally are not arranged as shown in the orthography. However, the consonants of Saigonese present the distinction between ordinary and retroflex initials. Also the groups iêp, iêm, uôm, uop, uom are pronounced /ip, im, um, up, um/, respectively. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 10 VIETNAMESE Most dialects indeed form a continuum from north to south, each of them somewhat different from a neighboring dialect on either side. Such major urban centers as Hanoi, Hue and Saigon represent rather special dialects marked by the influence of educated speakers and of more frequent contacts with the other regions. 1.8.2 The language described herein is typified by the Hanoi dialect, which has served as a basis for the elaboration of the literary language. The spoken style retains its natural charm in each locality although efforts have been made from the elementary grades up to nationwide conferences and meetings "to preserve the purity and the clarity" of the standard language, whether spoken or written. The spoken tongue is used for all contexts of oral communication except public speeches, whereas the written medium, which one can qualify as the literary style, is fairly uniformly used in the press and over the radio and television, too. After noticing the inconsistencies of the quôc-ngü script, early French administrators and scholars tried on several occasions to recommend spelling reforms. However, earnest efforts in standardization, begun as early as in 1945, moved ahead only since 1954, when the governments in both zones established spelling norms—a task that was greatly facilitated by the increase Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. in literacy among thousands of peasants and workers both north and south of the demarcation line between 1954 and 1975. There is a very clear tendency to standardize the transliteration of place names and personal names borrowed from foreign languages, as well as the transliteration and/or translation of technical terms more and more required by progress in science and technology. Committees responsible for terminology work, i.e. the coining and codification of terms both in the exact sciences and in the human and social sciences, have considerably contributed to the enrichment of the national lexicon. Members of the generations that grew up under French rule were bilingual in Vietnamese (their home language) and French, but have subsequently added English. The so-called generation of 1945, for whom French ceased overnight to be the medium of instruction, read and write English as well. During the 1954-1975 partition, because of the influence of socialist countries, Russian as well as Mandarin Chinese became familiar to Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. INTRODUCTION 11 classes of professors, researchers, cadres and students in the northern half of the country, exposed to various currents of Marxist thought. South of the demarcation line, on the other hand, secondary school students could choose either French or English as first foreign language, to be studied for seven years, then at the senior high school level add the other tongue as their second foreign language in the three upper grades. French itself remained for many years the official language in diplomatic and political circles. Chinese characters continued to be taught as a classical language needed for studies in Eastern humanities. In the past two decades or so, such western languages as French and English have again become increasingly popular among the student population within the country while the young people in overseas communities have adjusted themselves to nearly every foreign language spoken in their respective countries of asylum and residence. 1.9 Kinesics The kinesics of Vietnamese has not been studied in depth. Bodily postures taught in the traditional society still subsist: one bows one's head when saying greetings to a superior and avoiding eye contact, and the older folks still Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. prostrate themselves while offering prayers in front of the ancestral altar on ceremonial occasions (weddings, funerals, New Year's Day, etc.) or inside a shrine dedicated to Buddha, to Confucius, to Taoist deities, or to their village's tutelary deity. Parents give a look of dissatisfaction and use clicks to show disapproval. In the presence of strangers, an attitude of reserve is called for, and children are taught to refrain from making hand gestures or even raising their voices while trying to use proper terms of address and reference, notably honorific formulas, most of which based on terms of family relationship. 1.10 Syllabic Structure Vietnamese is an isolating language, that is to say, it has more free forms than bound forms. Each unit of form, often referred to as tiêhg (mot), is a syllable (âm-tiêt). Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 12 VIETNAMESE 1.10.1 In the uniquely Vietnamese verse form called the "six-eight" (Juc hát) meter, a line of six syllables is followed by a line of eight syllables, thus Thanh-minh trong tiet tháng ba, Lê là tao-mô, hoi là dap-thanh.. (Nguyên Du) 'Now came the Feast of Light in the third month 'With graveyard rites and junkets on the green.' (transi. Huynh Sanh-Thông) In the old days, when Vietnamese made use of the Chinese written symbols (chü Hán, chü nho) or the southern, i.e. Vietnamese characters (chü nom), each of those graphs represented a separate syllable: Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. However, in the currently used conventional orthography called (chü) quóc-ngü lit., 'national language', each syllable, which can still be easily recognized as a graphic unit, may either stand as one of many independent words (like trong 'inside', tiêt 'season', tháng 'month', ba 'three', etc.) or serve as a constituent within hyphenated compounds that are usually made up of two or more syllables (for instance, thanh-minh 'purity and light', tao-mô 'to sweep the graves',- dap-thanh 'to step on the green grass'). 1.10.2 Each of the building blocks within a syllable is a unit of sound, called phoneme (âm-vi) and written with a symbol enclosed between slashes: we speak of the Vietnamese phonemes /m/, ¡il, ¡n¡ that make up the syllable minh, in which each phoneme may be represented by one letter (m, i) or two letters (nh). Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. INTRODUCTION 13 Furthermore, since Vietnamese is a tonal language, the meaning of a given syllable may change according to its tone (thanh-dieu, thinh), which is determined by a pitch level and a definite contour (level, falling, rising, dipping-rising, etc.): the same consonant-vowel combination /la/ has six realizations — la, là, lá, lã, la, la — which mean respectively 'to yell', 'to be, equal','tree leaf', '[of water] plain', 'exhausted', and 'strange'. It is often said that "Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language" (ngon-ngũ don-âm) . But a formal message, either oral or written, usually contains many polysyllabic (da-âm-tiet = da-tiet) words, i.e. words which are made up of several syllables. The single syllable (âm-thết) can be defined as the smallest meaningful unit of linguistic form, whose structure is a linear sequence of several phonemes affected by a tone. True, it is often found standing by itself as an autonomous unit (called tieng) in the phonological system (Chapter 2). But it is at the same time the equivalent of a morpheme (hình-vi, ngü-vi, moóc-phim) and of a simple word (tù) in the morpho syntactic system—where it also co-occurs with similar units to make up complex words through reduplication and compounding (Chapters 3 & 4). , [Let us note that tieng (which refers to "syllable", "morpheme" as well as "word") also means 'sound', 'noise', and even 'language' as in tieng Viet 'Vietnamese', tieng Pháp 'French', etc.] Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 1.10.3 From the point of view of semantics, we can distinguish several types of tieng: a. those like n 'to eat', hôi 'festival', trong 'inside', ba 'three', etc., which can be used freely in larger constructions—that is, in phrases or in sentences; b. those like minh 'bright, light', tao 'to sweep', thanh 'green', etc. which cannot be used alone, but must occur in such larger forms as two-syllable compound words like tao-mô, dap-thanh, thanh-minh. These "restricted" forms are mostly borrowings from Chinese, which was the language of culture in traditional Vietnam, China having ruled so long over the country south of its border; c. those like áp in ám-áp 'comfortably warm', chap in châm-chap 'slow(ly)', sua in sáng-sua 'bright, well lit', lam in tham-lam 'greedy', etc., which though not carrying a meaning of their own, serve as "helping" Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 14 VIETNAMESE syllables in the creation of such reduplicative, i.e. repetitive, forms that usually contain two syllables having the same initial sounds or rhyming together. 1.10.4 In the subfield of morphology, we study the structure of lexemes or words (tu) , their shapes and their meanings as well as the individual meanings of their components. In the subfield of syntax, we study sentences as meaningful strings of words, put together according to definite syntactic rules. On both levels, tieng functions as the relevant grammatical unit that is used to construct words (tù), then phrases (ng ), then sentences (câu). In the following sentence (1) Tôi ãn com-trua ó truàng. I eat rice-noon at school 'I eat lunch at school.' each tieng or. syllable is a word—though cam-trua is often called a compound. But in the next example (2) Tôi ãn lót-da o câu-lac-bô. I eat line-stomach at club 'I eat breakfast at the club.' Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. it takes two tieng or syllables to make up the compound idiom lót-da ['to line one's stomach'—'breakfast'], and three tieng or syllables to yield the noun câu-lac-bô (a mere transliteration of the English word "club" as borrowed through Chinese). We are now ready to become familiar with a few more technical terms. First, a word (tù) in Vietnamese may consist of: one monosyllable, e. g. tháng, ba, tôi, n, corn, etc.; or two syllables, e. g. thanh-minh, tao-mô, com-triía, lót-da, etc.; or three syllables, e. g. câu-lac-bô 'club', quan-sat-viên 'observer', liên-lac-viên 'liaison person', kiên-truc-su 'architect', etc. Each word thus structured can function as a constituent in a sentence, e.g.: Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. INTRODUCTION 15 (3) Bây-gio là tiêt tháng ba. that-time be season month three 'It was then the third lunar month.' (4) Lé dó gol là le tao-mô. rite that call be ceremony sweep-grave 'That rite is called the grave-sweeping ceremony.' (5) Tôi ăn lót-da ô câu-lac-bô, chúkhông phai ô hop-tac-xă. I eat line-stomach at club but not correct at cooperative 'I ate breakfast at the club, and not at the cooperative.' [The hyphenated units are either disyllabic, as in bây-gio 'then', lót-da 'breakfast', or trisyllabic, as in câu-lac-bô 'club', hop-tac-xă 'cooperative'.] Compound words, especially those borrowed from Chinese, may be written with spaces between the syllables (tao mô, hop tac xă), or with hyphens between them (tao-mô, hop-tac-xă), or as solid compounds, with the syllables run together ( taomô, hoptácxă ) . As semantic wholes, they each have a very stable structure, and in actual, normal pronunciation there is no break or pause between syllables. Although the first style, considered by some people as careless, has been used in books, newspapers and other publications printed inside Vietnam or overseas, and although the third style Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. is far superior because it reflects phonological realities—as several conferences on spelling reforms had noted—this book uses the second style (with hyphens) for purely pedagogic purposes. 1.11 At the word level, we have to look at morphemes (variously called tiêhg, tù-to, hînh-vi, ngũ-vi, moóc-phim), which are parts of words or lexemes (tù). As for the term chũ, it is used to refer to either 'a single letter of the alphabet' (like ch a, chũ b, chă ô, etc.) or 'a system of writing, a script' (like chũ Han, chũ Pháp) or 'an individual character, that is to say, a written symbol in the Chinese script or the nôm script'—in all cases some written form(s) used to reflect the spoken forms. Words or lexemes are in turn grouped into larger sequences known as phrases and sentences. The sentence as a unit of communication is a string of words carrying a meaningful message, obeying the syntactic rules of the Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 16 VIETNAMESE language and following a specific pattern of stress and intonation. As we shall see in the chapters on Syntax, the structure of a minimal sentence (câu) consists of two essential parts or constituents: the subject (chu-ngũ) announcing a topic (de) and the predicate (vi-ngũ) providing a comment (thuyêi) on that topic. The subject-predicate or "topic-comment" relationship is obvious in such a simple sentence as (6) Tròi mua. sky rain 'It's raining.' in which troi is the subject, and mua is the predicate, and which represents a predication or statement about the weather. The same sentence may be reduced to (7) Mua., with the subject tròi left out, or it may be incorporated into a more complex form, for instance: (8) (Nêu) tròi mua thi tôi không di. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. if sky rain then I NEG go 'If it rains, I won't go'. As vital units of speech communication, sentences make up paragraphs, and paragraphs make up a given discourse that takes place in a given contextual environment—for instance an exchange or a conversation between two persons under given circumstances, or a written document designed to be read for the purpose of information or entertainment. Vietnamese utterances will be analyzed into sentences. But before proceeding to an analysis of words and sentences we will first need to discuss the phonology of the language, that is to say, the sound system and how the latter correlates with the quóc-ngũ writing system used throughout the country. This will be the objective of Chapter 2. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. Chapter 2 The Sound System 2.0 An Isolating Language Comparative linguistics, focusing on the characteristics of the word, would label Vietnamese as an "isolating language", that is, one in which all the words are invariable and grammatical relations are primarily shown by word order: in the sentence Sang nay tôi uôhg hai tách cà-phê. (morning this I/me drink two cup coffee) 'I drank two cups of coffee this morning', the verb uôhg actually could mean "drink, drank, drunk, or drinking". Other languages such as Chinese, and many Southeast Asian languages (including Thai, Lao, etc.) are likewise "non-inflectional". An alternative term is "analytic language", as opposed to "synthetic language", the label for a system in which a word typically contains more than one morpheme: in English the verb drank /dr æ nk/ consists of the base drink /drink/ plus the "past tense morpheme" (/i/ becomes /æ/), just as the verb talked contains the base talk /t c k/ followed by the past tense morpheme A/, which is spelled -ed. The noun cups, on the other hand, consists of the base cup /k p/ plus the "plural morpheme" /s/. In each language, the spoken chain can be divided into syllables. A Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. syllable is the minimum unit of pronunciation: it is larger than a single sound and smaller than a word. It is defined phonetically, within a string of sounds in any language, in terms of "peaks of sonority" with each peak corresponding to the center of a syllable. Phonologically, that is, with regard to an individual language, two classes of sounds can be distinguished: those which can occur on their own, or at the center of a sequence of sounds, and those which cannot occur on their own, or which occur at the margins of a sequence of sounds. The former sounds, like [a], [e], [i], [o], [u], etc., are generally referred to as vowels (nguyen-âm); the latter sounds, like [p], [t], [k], [m], [f], [x], etc., are generally referred to as consonants (phu-âm). Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 18 VIETNAMESE A consonant-vowel (CV) sequence seems to be found in all languages: these "open" syllables occur for instance in words [here hyphenated] in Japanese ta-be-ru 'to eat', Vietnamese ba ni-cô 'three (Buddhist) nuns', Thai bu-rìi 'cigarette', French ma-ri 'husband', ca-fé 'coffee', etc. The CVC pattern is also very common: examples of "closed" syllables are Vietnamese bat com 'bowl of rice', Thai maj-khìid 'matchstick', English fat, mad, cat, sit, hot, tin, roof, etc. In examining the Vietnamese phonological system, we will start with the structure of a Vietnamese syllable, since as a self-contained entity called tiêhg (mot) in common parlance, the syllable (âm-tiêt) forms the basis of our description. Indeed we will concentrate on the grouping of phonemes "sound units" (âm-vi) into syllables, which in this language are coextensive with morphemes "smallest meaningful units of linguistic form" (ngũ-vi) . 2.1 Syllabic Structure Each syllable, that is, each minimum pertinent unit under analysis is composed of three constituents: 1. an "initial" [or "onset"] , which is a beginning consonant; 2. a "final" or rhyme, which is the rest of the syllable minus the tone, and Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. consists of a vowel nucleus either standing by itself or preceded by a medial /w/, and/or followed by a final consonant [called "coda"]; and 3. a tone. If we represent the beginning consonant by the symbol C1, the final or rhyme by x, and the tone by T, then a CVC syllable in Vietnamese may be summarized as T C 1 + x [In traditional phonology, the initial (consonant) C1 is called thanh-mau, and the final or rhyme x is called van-mâu = van.] The final or rhyme x consists of the obligatory main vowel V, optionally preceded by the medial /w/ and optionally followed by a C2 : x = (w) V + (C2) Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE SOUND SYSTEM 19 2.1.1 Initial Consonants (phu-am dau) The initial consonant C1 may be absent, as in ăn, om, im, ung, etc., wherein the rhyme x is /-an/, /-6m/, /-im/, and /-ung/, respectively. Here the tones are /level/, /rising/, /level/, and /dipping-rising/, marking those syllables as meaning respectively 'to eat', 'sick', 'to keep quiet', and 'rotten'. (Actually each vowel in the above examples is preceded by a "glottal stop" — complete closure at the glottis — [?an], [?om], [?im], [?unm].) Although there may be only one initial consonant C1 in each syllable, for instance /t-/ or /k-/, the final or rhyme x may consist of 1. just a vocalic nucleus ; or 2. a vocalic nucleus followed by a final consonant ; or 3. a vocalic nucleus preceded by a medial sound/-w-/ [u]; or 4. a vocalic nucleus preceded by that /-w-/ element and also followed by a final consonant, as shown in the following two sets of examples: al t- ê C1 + V 'numb' 2 t- e n C1 + V + C2 'name' 3 t-u ê' C1 + w + V 'year of age' A t-o á n C1 + w + V + C2 'math' bl c a C1 + V 'fish' Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 2 c-á n C1 + V + C2 'handle [of tool] ' 3 q- u á C1 + w + V 'to exceed' A q-u á n C1 + w + V + C2 'inn' Phonetically, the examples a3, a4, b3 and b4 containing the medial /w/ are interpreted as follows: a3 t- uê /twê/ [tué] a4 t- oán /twán/ [tuán] b3 q- uá /kwá/ [kuá] b4 q- uán /kwán/ [kuán] In the following table of consonant phonemes that may occur in the syllable-initial position, the letter(s) used to represent a consonant in the quôc ngu script almost coincide(s) with a phonemic symbol, which appears between slashes: Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 20 VIETNAMESE 1. /b-/ b- (ba bon bà beo-béo) 2. /k-/ c-, k-, q- (con cá, cái kim, qua cam) 3. /c-/ ch-, tr- (cha, chu, chi; tra, tru, tri) 4. /z-/ d-,gi-,r- (da, di, gia, ra) 5. /d-/ d- (di day di dó) 6. /g-/ g(h)- (ghi, ghê-góm, gay-go) 7. /h-/ h- (ho-hen, hen-ho, hon-hén) 8. /x-/ kh- (khó-khan, khò-khè, khoe-khoang) 9. /l-/ 1- (liu-lo, leu-lao, lè-loi, lôi-lam) 10. /m-/ m- (mo-màng, mãi-mãi, mo-mò) 11. /n-/ n- (no-nê, nãn-nl, no-nang) Yl, ng(h)- (nghi-ngo, ngô-nghê, nghe-ngóng) 13. nh- (nhè-nhe, nhó-nhung, nhác-nha) 14. /p-/ p- (pip, pô-ke, pô-po-lin)* 15. /f-/ ph- (phuong-pháp, phu-phen, phe-phái) 16. A-/ t- (têt ta, tu-tài tây, ti-teo, to-tuóng) 17. /th-/ th- (that-thà, thong-tha, thinh-thoang) 18. /v-/ v- (vui-vé, vôi-vàng, v ng-vé) 19. Is-I x-, s- (xa-xãm, xa-xôi, Xã Xe; sa-si, sao sáng) 20. /tr-/ tr- (tra, tru, tri) Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 21. /JV s- (sa-si, sao sáng) 11. r- (roi ra rãt rác-roi) *The phoneme /p/ used to occur only in final position, but nowadays it also occurs at the beginning of several words borrowed from French, for example, pin 'battery', pip Smoking pipe', po-ke 'poker', pô-po-lin 'poplin', etc. Of the above 22 beginning consonants, the first nineteen represent the northern dialect typified by the speech heard around Hanoi whereas the last three (#20, #21 and #22) are typical of areas running from northern Central Vietnam southward and also of some areas in North Vietnam. Of these three retroflex consonants (pronounced with the tip of the tongue tilted upward), the last one is sometimes pronounced like / r / in the Saigon dialect, which does not have the labiodental /v / (#18) of the northern dialect. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE SOUND SYSTEM 21 In the northern dialect, the two consonants spelled tr- and ch- fall together in pronunciation {tra and cha sounding alike — /ca/). Also in the north, urban speakers do not differentiate between words spelled with s- and x- {sa and xa sounding alike — /sa/). Some people in rural areas do not differentiate between words spelled with /- and n-, pronouncing both làm and nam as /nam/: this is considered a non-standard feature. However, in the conventional orthography, members of such pairs as sa : xa /ja : sa /, tra : cha /tra : ca /, and làm : nàm I làm : nàm / are differentiated. Although the sounds spelled with d-, with gi- and with r- no longer show any distinction in modern Hanoi speech, spelling rules require that the word for 'skin' be spelled da, the word meaning 'house(hold), home; family' be spelled gia, and the word for 'to go out, exit' be spelled ra. [Indeed, in a dictation test, even a teacher who is a native speaker of northern Vietnamese may give the "spelling pronunciation" of each of these three sounds.] Some speakers of the Saigon dialect pronounce both da and gia as /ya/, that is with the glide or medial /y/ [j] before the main vowel /a/. The Vietnamese-Portuguese-latin dictionary (often referred to as "Tu~ dien Viêt-Bò-la") by Alexandre de Rhodes (1591-1660) recorded in 1651 some consonant clusters: /bl-/ as in blå, blai, blái, blang, blo, bloi, etc. Cf. Modern VN tra, Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. trai, trái, trăng, tro, troi, etc. with /bl/ becoming / tr /. /ml-/ as in mlam, mlat, mlë, mldi, mlón, etc. Cf. Modern VN lam, lăt, le, loi, Ion, etc. with /m/ being dropped. /mnh-/ as in mnham, mnhë, etc. Cf. Modern VN nham, nhë, etc. with /m/ being dropped. M-/ as in tlai, tlai, tlăm, tlâu, tle, etc. Cf. Modern VN trai, trái, tram, trâu, tre, etc. with Al/ becoming / tr /. No dialect in Modern Vietnamese has retained any of those consonant clusters, which had existed — as sounds — at least up to the seventeenth century. But in the quóc-ngũ script, some of the consonant phonemes are transcribed with a digraph, that is to say, a group of two consonant letters (ch- as in cha 'father'; gh- as in ghe 'small boat', ghê 'awe-stricken', ghi 'to record'; ph- as in pha 'to mix'; th- as in tha 'to set free; to forgive'; Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 22 VIETNAMESE tr- as in tre 'bamboo', etc.) or even with a group of three consonant letters (ngh- as in nghe 'to listen', nghi 'to suspect', nghê 'trade, occupation'). Also, one same phoneme may assume two or three written forms: /k/ for instance is transcribed with the letter k- before a front vowel i, ê, e , but with the letter q- if followed by the medial /-w-/, and with the letter c- elsewhere: ki-Io 'kilogram', ky ki /ki/ 'to sign', kè 'to trace', kê 'millet', qua 'to cross over', que 'native place', quan-quân 'champion', qui, quy 'precious', cá 'fish', cam 'chin', cam 'dumb, mute', con 'child', co 'aunt', com '[cooked] rice', cu 'used, old', cung 'hard', etc. Both velar consonants — the fricative /g/ [ ] and the nasal / ] / — are written with the extra letter h if the vowel is /i, ê, e/: ghi 'to record', ghe 'chair', ghe 'boat', nghi 'to suspect', nghê 'trade, occupation', nghe 'to listen, hear', etc. This was due to the influence of Italian spelling. 2.1.2 Rhymes (văn, van) Within the final or rhyme x, the vowel nucleus can be one of the eleven simple vowels: a, à, â, e, ê, i (y), o, ô, o, u, u (respectively, low central, short low central, short mid central, unrounded low front, unrounded Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. mid front, unrounded high front, rounded low back, rounded mid back, unrounded mid central, rounded high back, and unrounded high back). The nucleus can also be one of the three double vowels: /iâ/ spelled ia, iê- ; /uâ/ spelled ua, uô-; and /tía/ spelled ua, uo-. Of these two-vowel clusters, also called diphthongs (âm dôi), each has a noticeable change in quality within the syllable—the "glide" from a more sonorous element /i u Ml toward the less sonorous, central element /â/. The nuclear vowel phoneme / i / is sometimes spelled i (as in di 'to go', mi 'noodles', si 'scholar') and sometimes spelled y (as in ly 'reason', ky 'careful, thorough', My 'America; American'). [if, ki, Mi would be better representations, as recommended in the campaign to standardize the spelling system. But specialists recognize that spelling reforms take time.] All three diphthongs, written with two letters, are spelled -ia, -ua, -ua, respectively, if they occur in open syllables : mía 'sugar cane', mua 'to buy', Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE SOUND SYSTEM 23 mua 'to rain' (examples al, bl, cl below). However, when there is a final consonant C2 , that is, in a closed syllable, the complex vowels are spelled respectively iê-, uô-, uo- : thus, miêhg 'morsel, bite, piece, bit', muôn '10,000', muong 'irrigation canal'(examples a2, b2, and c2): al m-ia C1 + Vâ 'sugar cane' 2 m- iê ng C1 + Vâ + C2 'morsel, bite' bl m- ua C1 + Vâ 'to buy' 2 m-uôn C1 + Vâ + C2 '10,000' cl m- tía C1 + Vâ 'to rain' 2 m- oo ng C1 + Vâ + C2 'irrigation canal' The double nucleus /-iâ/, spelled -ia or -Jê-, obeys some special spelling rules. It is spelled yê- when there is a final consonant but no initial consonant (as in yêu /iâw/ 'to love', yêim /iâm/ 'Vietnamese halter bra'), or when it is both preceded by the medial sound /-w-/ and followed by a final consonant (as in uyên /wiân/ [-Wong] 'mandarin ducks', thuyêt Ahwiât/ 'theory', Nguyên / wiân/ 'the family name Nguyen', tuyên-truyên Awiân cwian/ 'propaganda'). If there is no final consonant, then the sequence -ia is respelled -ya, as in the unique lexeme khuya /xwiâ/ 'late at night' (Cf. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. khuyên /xwiân/ 'to advise') . le t us finally note that the two vowels a (short a) and â (short o ) cannot occur in an open syllable, but must be followed by a final consonant: an 'to eat', am 'lukewarm', tam 'toothpick', tăng 'to increase', sap 'to arrange', m t 'eye', bac 'north', can 'to need', cap 'to provide', dât 'earth, ground', nâc 'hiccough', etc. The presence of a final consonant is implied when we place a hyphen after either vowel: -, â-. 2.1.3 Final Consonants (phu-âm cuoi) There are eight possible elements occurring in syllable-final position: we can find one of the three stops (tac-âm) / p t k /, one of the three nasals (ti-âm) / m n /, or one of the two semivowels (ban-nguyên-âm) / y w /: Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 24 VIETNAMESE dáp [d á p] 'to reply', mat [m á t] 'cool', khác [x á k] 'other, different', khách [x ă i k] 'guest'; nam [nam] 'south', bán [b á n] 'to sell', trang [c a ] or [tr a ] 'page', trnh [c ă i η] or [tr a i n] 'painting'; tai [t a i] /tay/ 'ear', tay [t â i] /tăy/ 'arm'; bao [b á u] /báw/ 'newspaper', báu [b ă u] /băw/ 'precious', The (pre-)velar stop which follows i and ê is spelled -ch (as in thich [ th i k ] 'to like', éch [ăik ] 'frog'), and the (pre-) velar nasal is spelled -nh (as in minh [m i ] 'body', benh [b a i ] 'disease'). Among the final consonants C2, the labials /p m/ pattern together, the alveolars A n/ pattern together, just as the velars /k n/ pattern together, as seen in the reduplications áim-áp 'comfortably warm, cosy', dèm-dep 'fairly good-looking', ton-tot 'rather good', man-mat 'rather cool', sinh sich '[of engine] running loudly', vàng-vac '[of moonlight] bright and clear' [see 3.5.2.2]. The spellings ung, ông, ong, uc, oc, oc represent [uu m], [âu m], [au m], [uukp], [âukp], [aukp], respectively, with labio-velar co-articulation following a rounded back vowel /u 0 0/ as in ung 'ulcer, cancer', ông 'grandfather', ong 'bee', duc 'muddy', doc 'poison(ous)', doc 'to read'. In rare examples of simple velar nasals or stops occurring after back vowels Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. /o o/, the latter are spelled ôô, oo : côông in côông-kênh 'to carry someone sitting astride or standing on one's shoulders' (cf. công 'peacock'); boong 'ship deck' [< Fr. pont] (cf. bong '[of glued surface] to come loose'), ba toong 'walking stick, cane' [< Fr. bâton] (cf. tong 'lost, all gone'), loong toong 'messenger' [< Fr. planton ] (cf. long 'to become detached'), bu loong 'bolt' [ mot '1 after muoi' : for example hai muoi mot '21', ba muoi moi '31', boh muoi mot '41', .... muoi '10' > muoi '10 when preceded by a unit numeral' : for example bon muoi '40', nam muoi '50', tam muoi '80', ruoi '[of quantity, amount, unit] and a half', as in mot tháng ruoi 'one month and a half', mot do-la ruoi 'one and a half dollars', hai gio ruoi '2:30; two and a half hours', tang gap ruoi 'to increase 50%' — but ruôi '[of number] and a half', as in hai tram ruôi '250', ba nghin ruôi '3,500', tarn triêu ruôi '8,500,000',.... Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. B. (Demonstrative) substitutes. nay 'this; here, now' (horn nay 'today', ngày nay 'nowadays') : này (tháng này 'this month', tuân này 'this week', hoc-ky này 'this term') day 'here' : day 'there' bay gio 'now' : bay gio 'then' kia 'there' : kia 'yonder' nhieu 'much, many' : nhiêu [in bao nhiêu? 'how much? how many?', bây nhiêu this much, this many', bay nhiêu 'that much, that many']. C. Verbs. cua 'to saw' > cua 'to cut in a sawing motion with a (dull) blade' cúng 'hard' > cùng 'to have an erection' muon 'to borrow' > muon 'to hire, rent' ngang 'transversal, horizontal' > ngáng 'to trip, make [somebody] stumble' Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE lEXICON 43 nguoc 'upstream, opposite direction' > nguóc 'to look up' There are some examples among the Chinese loanwords: *lâu 'tower' and lau 'tower; stor(e)y, floor'; qua 'to pass by, cross' and qua 'to go beyond, exceed'; truong 'long' and trũong 'to grow up'; trung 'center' and trung 'to hit squarely'; truyèn 'to pass on' and truyên 'story, novel'; etc. D. Nouns. Beside the above pairs of related words that should for practical purposes be learned as separate words used in different contexts, there are interesting items which are used to refer to people or places. They are clearly derived from regular nouns (denoting relatives and locations). (1) Such kinship terms as bà 'grandmother—lady', ông 'grandfather gentleman', co 'aunt-unmarried young lady', anh 'elder brother—male equal', etc. are used as personal pronouns in both address and reference. They would in the Saigon dialect take the hôi tone and mean respectively 'that lady', 'that gentleman', 'that young lady', 'that fellow': bà > bå = bà ăy 'she' ông > ong = ông ăy 'he' cô > có = cô áy 'she' anh > anh - anh ăy 'he' Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. chi > chl = chi ăy 'she' thang > thang = thang ăy 'that guy, he' thang cha > thang cha = thàng cha ăy 'that bloody guy; he' [This does not work for words that have the sac tone like chu 'father's younger brother', bác 'fathers older brother'.] (2) On the other hand, such nouns as horn 'day', bên 'side', dang 'location', or such noun-like locatives as trong 'place inside', ngoài 'place outside', trên 'place on top', etc. would among speakers of Saigonese yield forms with the hôi tone, too. The relevant forms mean respectively: hom (= horn ăy) 'that day', bén (= bên ăy) 'that side; over there', ding (= dang ăy) 'that location; there', trông (= trong ăy) 'that space inside; in there', ngoài (= ngoài ăy) 'that space outside; out there', tren (= trên ây) 'that space on top; up there', etc. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 44 VIETNAMESE The above items trong, ngoài, tren, duói (and truóc, sau, ....) make up a small word class of locatives that on the surface resemble English prepositions. They all refer to position (in space or time), so have been called "relator-nouns" [Thompson 1965: 200]—phuong-vi-tu in Vietnamese. A diachronic (historical) explanation has been attempted by Thompson [1965c: 149] concerning this phenomenon: southern derivatives with hoi tone may involve anticipation of the tone of ăy 'that' in the preceding noun, at an earlier stage of the Saigon dialect when ăy was used (as it is in the northern dialect today) instead of modern dó ; later the demonstrative ăy was dropped, leaving the noun or noun-like form with modified tone. 3.6.1.2 A change in the initial consonant. This may result in two rhyming syllables, as in the case of the numeral nam '5', which gives lam /nhăm '5 in numbers between the tens,' i.e. when occurring after muoi / muoi '10': muoi lam '15', hai muoi lam /nhăm '25', ba muoi lam / nhăm '35', bay miloi lăm / nhăm '75', etc. But there are abundant examples of formations in which the final -c /k/ following a vowel alternates with -ng / /, for instance nong-noc 'tadpole', or the final -ch /c/ alternates with -nh / /, for instance [cuoi] khanh-khách 'to laugh heartily'. These formations will be treated in detail in the section devoted to reduplications. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 3.6.1.3 Vowel alternations. There is a vowel alternation between /ă/ and /â/, as in băc 'north' : bac '[of wind] northerly', and between /a/ and /ô/, as in nam 'south' , nom '[of script] southern, demotic' and nom '[of wind] southerly'. There are also alternations between /u/ and /i/, /ô/ and /ê/, /o/ and /e/, which will be discussed under reduplications (3.7). 3.7 Reduplications (lap lay, lay). Reduplications are iterative forms (tieng dôi - mots doubles) in which a repeated element reflects certain phonological characteristics of the base. This feature is also found in other Southeast Asian languages. In Thai, for instance, reduplication results in imitative words, such as súbsíb 'to whisper', haahee 'sound of hearty laughter', etc. In Malay languages, a complete repetition denotes plurality: orang-orang 'men' < orang 'man', bangsar-bangsar 'nations' < bangsar 'nation', api-api 'box of matches' < api 'fire', etc. In English the nearest examples are Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE lEXICON 45 such compound words are chop-chop, clip-clop, clackety-clack, dillydally, helter-skelter, mumbo-jumbo, palsywalsy, razzle-dazzle, teeter-totter, etc. In Vietnamese, the basic and the "derived" syllables display sound harmony, resulting in some parallelism in the structure and a change in meaning. The reduplicative formations, which have recently been studied in detail in several monographs and articles, and even listed in dictionary form [Hoàng Van Hành 1994], show several types of combinatory alternations, for instance, alternation in the rhyme plus alternation in the tone. 3.7.1 The repetitions perform several functions, of which the most important ones are: 3.7.1.1. Most classifiers (5.1.3.B7) and a few common nouns and pronouns can be reduplicated (with no loss of tone) with the meaning "every unit, each unit or group in turn" as in ai ai 'everyone', dâu dâu 'everywhere, somewhere', gi gi 'everything, something', nguoi nguòi 'everybody', ngàyngày 'every day, day after day', chiêu chiêu 'every afternoon', nam nam 'year after year', tháng tháng 'month after month', dòi dòi 'generation after generation, eternity', etc. 3.7.1.2. In another pattern of total repetition, a verb, an adjective oran adverb may be reduplicated, the meaning being that of "liveliness", "good Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. and ", and even "intensification" or "attenuation", as in mau mau, nhanh nhanh, le le /'le le 'good and fast', luôn luôn 'continually; always, forever '. More examples : dêu dêu 'regularly, evenly' < dêu 'equal, even, regular, steady' hoài hoài 'incessantly' < hoài 'continually' hoi hoi 'somewhat, a little'< hoi 'a little' mai mai 'for ever'< mai 'without interruption' quen quen 'rather familiar, casually acquainted' < quen 'acquainted' rung rung 'to rustle' < rung 'to shake' thuong thuong 'usually, regularly' < thuong 'ordinary; often' Each syllable of a two-syllable adjective or adverb may also be reduplicated (see 3.7.5). 3.7.1.3. Names of birds, insects, plants and fruits are often reduplications: ba-ba 'river turtle', buorn buorn 'butterfly', cào-cào 'grasshopper, locust', châu-chau 'grasshopper', chuon-chuon 'dragonfly', da-da 'partridge', dom Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 46 VIETNAMESE dom 'glowworm, firefly, lightning bug', le-le 'teal, tree duck', chien-chlên 'skylark", chol-chol 'plover', kên-kên /ken-ken 'vulture', tê-tê 'pangolin', dol-mol 'marine tortoise', se-se 'sparrow', chôm-chôm 'rambutan', thau dau 'castor-oilplant', du-du 'papaya', etc. 3.7.1.4. Examples of onomatopoetic forms are ào-ào 'imitative of water flowing', am-am 'noisy, uproarious, thunderous', bô-bô 'to speak loud(ly)' cac-cac '[of duck] to cackle', dùng-dùng 'noisy, noisily', hôn-hên 'topant, breathe hard and quickly', oang-oang '[of voice] booming', oe-oe 'imitative of infant crying', coc-cach 'to clank', tùng-tùng 'drum beat', lao xao 'crunching sound [of gravel under shoes]', leng-keng 'to clink, tinkle', lop-côp 'clop-clop, clumping sound of clogs', sôt-soat '[of tree leaves, paper, starched cloth] to rustle', the-thé '[of voice] shrill, piercing', etc. 3.1.2 The patterns of reduplication show much variety. 3.7.2.1 Total reduplication. In a total or complete reduplicative pattern (3.5.1), the second syllable is stressed: ào-ào 'sound of water running', dùng-dùng 'with a big bang', hao-hao 'analogous, rather similar', mành mành 'blinds', xuong-xuong 'angular, bony', khăng-khăng 'obstinate, persistent', khu-khu 'to hold tight [to ....], guard jealously', tro-tro Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 'unchanged; brazen-faced', dong-dong '[of rice] 'to be in ear', bùng-bùng 'glowing; in blazing anger', trùng-trùng 'to glower, stare', etc. The most often cited examples are adjectives referring to colors, shapes and states of mind: den den 'rather black, [of skin] rather dark' < den; xanh xanh 'bluish, greenish; pale'< xanh; vàng vàng 'yellowish'< vàng; tron trôn 'roundish; plump' < trôn; gay gay 'slender, rather skinny' < gay; hay hay 'rather interesting' < hay; buon buon 'somewhat sad' < buon; vul vul 'jovial; fun' < vul, etc. Tone harmony requires that the tone of the basic syllable (underlined in the examples) and that of the derived syllable belong to the same register [see 2.6]: ngang, sac, hoi, of the upper register, and huyen, ngă, nàng, of the lower register. Examples: âm-am 'rather lukewarm', beo-béo 'rather plump', thâm-thap 'rather short', trăng-trăng 'whitish', do-do 'reddish', nho-nhô 'smallish', kha-khá 'pretty good', tôn-tot 'rather good', chăng-chac 'more or less Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE lEXICON 47 certain', khang-khác 'rather different, not quite the same', man-mat 'rather cool', etc. dèm-dep 'rather pretty', hèm-hep 'rather narrow', lành-lanh 'rather chilly', nang-năng 'rather heavy', ngòn-ngot 'rather sweet, sugary', so-so 'a little scared', sùng-sung 'standing tall', cham-châm '(rather) slowly', nhàn-nhat 'rather bland, flavorless', etc. 3. 7.2.2 Partial reduplication. The patterns can be alliterative (diêp am) or rhyming (diep văn). A. Alliterative patterns. When the initial consonant is repeated (diep am), and onliy the rhyme of the basic syllable changes, we have alliteration: examples are /ch-/ chăm-chu 'to concentrate', /l-/ làm-lung 'to work hard, toil', /r-/ rac-roi 'complicated, intricate', etc. In one pattern, a back (rounded) vowel /u ô o/ alternates with a front (unrounded) vowel /i ê e/ of the same height: u - i, ô - ê , and o - e . Some examples of this vowel harmony: cu-ky 'old, outmoded', mum-mlm '[of baby] chubby', tum-tim 'to grin, chuckle', xù-xî '[of surface] rough, not smooth', etc. go-ghe '[of road] bumpy', hon-hen 'panting', ngô-nghê 'to look incongruous', etc. cô-kè 'to bargain, haggle', nhô-nhè '[of voice] soft', thô-thè '[of Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. small child] to speak softly', etc. The derivative formation may either precede or follow the basic word: C-âm — C-x as in ngâm-ngùi 'deeply grieved', or C-x — C-àng as in ky-càng 'carefully, thoroughly' [C-x = initial consonant + rhyme, see 2.1]. Other examples: C-x — C-a: thiêt-tha 'insistent, earnest' < thiêt 'deeply interested'; nhuc-nhă 'shameful' < nhuc 'disgraced, humiliated'. C-an — C-x: dán-do 'to weigh the pros and cons' < do 'to measure'; bàn-bat 'to leave no echo, no news' < bat; khan-khan 'smelly' < khan 'fetid'; ngan-ngat 'to cry, sob' < ngat 'to choke'. C-x — C-an: dung-dan 'correct' < dung; nho-nhan 'tiny' < nhô; vua-văn 'just right' < vùa; xinh-xan 'pretty, well-proportioned' < xinh 'cute'. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 48 VIETNAMESE C-x — C-Ò: bat-bó 'to make arrests' < bát 'to arrest, detain'; găp-gò 'to encounter' < gap 'to meet'; lang-lo 'flirtatious'< lang 'amorous'; nhâc-nho 'to remind'< nhac 'to recall'. C-x — C-e: manh-mê 'strong' < manh; mát-mé 'cool' < mat; sach-sê 'clean, spotless' < sach 'clean'. C-x — C-inh: buóng-blnh 'stubborn, headstrong' < buóng; ngo-nghinh '[of child] cute'< ngo. C-x — C-ui: den-dûi 'unlucky' < den 'black; unlucky'; gan-gui 'close, next to' < gan 'near'; ngan-ngui '[of time] very short'< ngan 'short'. C-âp — C-x: lâp-loè 'to flare, flick, waver' < loé 'to flare up'; thâp-thô 'to appear and disappear' < tho 'to stick out'; nhap-nhô 'to rise and fall' < nhô 'to surge'; bap-bênh 'unstable' < bênh 'to tilt, slant'; gâp-ghènh '[of road, ride] bumpy'< ghenh; khăp-khénh ' [of teeth; trot] uneven'< khénh . According to one analyst, who listed 254 instances of the latter pattern, all forms (in which the derived syllable C-âp has either the sac or the nang Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. tone) convey the idea of something appearing then disappearing, or something moving up and down, or a flame or a shadow flickering, with a continuing, repetitive on-and-off motion [Phi Tuyet Hinh 1977: 42-50]. But in an alliterative pattern, there may be alternation between final consonants—between a stop and a nasal that are "homorganic", i.e. that share the same point of articulation (labial, dental or velar) [see 2.4] : /-m/ and /-p/: - am-áp 'comfortably warm', am-áp 'chock-full, crammed', cam-cap 'to tremble, shake [with cold or fear]', com-com 'thick, bulging', dèm-dep 'rather pretty', nom nop 'fearful, worried'; /-n/ and /-t/: tôn-tot 'rather good', man-mat 'rather cool', kin-kit '[of crowd] milling', quán-quít 'to hang around [somebody]'; /-n/ and /-k/: eng-éc '[of pig] squeal', khang-khác 'somewhat different', phang-phác '[of silence] complete', slnh-sich '[of engine] throbbing, panting', vang-vac '[of moonlight] bright and clear'. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE lEXICON 49 B. Rhyming patterns. The dominant pattern of diep van seems to consist of perfectly rhyming syllables, that constitute (like the alliterative forms introduced above) real "emphatics", that is, picturesque forms with intensive, attenuative, figurative connotations: In approximately half of the cases, the first syllable has initial /l-/, which most commonly alternates with/k-/ as in lích-kích ' [of carried utensils] weighty, burdensome, clanging; [of procedures] complicated'; lung cung 'cumbersome', with /d-/ as in låo dåo 'to stagger', lác dác '[of huts, trees, stars, rain drops] scattered ', with /kh-/ as in lorn khom 'bending, stooping', lù-khù 'slow, laggard, lethargic', with /m-/ as in lô-mô 'to grope (one's way) (in the dark)', lo-mò 'dim, vague, unclear', with /nh-/ as in làng-nhang 'tangled; to drag on', li-nhí '[of writing] minuscule; [of voice] soft, indistinct', with /t-/ as in linh-tinh 'miscellaneous', lúng-túng 'embarrassed, helpless, not knowing how to get out of an awkward situation', with Ah-/ as in lo-tho 'sparse, thin', lũng-thũng 'to saunter, stroll along, walk leisurely', etc. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 3.7.3 Stylistic effects. Sometimes reduplications serve as onomatopoeias or sound-imitating forms, e.g. chí-choé '[of kids] to squabble', chiêm-chiêp '[of small bird] to chirp', khúc-khích 'to giggle', liu-lo '[of bird, kid] to trill', oa-oa '[of infant] to cry', roc rach '[of brook] to babble, murmur'. Moreover, in literary utterances, the derivative forms help evoke visual imagery and suggest movements, gestures, shapes, sizes, lights, as in lom-ngom 'to crawl, creep', lác-dác (see 3.7.2.2B) , lap lo 'to appear and disappear alternately', lorn khom (see 3.7.2.2B) , khúm-núm 'to bow low [in a servile or fawning manner', thuot-tha / tha-thuót 'lithe, lissome', thoăn thoat 'to walk briskly', nhón nháo '[of crowd] disorderly, panicky', bap bùng '[of flames] to flicker', day-dà 'corpulent', khăng-khiu 'lean, lank, skinny, twiggy', bát-ngát, mênh-mông '[of space] immense', diu-hiu 'desolate', quanh-quê 'deserted', etc. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 50 VIETNAMESE Indeed, "each reduplication is a 'musical note' containing a concrete 'picture' of the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, accompanied by the impressions of the speaker's subjective perceptions, evaluations and attitudes toward things and phenomena—impressions strong enough to deeply affect the hearer through his or her outward and inward senses" [Dó Huu Châu 1981:51]. Poets take full advantage of reduplications—generally untranslatable— which help convey their feelings of vague melancholy, nostalgia (bang khuâng), deep grief (bùi ngùi), or hesitation (tan ngan), etc. In these illustrative verses from Nguyên Du's 3,254-line narrative The Tale of Kieu, the national bard (1765-1820) made ample use of reduplicative patterns: Nao-nao dong nuóc uôn quanh, Nhip cau nho-nhô cuôi ghènh bac ngang. Sè-sè nam dát bên dàng, Dàu-dàu ngon cô nùa vàng nùa xanh. 'The rivulet, babbling, curled and wound its course 'under a bridge that spanned it farther down. Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 'Beside the road a mound of earth loomed up 'where withered weeds, half yellow and half green.' [The Tale of Kiêu, lines 55-58, transi. Huynh Sanh-Thông] Closer to us, Nguyen Khuyen (1835-1909) also made frequent use of symbolism and allegory as shown in the following lines from his pastoral poems about autumn: Ao thu Ianh leo nũóc trong veo, Mot chiec thuyên cau bé tèo teo Tâng mây lo lùng troi xanh ngat, Ngo truc quanh co khách váng teo. 'Cold autumn pond with water pure and clear. 'A tiny little boat for catching fish. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE lEXICON 51 'Clouds dangling high aloft in stark blue skies. 'Path winding through bamboos where no man walks.' [ Thu dieu "Fishing in Autumn", transi. Huynh Sanh-Thông] Nam gian nhà cô thăp le te, Ngò toi dêm sâu dóm lâp loé. Lung giâu phát pho màu khói nhat, lăn ao lóng lánh bóng trâng loe. 'Five rooms make up a low, low hut of thatch, 'Deep night, a pitch-dark alley-glowworms blink. 'Around the hedgerow vapors waft and fade, 'Inside the pond the moonlight gleams and glares.' [ Thu am "Drinking in Autumn", transi. Huynh Sanh-Thông ] 3.7.4. Meaning differentiation. A division of labor exists among reduplications from the same root. Thus, from d 'easy' one gets d dai, which means 'easy-going, not demanding', and d dàng, which means '(fairly) easy to do'. From nhô 'small' we can derive nhô nhán 'little, tiny', nhô nhat 'trifling, unimportant', nhô nhè '[of voice] soft'; [of table Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. manners] gentle', nhô nhen 'petty, mean', and nhô nhoi 'small, modest'. likewise, from the root quanh 'around', a native speaker can obtain such forms as loanh quanh 'roundabout', quanh co 'winding', quanh quân 'to stick around', quanh quăt 'somewhere close by', and quanh quéo 'tortuous'. A good writer discriminates between then tho 'shy, bashful' and then thung 'looking ashamed' ( < then 'shy, timid' ). likewise, of several reduplications containing êm 'soft, gentle; calm' an effective writer has a choice among êm å, êm ai, êm am, êm diu, êm dep, êm dem, êm thárn, etc. 3.7.5 larger forms. There are a number of forms that have three syllables: nhô nhô nhô (là) 'to miss .... very much' < nhó 'to miss', con con con 'tiny' < con con Tittle, tiny' < con, tí ti ti 'tiny' < tí ti < tí 'tiny', sach sành sanh 'clean sweep; completely' < sach 'clean', vui vui vui Tots of Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 52 VIETNAMESE fun' < vui 'fun', xôp xóm xôp 'very porous'< xô'p xôp < xôp 'porous', tèo tèo teo 'very tiny' < tèo teo 'tiny' < teo 'to shrivel, contract'. A compound form X-Y (4.3) like nói cuoi 'to speak and laugh' may become nói nói citoi ciXoi (X-X Y-Y) 'speaking and laughing at the same time'. Other examples: di lai 'go and come,—to go back and forth' > di di lai Jai 'back and forth, to and fro'; ham ho 'ardently' > ham ham ho ho 'impetuously, enthusiastically'; ram rô 'noisily' > ràm ràm rô rô 'noisily, with great fanfare'; anh em 'elder brother and younger sibling' > anh anh em em 'to use sibling terms in addressing someone'; etc. The reduplication vôi-vàng 'hurriedly' < vôi 'to be in a hurry' can be intensified through repetition of each syllable, resulting in vôi voi văng văng 'hurry-skurry'. 3.7.5.1 Such disyllabic formations as ăp ling '[of embarrassed person] to speak haltingly, embarrassedly', Jung túng 'at a loss, not knowing what to do', lung cung 'cumbersome', lung thung '[of garment] too roomy', dûng dinh 'to walk leisurely', hap tap 'hasty', hón hén 'panting', hón hô 'excited, elated', nhi nhanh 'lively', òng eo 'to mince, walk with short, affectedly dainty steps' deserve special mention.' To reduplicate such a disyllabic base, the base is preceded by two syllables, the first of which is the first syllable of the base ( ăp, lung, lung, lung, dung, hap, hón, hón, Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. nhi, òng ) while the second — receiving stress — consists of the initial consonant of the second syllable of the base followed by the new rhyme /-a/ or /-à/. The resulting four-syllable formations with strong "dramatic" overtones are respectively: áp a áp ung, lung ta lung tung, lung ca/cà lùng cung, lung thà lung thung, dung da/dà dùng dinh, hấp ta háp tap, hon ha hon hén, hón ha hón hô, nhí nha nhi nhânh, òng à òng eo. With l-ol occurring less frequently as the new rhyme, we have cau bat 'vagrant, homeless' > càu bo cau bat; hót hài 'nervous and panicky, out of breath' > hôt ho hat hår, văt vuïông 'discarded, abandoned' > văt vo/va văt vuông; ngăt ngrfong'lall, unsteady, staggering' > ngăt ngo/nga ngăt nguong; nhón nhác 'awestruck' > nhón nho/nha nhón nhác 'terror-stricken'. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE lEXICON 53 l ê Văn l y calls /-a/ or /-ol an infix, and also lists phát phuang > phât pho phăt phuông [1968: 44]. His other example nghèo xo nghèo xác < nghèo 'poor' is ill-chosen because this is but an interlocking construction containing the compound xác xa = xa xác 'ragged, tattered; denuded' and optionally occurring as nghèo xác nghèo xa : either phrase means 'as poor as a church mouse, pauperized, destitute- -like a tatterdemalion'. 3.7.5.2 In the spoken language, a particle may be used following the repeated syllable in an exclamatory expression: den 'black, dark' would yield den den là! 'so dark'; so 'scared' would yield sa sa là! 'I was so scared!'; vul 'fun' [see 3.5.5] would yield Vul vul (vul) là! [ with heavy stress on the first syllable vul] 'Oh, we had so much fun! ' Talking to children, a mother or grandmother may exclaim Dep ai là dep! 'Oh [you're] so pretty!', Thuong oi là thwong! 'Oh, how I love you!', or Ngon that là ngon! 'So delicious!' A person impressed with a large quantity of mangoes or mosquitoes may cry out Nhũng xoài là xoài! 'So many mangoes!', Nhũng muôl là muôl! 'Nothing but mosquitoes!' 3.7.6 Suffix -iec. Finally we have to mention a very productive suffix /(C)-iec, (C)-iec/, which, when added to the initial consonant of the basic word C-x, yields a derived form C-iec. This phenomenon, called "iec-hoá" Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. by native linguists, supplies some emotional coloring (disinterest, irony, etc.) to the meaning of any base: an > an-iec 'to eat' hoc > hoc-hiec 'to study' hát > hát-hiec 'to sing' nói > nói-niec 'to speak, talk' áo > áo-iec 'coats and the like' m > mũ-miêc 'headgear [ collectively]' ban > ban-biec 'friends' com > com-kiec 'rice and the like' canh > canh-kiec 'soup and the like' pho > pho-phiec 'beef noodle soup and the like' xe > xe-xiec 'cars and the like' sách > sách-siec 'books and the like' gom > góm-ghiêc 'abominable, horrible'. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. 54 VIETNAMESE Emeneau, whose material contains none of this pattern, quotes Maspero [1912: 109] as saying that this is "a Cochin Chinese pattern" [Emeneau 1951: 186]. Actually, the northern dialect makes frequent use of this formative element. Indeed, this "chameleon alliterative suffix" [Thompson 1965c: 173, 176]- -not at all limited to the southern dialect area—is used even when the base is a compound word: di thi di thiêc < di thi 'to go take an exam', di hoc di hiec < di hoc 'to go to school'. Given a basic form like o-to 'automobile, car' (a fairly recent loanword from French), the highly colloquial suffix -iêc would affect the second syllable and yield ô-tô ô-tiêc 'automobiles and the like', just like xe dap xe diêc 'bikes and the like' < xe dap 'bicycle', ca-vát ca-viêc 'neckwear' < ca-vát 'necktie', and more recently ti-vi ti-viê 'television and the like' < ti-vi 'TV'. Nguyen Quí-Hung [1965: 124] cites three other examples of -iêc occurring in borrowings from foreign languages : cà-phê cà-phiêc 'coffee and the like', ten-nit ten-niec 'tennis and the like' [from French], and phá sa phá-siec 'roasted peanuts and the like'[from Cantonese fasang]. A native speaker has no difficulty in understanding or using hop-tac-xâ hop-tác-xiéc 'cooperatives and the like' < hop-tac-xâ 'cooperative'. The three-syllable English loanword càu-lac-bô (from "club", borrowed via the Chinese transliteration) would be reduplicated as cau-lac-bo câu-lac-biêc Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. 'clubs and the like'. According to Truong Vän Chinh & Nguyen Hien Lê [1963: 93] the syllable (C)-iec is generally used when one speaks disparagingly or playfully. We agree, and further suggest that it is used most often in such negative sentences as TÙ sáng den gio tôi dä cà-phê cà-phiêc gì dâu ! (from morning- reach now I ANTERIOR coffee-coffee whatever where) 'I haven't had any coffee this morning! ' May tuàn nay chå ten-nit ten-niêc gi cal (few week this NEG tennis-tennis whatever all) 'No tennis these past few weeks at all! ' Occurring less often in colloquial speech are four-syllable forms containing the syllable C-ang or C-ung, which alternates with C-x: dàn ông dàn ang 'men, males in general' < dàn ông 'man, male person'; hoa tai hoa tung 'earrings [collectively]'< hoa tai 'earring'. Dinh-Hoa, Nguyen. Vietnamese : Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/vu/detail.action?docID=739965. Created from vu on 2019-03-29 04:49:01. THE LEXICON 55 3.7.7 Concluding remarks The discussions in sections 3.7.1 to 3.7.3 have presented the meanings and functions of reduplicative forms; the following summary will underline the important role of this process of building words from syllables. 3.7.7.1 Reduplicated forms of nouns seem to carry at least three broad meanings: • collective: cây-coi 'vegetation', chim-chóc 'birds', da-de 'the skin', hôi-hè 'festivals', máu-me 'blood', máy-móc 'machines, machinery', mùa-màng 'crops', phu-phen 'coolies', quà-cáp 'presents5, tho-ihuyen 'workmen, workers', etc. and also forms like sach-siec 'books and the like', ca-vat ca-viec 'neckties, neckwear', etc. • abstract: -co (gì?) 'whatever reasons?', cung-càch 'ways, patterns [of behaviour]5, manh-môi, moi-manh 'clue, lead', nông-nôi 'plight, condition', etc. • pejorative: hoa-hoét ''flowery, gaudy, showy', mat-m i 'eyes', nghe-ngőng 'any occupation at all', nguòi-ngom 'creature', thit-thà 'meats', etc. 3.7.7.2 Reduplicated forms of verbs carry even more meanings, all of them showing "emphatic" sound symbolism, hence such terms as "impressifs" [Durand 1961], "descriptives" [Smith 1973] or "expressives" Copyright © 1997. John Benjamins Publishing Company. All rights reserved. [Diffloth 1976]: • general, mutual, or reciprocal : (a) bàn-bac 'to deliberate'