Cảicách CáchViết ChữViệt

Haylà ChữViệt 2020

By dchph

Abstract

Vietnamese2020 introduces a new Vietnamese writing system designed to modernize orthographic conventions and shift toward polysyllabic principles. This proposal examines the need to reform Vietnamese orthography, presenting a polysyllabic approach that departs from traditional monosyllabic writing.

The proposed reform aims to enhance abstract and collective thinking in native speakers by integrating symbolic patterns. Writing words in a combining formation improves cognitive processing, allowing pre-defined text strings to appear as complete units that resemble conceptual representations rather than isolated syllables. Polysyllabic word formation ensures that meanings remain bound to their symbolic shapes, mimicking the effects of ideographs. In languages such as English and German, polysyllabic structures reinforce abstract word recognition through extended text string shapes.

By contrast, the Vietnamese monosyllabic system requires readers to recognize each syllable independently before assembling meaning. This process slows comprehension, whereas polysyllabic scripts enable the brain to absorb larger, continuous text sequences, producing a visual effect similar to ideograms. Readers familiar with German may already recognize these advantages, as polysyllabic formations enhance word perception through shape recognition.

The limitations of a monosyllabic writing system restrict linguistic representation to isolated syllables, as seen in current Vietnamese orthography. If databases were structured in a similar manner—segmenting all entries into separate syllables—the efficiency of modern computing systems would have been significantly reduced.

Vietnamese is no longer a monosyllabic language, yet its orthography remains fragmented, mirroring the way Vietnamese once handled block-written Chinese characters before the late 19th century. Words such as học bổng (scholarship), bâng khuâng (melancholy), bâng quơ (vague), and ma tuý (narcotic) are clearly polysyllabic, yet they continue to be written in separate syllables. This convention is equivalent to breaking English words into individual syllables, such as "scho lar ship" or "nar co tic."

Monosyllabic writing is inherently inefficient. These dissyllabic Vietnamese words should be accurately represented in their combined formations as họcbổng, bângkhuâng, bângquơ, and matuý. Writing words in their full polysyllabic form more accurately reflects Vietnamese linguistic structure. Had English been written in a monosyllabic format, it would have failed to achieve widespread adoption as the dominant technical language in global computing.

Language evolution is tied to societal progress. The persistence of Vietnamese monosyllabic writing has hindered advancements in technology, education, and cognitive development. Reform is challenging, but necessary.

This proposed writing system establishes a foundation for standardized polysyllabic principles. Over time, Vietnamese polysyllabic orthography will facilitate abstract reasoning in children while enabling more efficient data processing and economic development.

Call to Action

The transition to a polysyllabic system begins now—through emails, internet posts, and gradual implementation of combined syllable formations. While awaiting formal guidelines from linguistic institutions, speakers of foreign languages can reference equivalent polysyllabic structures for accuracy. For example:

• Although → mặcdù

• Blackboard → bảngđen

• Faraway → xaxôi

The German writing system, with its comprehensive polysyllabic structures, serves as a valuable model for Vietnamese reform.

Vietnamese language modernization depends on pioneering efforts to establish new polysyllabic standards. The reform is not an impractical pursuit but a necessary innovation that will benefit future generations by fostering abstract thinking and collective learning. If enough voices support this initiative, meaningful change can be realized. The time to act is now.

>> Continue on the elaboration in the English version

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ChữViệt Đaâmtiết 2020

Ngônngữ là một thuộctính bềnvững và biếnđổi chậmnhất của một dântộc. Đặctính của ngônngữ là sự tổnghợp những biểuhiện đặcthù tạothành hệthống giaotiếp đó. Trong quátrình pháttriển lịchsử, tínhcách của ngônngữ có thể thayđổi ở mứcđộ ítnhiều khácnhau, đặcbiệt là về hìnhthức và cáchbiểuhiện qua chữviết.

Theo nhucầu lịchsử, một dântộc cóthể điềuchỉnh cáchthểhiện tiếngnói của mình qua chữviết để phùhợp với yêu cầu của thờiđại. Nhiều quốcgia tiếnbộ trên thếgiới ngàynay đã trảiqua các giaidoạn cảicách chữviết như một phần tấtyếu của sự pháttriển.

ChữViệt hiệntại không phảnánh đúng thựctrạng ngônngữ Việtnam một cách khoahọc. Việc cảitổ hoặc điềuchỉnh hệthống chữviết khôngchỉ giúp nó phùhợp hơn với tiếngnói màcòn manglại những lợiích thiếtthực trong việc xửlý thôngtin nhanhchóng và chínhxác—cả ở cấpđộ nhậnthức của conngười lẫn trong ứngdụng côngnghệ. Một hệthống chữviết tốiưu sẽ tạođiềukiện thuậnlợi cho sự pháttriển của Việtnam trong lãnhvực kỹthuật và côngnghệ hiệndại.

Thayđổi một thóiquen, đặcbiệt là trong lãnhvực ngônngữ, là điều không dễdàng. Tuynhiên, nếu việc cảicách là cầnthiết, nó khôngphải là điều khôngthể thựchiện được. Từ một gócnhìn nhấtđịnh, cảitổ chữviết tiếngViệt khôngphải là một yêucầu cấpbách, nhưng nếu sự đổimới này manglại lợiích cho đấtnước, thì cần có hànhđộng cụthể.

Để thựchiện cảitổ chữviết tiếngViệt hiệnnay, cần xemxét vấnđề dưới nhiều khíacạnh nhằm trảlời các câuhỏi liênquan: hiệntrạng của chữviết tiếngViệt, lýdo cần cảicách, và phươngthức thựchiện cảicách một cách hiệuquả.

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HIỆNTRẠNG CỦA CÁCHVIẾT TIẾNGVIỆT

Trong lời màođầu, chúngta có nhắctới tínhcách của một ngônngữ, cụthểhơn đólà đặctính của tiếngViệt. Vậy đặctính cơbản của tiếngViệt là gì và hìnhthức gì của nó đã thayđổi qua các thờiđại? Trảlời câuhỏi nầy dưới lăngkính ngônngữ lịchsử sẽ làm ta nhậnthấy rõnét hơn hiệntrạng của tiếngViệt. Ðólà một ngônngữ tổnghợp âmtiếttính và thanhđiệutính, là kếtquả của một  tiếntrình pháttriển ngônngữ lịchsử lâudài đitừ đơnâmtiết sang đaâmtiết, từ đơnthanhđiệu sang đathanhđiệu. TiếngViệt lịchsử là toàlâulài bằng chấtliệu tiếngHán cất trên cáinền và cáisườn của một thứ tiếngViệt tháicổ cóthể làđã pháttích từ cáicốtlỗ của một ngônngữchung nàođó đã phátnguồn và triểnkhai thành nhiều ngônngữ thuộc ngữhệ -HánTạng.

Cái tiếngViệt tháicổ nầy trong quátrình pháttriển đã thẩmnhập và tiêuhoá (Việthoá và HánViệthoá) hàngngàn từngữ từ tiếngHáncổ và tiếngHán của nhiều thờiđại, cóthể đã xảyra trước thời Tần-Hán 221 năm trước Côngnguyên (thídụ từ "vuquy", "thángchạp" đượcdùng vào đời Tần, ngườiTrunghoa ngàynay khôngdùng những chữ này) chotới ngàynay (thídụ từ "khôngdámđâu", "baxạo", " tầmbậy", " phaocâu", "dêxồm", v.v... 

Trong quátrình nầy bướcpháttriển lịchsử của Việtngữ đã rậpkhuôn theo cáchcấutừ của tiếngHán, nhấtlà sựhìnhthành những từkép haylà từ songâmtiết (dissyllabic words). Nhưvậy, ngàynay đặctính hay tínhcách của tiếngViệt là mang thanhđiệuhoá songâmtiếttính (dissyllabicism), tứclà chứa nhiều từkép (trongđó baogồm  cả từghép và từláy gồm có haivần, hay hai âmtiết), được viết dưới hìnhthức mẫutự Latin rờira từng tiếngmột hay từng âmtiết (vần) một. Trong tiếngViệt đasố từkép có một sốlượng lớn âmtiết cóthể đứngđộclập như một từ và có ýnghĩa đơnbiệt. Ðiều nầy chothấy tiếngViệt đã biếnchuyển từ tínhcách đơnâmtiết sang đaâmtiết. Trong quátrình biếnđổi nầy, nhiều từghép đã trởthành một đơnvị toànthể, khôngthể táchrời vì nhiều từghép đã trởthành từkép, nếu chúng bị táchrờira, những tiếng bị táchrời sẽ khôngcòn mang ýnghĩa nữa. Thídụ: mãtà, càgiựt, càlăm, cùlần, càmràm, lãngnhách, xíxọn, bợmtrợn, dưahấu, basạo... Nhưvậy tiếngViệt của chúngta ngàynay khôngcòn là một ngônngữ đơnâmtiết. 

Mộtsố nhàngữhọc lại chorằng thựcsự tiếngViệt từ thời tháicổ đã có hìnhthái phụâm phứchợp và đaâmtiết như nhiều ngônngữ khác thuộc mgữhệ Mon-Khmer, và họ cholà tiếngViệt đã biếnđổi từ tínhcách đaâmtiết sang đơnâmtiết do sựảnhhưởng của tiếngHán. Ýkiến của họ cũng đángchúý vì bảnthân của tiếngViệt cóthể là từxưađếnnay khônghẳn thuầntuý là một tiếngnói đơnlập đơnâmtiết (mono-syllabic and isolated language), chứngcớ là nhiều từ cơbản trong tiếngViệt tựnó baogiờ cũnglà những từsongâmtiết nhưlà màngtang, mỏác, đầugối, khuỷtay, bảvai, cùichỏ, mồhôi, cùlét v.v...và thậmchí ngườita còn tìmthấy mộtít những từ đaâmtiết (polysyllabics) trong tiếng "thuần Việt" (ởđây mang ýnghĩa tươngđối đốivới những từ được chọn chỉ để làmthídụ): xấcbấcxangbang, bảlápbảxàm, gióheomay, ngủlibì, dốtđăïccánmai, cờbayphấtphới, mưalấtphất, balăngnhăng, lộnxàngầu, mêtítthòlò, bađồngbảyđổi, lộntùngphèo, tuyệtcúmèo, bachớpbanháng... và phụâm phứchợp còn hiệndiện trong tiếngViệt chođến thếkỷ 17: blời, blăng (cóthể saunầy biếnthành "mặttrời", "mặttrăng" theo conđường b > m, rồi m âmhoá thành "mặt" chăng ? Nếu đúng, cáchbiếnđổi nầy giốngnhư trườnghợp "khlong" thành "khủnglong" của tiếngHán. Nhưng trong thí`dụ cụthể nầy, theo ngữâmhọc, khảnăng phứcphụâm bl- biếnthành đơnphụâm tr- rấtcao.) 

Với cáchnhìn nào, tínhcách songâmtiết của tiếngViệt ngàynay rất rõnét. Ðặctính nầy đốilập với tínhcách đơnâmtiết của mộtsố lớn từvựng cổ của tiếngViệt, giốngnhư tiếngHán, vì rấtnhiều từsongâmtiết trong tiếngViệt hiệnnay chứa hai yếutố (hai tiếng, hay âmtiết) đều đồngnghĩa: tứcgiận, trướctiên, cũkỹ, kềcận, gấprút... Ðặcđiểm nầy thểhiệnra tínhcách đơnlập [phảnđề của songlập, là tínhcách đặcbiệt của tiếngViệt] của Việtngữ: từvựng pháttriển từ đơntiết đến songâmtiết dựatrên sựkiện ôngcha chúngta đã ghép haitiếng đồngnghĩa lại vớinhau để tránhsự đồngâm và để minhxác ýnghĩa đơnthuần của từ đơnâm để khỏi bị lẫnlộn với từ đồngâmdịnghĩa khác. Trong tiếngHán hiệnđại, từ songâmtiết có hai âmtiết đồngnghĩa đasố đềuđược cấutạo theo lối nầy. Tínhcách nầy đã gây ngộnhận cho mộtsố nhà ngữhọc phươngTây, họ đã dựavào tínhcách này để kếtluận là TiếngViệt là một ngônngữ đơnlập.

Hìnhthức biểuhiện của tiếngViệt khoảng một thếkỷ trướcđây là nhờvào chữHán, là ngônngữ có cơchế pháttriển từvựng giốngnhư của tiếngViệt. Khi ôngcha chúngta có nhucầu muốn thểhiện những âmthanh mà tiếngHán khôngcó, họ đã biếnđổi hìnhthức chữHán sang chữNôm cáchnay nhiều thếkỷ. 

Khi chữQuốcngữ (tiếngViệt viết bằng mẫutự Latin) được các nhàtruyềngiáo phươngTây sángchế ra để kýâm tiếngViệt vào thếkỷ thứ 17, họ cũng đã nhậnthấy tính songâmtiết của tiếngViệt và họ đã dùng dấugạchnối - để nốilại những từ nầy thành từkép. Và lốiviết gạchnối nầy còn tồntại đến cuối thậpniên 1960. Hiệnnay thì đasố ai cũng viết rờira thành từng chữmột, vừa do thóiquen và vừa do tínhlườibiếng tậpthành. 

Và nhưvậy rõràng là cáchviết tiếngViệt ngàynay khôngcòn phảnánh đúng thựcthể tiếngnói nữa, vì với một sốlượng vốn từkép Hánviệt (thídụ: tổquốc, phụnữ, giađình, cộngđồng....), từ Hánôm haylà từ Nôm songâmtiết có gốcHán (sinhđẻ, dạydỗ, lạnhlẽo, nhờvã...), và từ "thuầnViệt" (mặccả, bângkhuâng, ngọtngào, mồcôi, hiuquạnh...) khổnglồ hiệndiện trong tiếngViệt ngàynay, cáchviết táchrời từng âmtiết là một cáchviết không phảnảnh đúng mộtcách khoahọc bảnthân của tiếngnói nướcnhà nữa.

Ai cũng thừanhận tiếngAnh là tiếng đaâmtiết (thựcsự tiếngnói nào trênthếgiới ngàynay cũng đều đaâmtiết cả, nếucóchăng tiếng đơnâm thì đólà ngônngữ cổxưa; ngônngữ phải pháttriển từ cáigiảnđơn sang cáiphứctạp.) Ðem tiếngAnh ra sosánh, ta cũng cóthể nhậnthấy trong tiếngAnh nếu ngườita loạitrừra hết những yếutố vaymượn từ Latin hay Hylạp và chỉcòn giữlại những từ gốcAnglo-Saxon, thì tiếngAnh sẽ hiệnra cáibảnchất gầnnhư đơnâmtiết của nó: go, keep, run, walk, eat, sleep, morning, (<morn), evening (<eve) before (be+fore)...

Chúngta cóthể sosánh những từ "thuầnAnh" những từ "thuầnViệt" (ýnghĩa tươngđối để sosánh, chứ bảnthân của những từ sau đều cóthể có gốcHán) với những từ Việt tươngtự: ăn, ngủ, đái, ỉa, đi, đứng... Cóngười sẽ nói: nhưng tiếngAnh là một ngônngữ biếnthể, họ còn có dạng eater, keeper, walker, sleeper... trongkhiđó tiếngViệt là một ngônngữ đơnlập (?) làmgì có biếnđổi hìnhthái mà sosánh? Hãy xemxét hìnhthức nầy của tiếngViệt: artist = nghệsĩ, singer = casĩ, writer=vănsĩ,... nếu chúngta quyước -sĩ=-s, thì ta có nghệs, văns, hoạs, nhạcs, quâns, hay -gia=-z thì ta có tácz, luậtz, sángchếz, hay sự-=s- thì ta có stình, scố, sviệc, sthể, hay -thuật=th thì ta có kỷth, nghệth, math, mỹth, hoặc f-=phi thì ta có flý, fquânsự, fnhân, fliênkết, fchínhphủ... Vậy -s, -z, s-, -th, f- cóthể vínhưlà những ngữõtố (suffixes) có chứcnăng khôngkhácgì suffixes của tiếngAnh. Ngônngữ nhưvậy chẳngqua là những quyước và côngước.

Trong quátrình tiếngAnh pháttriển và thẩmnhập những yếutố ngoạilai khác, bảnthân cáchcấuthừ của tiếngAnh cũng theo cáchcấutừ của ngônngữ ngoạinhập: therefore, anybody, however, nevertheless, blackboard, gunship, eyebrow, armchair... Khi viết chữAnh ngườita khôngbaogiờ cắtđứt âmtiết ra nhưng khi ngườiViệt viết chữViệt chúngta lại cắtra thành từng tiếngmột, bấtkể từ bị cắtra bảnthân nó đôikhi không cónghĩa theo nghĩa ngữvựng như chúngta hiểu ngàynay: bâng/khuâng, hồi/hộp, mồ/hôi, tai/tiếng, mặc/cả, cù/lét.... Bạn có baogiờ thử tựhỏi: "bâng" làgì? "khuâng" làgì? Và rồi "hồi" làgì? "hộp" làgì?, "mồ" làgì? "hôi" làgì? "tai" làgì?, " mặc" làgì? "cả" làgì? "cù" làgì? "lét" làgì? Chúng chỉ cónghĩa khi chúng đichung vớinhau, khi ta phátâm ta cũng phátâm thành cặp, nhưng thếsao chúngta khi viết những từkép nầy chúngta lại tách chúng ra? Nếu kểthêmvào từvựng Hánviệt và từNôm có gốcHán (Hánnôm), sốlượng từ songâmtiết nhiềukhôngkểxiết, và những từ này chịuchung sốphận của lưỡibút lườibiếng của chúngta cắtngang. Rõràng là lốiviết nầy phảnánh tính thiếu khoahọc và không tiếnbộ của ngườiViệtnam!

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TẠISAO PHẢI SỬAÐỔI CÁCHVIẾT HIỆNNAY 

Giốngnhư cái nhãn 4000 năm vănhiến, chúngta tựmãn đãlâu với disản Quốcngữ và mang tâmlý ùlì, ngại thayđổi. Ðó là một khuyếtđiểm của người Việtnam, cộngthêmvới tính ưa phảnđối, khi có aiđềxướng cáigì mới mà mình khôngthích là phảnđối ngay dù chẳngbiết là tạisao lại phảnđối? Dù đã có khôngít người như các vị Lãng Nhân Phùng Tất-Ðắc (hiện ở bên Anh), Giáosư Phạm Hoàng-Hộ (ở Canada), Giáosư Trịnh Nhật (Úc), Giáosư Dương Ðức-Nhự, cụ Ðào Trọng-Ðủ, và những vị ủnghộ ýkiến về tính đaâmtiết của tiếngViệt như là cụ Hồ Hữu-Tường, Giáosư Nguyễn-Ðình Hoà, Giáosư Bùi Ðức-Tịnh..., nhậnthấy những saisót trong cáchviết tiếngViệt ngàynay, nhưng tiếngnói của họ bị phảnđối khíchbác rồi chìm trong quênlãng. Ngàynay tiếnbộ kỹ thuật và cuộc cáchmạng tinhọc về liênmạng toàncầu chophép chúngta cùngnhau dấyđộng côngcuộc cảitổ cách viết chữViệt của chúngta ngàynay saocho nó cólợi, và cái lợi của nó manglại phải nhìnthấy được trong các lĩnhvực khoahọc kỹthuật, vá tácđộng của nó đốivới sự pháttriển kinhtế nướcnhà.

Nhưđãnói, cáchviết chữViệt ngàynay chứa một saisót trầmtrọng trong hìnhthức biểuđạt những kháiniệm mà khi nói chúngta phátâm điliền vớinhau không ngắtquảng. Ðã thấy sai thì chúngta phải sửa, chứ đừng để cho những nhàngữhọc phượngTây thiếu amhiểu bachớpbanháng thoạtnhìn cáchviết của chúngta là đã hôhoán lên: tiếngViệt là tiếng đơnâmtiết (monosyllabic) và đơnlập (isolated) -- họ cóthể hàmý tiếngViệt chúngta còn thôsơ, chưa pháttriển, lạchậu, và nghèonàn. Họ đâucần biết chi đến bốn nghìn năm vănhiến gìđó của ta. Họ có baogiờ bỏ thờigiờ nghe ta giảithích những hìnhthức đạiloại "nghệs", "flý" kểtrên. Nếu cảitổ cáchviết mộtcách triệtđể, chúngta cóthể làm vậy (biếnthểhoá thành hìnhthái những ngữtố 'suffixes'), thậmchí khôngcần bỏdấu nữa. Nếu cảitổ theokiểunầy thì đâylà một hìnhthức mà ngườingoạiquốc học tiếngViệt sẽ rất hoannghênh vì khi học từvựng tiếngViệt, họ sẽ học cáitoànthể: conđường=road, bầutrời=the sky, quảđất=the globe... "con" đichung với "đường", "bầu" đichung với "trời", và "quả" đichung với "đất"; nhờđó họ khôngcòn phải thắcmắc về cách chúngta nói khi thì "con", khi thì "bầu", khi thì "quả"... họ sẽ nói tạisao không dùng hết "con" hay "cái" cho nó tiện! Thựcsự khôngphải ngônngữ chúngta sửdụng có quánhiều loạitự (classifiers) mà bởilẽ cáchviết rời của những từ có loạitự nầy làm ngườita rốitrí. TiếngHán cũng có một sốlượng loạitự rấtlớn ynhư loạitự của tiếngViệt, nhưng khi người ngoạiquốc học tiếngPhổthông (Quanthoại) thôngqua hệthống phiênâm Latin pinyin của Trungquốc, họ chẳng thắcmắc gì bởilẽ phầnlớn những từ thường đicặp với loạitự thường được viết dínhliền nhau hoặc đichung vớinhau.

Nhưng chúngta khôngphải cảicách chữviết là để cho người ngoạiquốc học hoặc phêphán. Dođó chúngta sẽ không sửađổi cáchviết tiếngViệt mộtcách triệtđể nhưvậy và những minhhoạ trên chỉ nhằm nhấnmạnh đến tínhcách của tiếngViệt đã bị chữviết "phânhoá" và phảnbội. Khi nói ta không táchrời âmtiết ra, tạisao khi viết chúngta lại cắtra? Cóngười đã nói, đólà do thóiquen, vì ngônngữ là thóiquen, mà đãlà thóiquen và ai cũng dùng và chấpnhận thì khôngthểnào sửađổi. Câu nầy nghe rất quentai phải không? Bạn nghĩsao? Bạn thích ăn thịtbò nhiều, nhưng thịtbò lại chứa nhiều chất mỡ cholesterol, nhưng ăn quen rồi bỏ khôngđược. Cáitaihại chínhlà ở chỗ này. Khi hiểurõ những bấtlợi hoặc taihại trong cáchviết chữViệt hiệnđại, colẽ chúngta nên xemxét vấnđề và thayđổi theo chiềuhướng khoahọc hơn. Tómlại, cáigì phảnkhoahọc sẽ cókhảnăng gâyra phảntiếnbộ!

Hiệntrạng của tiếngViệt ngàynay là kếtquả pháttriển khôngngừng của tiếngViệt, trảiqua biếtbao thờiđại, biếtbao đổithay thăngtrầm mớicóđược một vịtrí ngàynay. Như ai cũng biết, mấy trăm năm trướcđây, ôngcha chúngta đã mượn chữHán để tạo chữNôm để biểuthị tiếngnói của dântộc mình. Trướcđó, ngườiViệt chúngta hoàntoàn dùng chữHán để truyềnthông tưtưởng và giaodịch hànhchánh, mặcdù tiếngViệt và chữHán là hai thựcthể khácbiệt nhau. Ðixa vào lịchsử, có người cholà tiếngHán và tiếngViệt cóthể cùng gốc (thuộc ngữhệ Hán-Tạng thayvì thuộc ngữchi Mon-Khmer, ngữhệ NamÁ) và họ cholà tiếngnói có thayđổi nhưng chữviết khôngcần thayđổi, thídụ như trườnghợp tiếngAnh hoặc phươngngữ Quảngđông hay phươngngữ Phúckiến của Trunghoa, nói mộtđàng viết mộtnẻo, họ vẫn tồntại và tiếnbộ vậy. Thêmvàođó, chữViệt ngàynay khôngcòn sửdụng chữ Hán màlà mẫutự Latin, thì yêucầu cảitổ cáchviết chữViệt không cấpbách hoặc không cầnthiết nữa. 

Trên thựctế, Trungquốc rất muốn cảitổ chữviết của nước họ bằngcách sửdụng mẫutự Latin lắm nhưng vì mộtsố những điềukiện kháchquan không chophép họ thựchiện được. Thídụ tiếng Phổthông tiêuchuẩn của Trungquốc ngàynay có đặcđiểm là tính đồngâm rất cao chonên nếu tiếng nầy được viết hoàntoàn bằng tiếng Latin thì sự sailạc ýnghiã của những âmtiết đồngâm còn tệhại hơnlà không cảicách. (Thựcsự như đã nói, tínhcách của tiếngHán giốngnhư tiếngViệt, tiếngViệt đã Latinhoá được thì tiếngHán Latinhoá được. Cólẽ trong tâmthức người Trunghoa, qua 5000 năm pháttriển, gắnbó với cùng một thứ chữviết từxưađếnnay, nó đã trởthành linhhồn của dântộc họ. Khi Mao Trạchđông còn sống ông có ýđịnh thựchiện ýđồ nầy, nhưng vì mê thơÐường, ông đâmra ùlì. Ông là người duynhất trong lịchsử Trunghoa cóthể làmđược chuyện nầy. Nhưng cơhội nầy đã vuộtqua khó cóthể còn có cơhội thứhai!) Họ đã cho tiêuchuẩnhoá pinyin, là hệthống phiênâm Latin của tiếngPhổthông của Trungquốc hiệnđại, trongđó tấtcả những từ song hoặc đaâmtiết đều được viết dínhliển vớinhau. 

TiếngNhật cũng cùngchung cảnhngộ với tiếngPhổthông của Trungquốc và mang nhiều âmtiết đồngâm nhiềuhơn nữa. Trong ướcmuốn cảicách chữviết, nước Nhậtbản cũng lâmvào trìnhtrạng tươngtự. Thídụ họ phiên "to" và "to" cóthể là mộttrongnhững tiếngHánviệt tươngđương: đông, đôn, độc, độn, đồn, đốc, đống, động, đồng... NgườiNhật đành tạo hệthống viết riêng dùng songsong với Hántự để phiênâm tiếng ngoạiquốc, nhờđó dân Nhật cóthể tiếpthu được những kháiniệm khoahọc kỹthuật mới của phươngTây. Nói nhưvậy không cónghĩa là chữviết của hai nước nầy chưahề được cảicách. Họ đã cảicách: chữHán dùng trong hai ngônngữ của hai xứ này đã được đơngiảnhoá rấtnhiều. Tómlại, hai nước Hoa và Nhật nầy đãtừng cảicách chữviết của họ nhưng chỉ mộtphần, chonên khôngđược toàndiện và triệtđể. 

Và một câuhỏi lýthú cũng đángđược nêura ở đây: nếu hai nước lớn Áchâu nầy cảicách thànhcông sang cáchviết bằng mẫutự Latin, sựpháttriển kinhtế và khoahọc kỹthuật của hai nước nầy cóphải là đã tiếnxa hơn hiệnnay không? Hỏi tức là trảlời. Nếu hai nước Hoa và Nhật cảicách thànhcông chữviết bằng mẫutự Latin của họ, thì cólẽ họ đã tiếnxa hơnnữa sovới hiệntại trong các lãnhvực khoahọc kỹthuật và kinhtế. Vìsao? Vì chữviết của họ nếu sớm được cảicách sang mẫutự Latin thì chươngtrình giáodục cho hơn 1 tỷ dân Trungquốc sẽ được phổcập hơn, tiếntrình điệntoánhoá hay vitínhhoá trong lãnhvực tinhọc (informatics) của họ đã đi mộtbướclớn và dàihơn, và nếu lãnhvực tinhọc có tiếnbộ thì bướctiến kinhtế của họ còn đi xahơn và nhanhhơn nữa. Lốiviết dựa trên Hántự ngàynay của hai nước nầy đã gây trởngại khôngít trong tiếntrình hiệnđạihoá côngnghiệp của họ, nhưng họ khôngthể làm hơn được. Ngàynay họ khôngthể quaylại từ khởđiểm banđầu của cuộc cảicách chữviết nữa bởivì chữviết hiệnđại của họ đãlà mộttrongnhững tiếntrình điệntoánhoá trong côngnghệ thôngtinhọc. 

Tớiđây sẽ có người nóirằng Ðàiloan cũng hoàntoàn dùng chữHán nhưng họ vẫn đạtđược tiếnbộ đángkể trong lãnhvực truyềnthông và kỹthuật điệntoán? Vâng, nhưng vẫncòn chậmhơn sovới Nhật. Và những tiếnbộ họ đạtđược là trên cơsở xửlý vitính bằng tiếngAnh chứ khôngphải là tiếngHán!

Rồi có người sẽ nói: cảicách chữviết để tiếnbộ nhưng còn trườnghợp BắcHàn, nước nầy đã cảicách triệtđể loạibỏ hết chữHán trong chữviết của họ, nhưngï sao họ vẫncòn sống trong một xứsở nghèonàn lạchậu nhất thếgiới, trongkhiđó NamHàn lại vữngmạnh, và chữviết của xứ nầy vẫncòn giữ những yếutố Hán trongđó mà khônghề cảitổ? Ðólà vì BắcHàn phủnhận thựctế kháchquan là sựtồntại của yếutố Hánngữ trong chữviết của họ. Yếutố từvựng Hán là một bộphận của tiếng Ðạihàn, là bảnsắc ngônngữ của họ, và NamHàn thừanhận yếutố kháchquan nầy. 

Khôngnhững chỉ Ðàiloan, Nam Hàn, Nhậtbản hay Trungquốc đạtđược những tiếnbộ kỹthuật về ngành côngnghệ vitính (Trungquốc ngàynay là một nước có khảnăng phóng vệtinh thươngmại lên khônggian) dựatrên xửlý dữkiện bằng tiếngAnh, màcòn những nước phươngTây nhưlà nước Ðức, nước Pháp hay nước nào đinữa cũng sửdụng tiếngAnh làm ngônngữ côngcụ kỹthuật để xửlý dữkiện, thì nước sanhsauđẻmuộn như Việtnam trong lãnhvực truyềnthông cầngì đến sựcảitổ chữviết của mình để cầumong tiếnbộ nhanhhơn, vì đằngnào Việtnam cũng phải dùng tiếngAnh côngcụ để xửlý thôngtin vitính? TiếngAnh là vạnnăng! TiếngAnh là ngônngữ kỹthuật! TiếngAnh là tiếngnói của thếgiới! Cứ xửdụng tiếngAnh làm côngcụ ngônngữ kỹthuật là đủ, cảitổ tiếngViệt chi cho phiềntoái! Ðó là nhờ tiếngAnh mởrộng cánhcửa thunhận tấtcả mọi yếutố -- nhờđó nó pháttriển mạnhmẽ chăng?

Ðúngvậy, nhưng khôngphải xứ nào dùng tiếngAnh cũng đạtđược những tiếnbộ khoahọc đángkể, thídụ Philuậttân hoặc Jamaica. Nhưng xứta có nói tiếngAnh chăng? Bạn nghĩ sao về nước Nga và tiếngNga? Nước Pháp và tiếngPháp? Ðếquốc Lamã và tiếngLatin? 

Có một điều thúvị là vôtình hay hữuý mà trên thựctế những nước giàumạnh tiếnbộ đều đã trảiqua tiếntrình cảicách chữviết của nước họ: ngoài Nhậtbản và Trungquốc, còncó Ðứcquốc, Hànquốc, Mãlaiá, Tháilan là những nước điểnhình. Và đặcđiểm chung của cách đổimới lốiviết của họ là sự thừanhận sựhiệnhữu của những nhómtừ đaâmtiết. Phiá Việtnam cũng sẽ lêntiếng: ô, chuyện nầy nhànước đã làm từlâu, thídụ: ốc-xít-hoá, cạc-bôn-nat, can-xum, ni-trơ-at,... Ðúng, chínhphủ Việtnam đã thựchiện một phầnnhỏ, nhưng đólà phần vôbổ, cóhại nhiều hơn là cólợi, lýdo tạisao ởđây xin miễnbàn. Khuynhhướng thôngdụng ngàynay trongnước vẫnlà giữnguyên những từ nướcngoài khi viết chữViệt. Thựcsự một người cóhọc ở Việtnam dù không biết tiếngAnh nhưng vẫn cóthể phátâm đến mộtmức cóthể chấpnhận được những từ tiếngAnh được dùng trong chữViệt (dĩnhiên là những từ quá thôngdụng đã Nômhoá như xàphòng, kem, càrem, càphê, free, sale, ápphe, xinê... thìchẳng nên đổi).

Ai học qua tiếngÐức đều biết là lốiviết nhưlà 'Willcommenskultur' (tiếngAnh: Welcome Culture, Vănhoá Chàođón) 'Informationssystemverarbeitung' (tiếngAnh: information system processing, hệthống xửlý thôngtin) của chữÐức là "lòngthòng" nhất trong các thứ tiếngẤnÂu, vì bởilẽ kháiniệm nào bấtkể khi ghéplại dù chữviết có dài đến dườngnào họ vẫn vuivẻ chấpnhận và sửdụng trong cáchviết của họ, vì chỉ mộtthoáng liếcqua là họ bắtgặp ngay kháiniệm được truyềntải.

Ngaycả chữ ÐạiHàn, NamHàn tuy vẫncòn sửdụng chữviết hìnhkhối (phiênâm và chữHán) là disản do kếtquả của ảnhhưởng vănhoá Trunghoa đểlại, họ vẫnphải viết thành cụmtừ ("kháiniệm") vớinhau: hyundai = hiệnđại, dongnama=đôngnamá, fanghuo=phònghoả, phónghoả, Kori= Caoly... nếu X đạidiện cho một chữkhối bấtkỳ, thì bạn sẽ thấy những từ trên hiệnra dưới dạng XX XXX XX XX. Mộ thídụ điểnhình: 그는 여러 代의 임금을 내리 섬긴 歷事로 널리 尊敬받았다. Geuneun yeoreo dae'ui imgeumeul naeri seomgin yeoksaro neolli jon'gyeongbadatda. (Dịchsát: "Ôngta liêntiếp baođời vuachúa là quanviên kinhlịch rấtđược tônkính."), và saukhi họ canhtân chữviết: '그는 여러 대의 임금을 내리 섬긴 역사로 널리 존경받았다.' Cáchviết của họ tiếnbộ hơn chữTàu, chữNôm, và ngaycả Quốcngữ. Họ vượtlên từ tưduy tượnghình sang hìnhtượng trêncả "điệnthoạithôngminhnhântạo"!

Lốiviết thành cụmtừ nhưvậy cólợi gì về mặt thôngtin? Câu trảlời là nó khoahọc hơn (phảnánh đúng thựctế của tiếngnói) và nhanhhơn (xửlý, tiếpthu, inấn, tiếtkiệm).

Cảitổ chữviết là điềukiện cần chứ khôngphải là điềukiện đủ để đạtđược tiếnbộ trong lãnhvực kỹthuật. Khôngcần phải biệngiải ai cũng đồngý là tiếnbộ kỹthuật là tiềnđề cho sựpháttriển kinhtế. Cáchviết tiếngViệt của chúngta ngàynay ngàycàng xa thựctế nếu sovới bốn thậpniên về trước, thờiđó tấtcả những từkép (songâmtiết) đều được nốilại vớinhau bằng một gạchnối: quốc-gia, bâng-khuâng, lạnh-lẽo... Càng về sau, lối viết lườibiếng trởnên chiếm ưuthế vì tiếtkiệm được một độngtác nốigạch khi viết. Cólẽ trong tiềmthức dântộc Việtnam, lốiviết hìnhkhối của chữ Hán thành từng chữ một với từng kháiniệm một đã ảnhhưởng mạnhmẻ đến thóiquen nầy của ngườiViệt ta chăng? Những gì ta đọcthấy trên sáchbáo, liênmạng ngàynay là lối viết rờira thành từng âmtiết đơnlẻ -- phảnánh đúng mứcđộ "bờirời" hay "rờirạc" của tiếnđộ pháttriển của Việtnam thuộc nhiều lãnhvực. Dĩnhiên là cảicách chữviết khôngthôi khôngphải là điềukiện đủ để pháttriển những lãnhvực khác. Dođó cảitổ cáchviết chữViệt điềukiện cần để đạtđược tiếnbộ kỹthuật. Cảitổ lốiviết tiếngViệt ngàynay bằngcách viết dínhliền lại vớinhau những từkép (songtiết) và từđaâm (đaâmtiết) sẽ mangđến những điểmlợi nêutrên vì nó sẽ rútngắn thờigian xửlý thôngtin và sẽ xửlý mộtcách chínhxác hơn.

Tiếng Ðức với từ "Informationssystemverarbeitung" chỉ cho ngườita mộtphần nhỏ của một giây để tiếpthu kháiniệm nầy. Vì khôngai phải đọc từng vần của từ nầy để nhậndiện ra kháiniệm mà chữ nầy chuyênchở. Nhưng nếu với cáchviết rời thành "xử lý bằng hệ thống truyền thông" thì cái đầu của người Việtnam phải tiếpthu 7 dạngchữ khácnhau, qua quátrình phântích mới nhậnra là có bốn kháiniệm thôngqua 4 từ, rồi sauđó mới kếthợp thành một cụmtừ-kháiniệm chung. Nếuphải dịch từngữ nầy theo lối Ðức thành "xửlýbằnghệthốngtruyềnthông" thì hơi quáđáng và chướngmắt, nhưng nếu được viếtthành "xửlý bằng hệthống truyềnthông" thì kếtquả xửlý và tiếpthu dữkiện nầy hiệuquả sẽ nhanhhơn sovới cáchviết rờirạc, và nhưđãnói, ngườiđọc sẽ đỡ mấtthờigiờ đọc từng chữ, sauđó mới tổnghợp lại để có kháiniệm toànthể về cụmtừ-kháiniệm kỹthuật nầy. 

Với hằnghàsasố dữliệu thôngtin ngàynay, nhìn dạngchữ nhậnra kháiniệm nhanhhơn và hiệuquả hơnlà qua từng chữ-âmtiết. Khi thấy dạng "international" ta không cầnphải đánhvần thành in-ter-na-tion-al mới "thấmnhuần" kháiniệm nầy, ta chỉ mới thấy dạngchữ của từ nầy là hiểu ngay. Tươngtự với những chữ đồnggốc "internationalization", "internationalism", "international imperialism", "internationale"... bộóc ta xửlý chúng với tốcđộ ngangnhau, và nhưthế nhanhhơnnhiều khi ta mang cáchbiệngiải nầy sang những từngữ Việt tươngđương như " quốctế", quốctếhoá", "chủnghĩaquốctế", "chủnghĩađếquốc quốctế" và "thếgiớiđạiđồng"... Ðầuóc conngười đã xửlý nhanh thì máy vitính xửlý càngnhanh và chínhxác hơn. Thídụ "chủnghiãquốctế" sẽ tiếtkiệm cho bộnhớ của máy vitính 3 bytes cho ba khoảngcách trắng (spaces), khi kiểmlỗi chínhtả "speller" sẽ làmviệc nhanhhơn và khôngcòn gặp trườnghợp "chủ nghĩa" nếu được viếtthành "chu nghiã", "chủ nghĩa", chú nghĩa" đềuđược máy vitính dễdàng cho thôngqua! Nóivề tiếtkiệm giấy in thì chúngta còn tiếtkiệm tiềnbạc nhiềuhơn là tiếtkiệm khoảngtrống trong bộnhớ của máy vitính, va sáchvở inra bớt tốn giấy thì dĩnhiên giáthành trởnên rẻ hơn!

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LÀMSAO ÐỂ CẢITỔ CHỮVIẾT

Có người đã từng hôhào loạibỏ hết yếutố Hán trong tiếngViệt, cắtđứt sợi dâydài của lịchsử quanhệ với ngườiHán, và nếu chúngta làm nhưvậy thửhỏi chúngta cònlại gì? Một lỗhỗng khổnglồ trong Việtngữ và trong vănhoá Việtnam. Trongnước trướcđây một vài nhà lãnhđạo cũng có hôhào mộtsố phongtrào "giữgìn sự trongsáng trong tiếngViệt" nhằm loạibỏ mộtsố yếutố Hán trong tiếngViệt, nhưlà; dùng máybay thayvì phicơ, dođó chỉ xài máybay lênthẳng, tênlửa thaycho hoảtiển, sânbay thaycho phitrường... Nhưng những người hôhào chắc khônghề biếtrằng: máybay, tênlửa, hay sânbay đều hoàntoàn có gốcHán. Chúngta cảitổ chữviết nhưng sẽ không sa vào trìnhtrạng quáđà nầy.

Trong quátrình pháttriển của Quốcngữ, từ buổi bansơ đến hiệntrạng của chữViệt ngàynay, đã có biết baonhiêu đổithay và sửađổi về mặt hìnhthức kýâm của tiếngnói nướcnhà. Trong hơn nửa thếkỷ trởlạiđây, chínhtả Việtngữ đã khá ổnđịnh. Chính nhờ vào tính ổncố nầy, khi sosánh cáchviết và thựctế cách phátâm tiếng Việt, khôngkểđến cáchviết để diễndạt theo ngônngữ hiệnđại đốilập với kiểuxưa, cách kýâm tiếngViệt bằng mẫutự Latin cho ta thấy một hìnhảnh tươngđối về những thayđổi về mặt ngữâm. Thí dụ, ta viết "thu" nhưng lại phátâm là /t'ou/, không phải là /t'u/, "không" phátâm là /k'ongw/ chứ khôngphải là /k'ong/, "hộc" phátâm là /hokw/ chứ khôngphải là /hok/, "ti" phátâm là /tei/ chứ khôngphải là /ti/, nhưng "tin" phátâm là /tin/ chứ khôngphải là /tein/v.v... Nếu kể thêm vào giọngBắc, Trung, Nam của từng địaphương, cáchviết ngàynay dĩnhiên là không hoàntoàn giữ đúng như thuở banđầu, vì ngônngữ luônluôn ở trong một tiếntrình vậnđộng và biếnđổi khôngngừng và nếu quảthật những người sángchế ra chữQuốcngữ kýâm đúngđắn tiếngViệt vào thờiđiểm nàođó trong lịchsử. Nhưng những thayđổi nhỏ nầy về mặt ngữâm không làm xáotrộn hệthống chínhtả Việtngữ vì nó không giốngnhư tiếngAnh, là ngôngữ mà sựphátâm đã thayđổi đến mức đôikhi nói mộtđàng viết mộtnẻo. Dođó, ởđây chúngta sẽ không tiếnhành cảitổ cách kýâm saocho chuẩnxác mộttrămphầntrăm, mà chúngta chỉ xétđến cáchcảitổ phảnảnh đúng tínhcách songâmtiết và đaâmtiết của tiếngViệt.

Vấnđề ởđây đặtra là bấtcứ sửađổi hay cảitổ chữviết nếu không xétđến tínhcách kháchquan của nó sẽ không baogiờ thựchiện được. Hiệnthực kháchquan của ngônngữ nóichung là tiếngnói của nước nào cũng vaymượn từngữ của những nước lớn hơn mình. Thựctế kháchquan của tiếngViệt ngàynay là nó mang tíchcách songâmtiết, với những đặcđiểm ngônngữ gần giốngnhư tiếngHán, là disản của sựthẩmnhập một sốlượng từHán khổnglồ, mà tiếngHán là tiếng mà tấtcả đạihọc lớn trên thếgiới đều có làm nghiêncứu và nhìnnhận rằng tiếngHán hiệnđại là một ngônngữ đaâmtiết (songâmtiết).

Cách diễnđạt tiếngViệt rõràng và logic nhất vẫn là côngnhận tính đaâmtiết của tiếngViệt. Có người cholà làm nhưvậy thể thơ lụcbát hay songthấtlụcbát sẽ có một lối viết không có dântộctính (bạn còn nhớ truyện ông Mao Trạchđông mê thơ Ðường không?). Thựcsự vấnđề này cũng dễ giảiquyết bởilẽ chúngta sẽ có hai chọnlựa khi làmthơ: hoặc là cảiđổi hoàntoàn theo lốiviết mới, hoặclà cứ giữy nhưcũ, vì đây thuộc lãnhvực nghệthuật và lãnhvực nầy cóthểkhông bị ràngbuộc bởi hìnhthức. Cảitổ cáchviết chủyếu là chútrọng đếntính khoahọc của nó và là để ápdụng vào trong lãnhvực khoahọc, thídụ nhưlà tạo thuậtngữ khoahọc mới trong các lãnhvực như tinhọc, ykhoa, côngnghệ, thươngmại, thưviệnhọc v.v...

Khi cấutạo hay sángchế từ mới, mộtkhi chúngta đã chấpnhận sựthưc kháchquan thuộctính đaâmtiết của tiếngViệt, những thuậtngữ khoahọc cần được cấutạo để đápứng nhucầu pháttriển khoahọc hoặc để dịch những kháiniệm khoahọc mới từ tiếngAnh thì ta cóthể mang nguyêntắc đaâmtiết ra ápdụng khi dịch. Ở trongnước những kháiniệm như lênmạng=online, cổngnối=gateway, nốimạng=connected, trangnhà=homepage... là những từ được tạora trên nguyêntắc phântích thànhtố của từ, xong ghéplại thành từghép để chora từkép hay từđaâmtiết mới.

Thêmvàođó, mộttrongnhững ưuđiểm của tiếngViệt là cóthể giatăng sốlượng từvựng mới mộtcách gầnnhư vôhạn. Tuy sinhsauđẻmuộn trong lãnhvực khoahọc, Việtnam cóthể sửdụng khotừ Hánviệt và Hánnôm của mình để dịch những thuậtngữ khoahọc mà Nhậtbản là nước đã đitrước và tiếnbộ về lãnhvực nầy với những thuậtngữ họ tạora từ tiếngHán. Chuyện nầy Trungquốc đã thựchiện từlâu khi họ cho dunhập những từngữ như là chínhtrị, cộnghoà, dânchủ, tíchcực, tiêucực... vào trong kho từvựng của họ đềulà những kháiniệm mới hồi đầu thếkỷ 20 của Tâyphương mà Nhật đã tạora bằng yếutố Hán. Những từ này đã làm một vòng Trunghoa trước khi sang Việtnam! Tươngtự, rất nhiều danhtừ kỹthuật ngàynay do Nhật tạora vẫncòn được Trungquốc vaymượn. Tómlại, nhiều thuậtngữ đã cósẵn, ta cóthể vaymượn lại và tiếpthu mộtcách dễdàng.

Cũng căncứ và tính đaâmtiết của từvựng, tiếngViệt đã nẩysinhra những từ mới như: máyvitính (micro=vi, compute=tinh, -er=máy), tinhọc (information=(thông)tin, science=(khoa)học)), liênmạng (inter=liên, net=mạng), nângcấp (up=nâng, grade=cấp)... Trongkhiđó, tuỳtheo mứcđộ thôngdụng mà ta cóthể giữy như chữgốc của tiếngAnh: chip, bit, bai 'byte', mê 'mega', bo 'board', font, CD, email, website...

Trong lãnhvực nầy trongnước ngườita đã thựchiện và tiêuchuẩnhoá khánhiều thuậtngữ mới và theo nguyêntắc ghéptừ. Nhưvậy, mộtlầnnữa, đâylà bằngchứng hùnghồn về tính đaâmtiết của tiếngViệt hiệnđại. Bạn cóthể thích từ máyđiệntoán hay máyđiệnnão hơn là cáchgọi máyvitính, nhưng nếu đasố đã dùng, bạn khôngthể đứùng ngoàilề mộtmình chốngchọi với dòngnước lịchsử.

Và nhưvậy, khôngcần phải đợi kếtquả nghiêncứu nào khác để xácđịnh tínhcách đaâmtiết (songâmtiết) của tiếngViệt vì chỉ nội sốlượng hiệnhữu cũa những từ songâmtiết Hánviệt và tiếngHánnôm (từNôm có gốcHán), chúngta cóthể tiếnhành cảitổ ngaytừbâygiờ.

Nhưvậy chúngta sẽ cảitổ gì và bằng cáchnào? Yêntâm, đâylà một cảitổ rất đơngiản.

Ngônngữ viết chỉlà một phươngtiện truyềnthông bằng thóiquen và quyước. Nếu chúngta quyước và ai cũng chấpnhận thì mọiviệc cóthể thựchiện được. Chúngtôi không hôhào cảitổ triệtđể như trườnghợp -s cho sĩ, -z cho gia, s- cho sự, mà chỉ muốn tấtcả mọingười sửađổi một tíxíu thóiquen: lợidụng sựnhậndạng những chữ thường đichung vớinhau -- viết chúng dínhliền lại vớinhau (quyước nầy cũng do thóiquen mà ra), vì đólà những từ chúngta nói liềnnhau không ngắtquảng. Những từkép songâmtiết và đaâmtiết cùngvới những chữ đichung vớinhau để diễntả một kháiniệm, và những thànhngữ, cụmtừ thườngdùng. Thídụ: mặcdù, vớinhau, nhiềuhơn, đẹpnhất, nhấtlà, đólà, dođó, chonên, chotớinay, kểtừbâygiờ, ngaylậptức, từtrướcđếnnay, xãhộichủnghĩa, chủnghĩatưbản, phầnmềm, hằnghàsasố, kểkhôngxiết....

Khởiđầu cóthể mỗingười cũng cùng một cụmtừ nhưng lại viết khác, lâudần vềsau thờigian sẽ đảilọc, cáigì thường được dùng nhiềunhất sẽ được giữlại. Ðể có kimchỉnam đưadườngchỉlối bướcbanđầu, tạmthời ta cóthể dùng một ngônngữ nướcngoài làmchuẩn: tiếngAnh hoặc tiếngHán, hay bấtkỳ ngônngữ nào vì đasố ngônngữ ngoạiquốc không có lốiviết rờirạc như lốiviết tiếng Việt của chúngta ngàynay.

Lấy tiếngAnh làm thídụ: although=mặcdù, scholarship=họcbổng, dictionary=từđiển, handbook=sổtay, however=tuynhiên, any=bấtcứ, individualism=chủnghĩacánhân.... Tómlại, nếu một nhóm chữ thường đichung vớinhau và là cùngchung một kháiniệm hay một đoảnngữ quen dùng: cứ viết dínhliền vớinhau!

Có người sẽ hỏi: Ðồngý, đólà cho tươnglai , nhưng thế còn số sáchvở và thưtịch cũ đã in của nướcta thìsao? Mộtkhimà ai cũng quen đọc và viết theo lốimới nầy (ChữViệt năm 2020, haylà Việtngữ2020), thì độngcơ kinhtế sẽ làm mọisự thayđổi hết. Nhàin sẽ tựđộng insách theo nhucầu ngườiđọc, nếu vào năm 2020 ngườita còn insách!

Cáilợi đã được phântích, tuy chưa được sâusắc, đầyđủ và thuyếtphục lắm, nhưng nếu các bạn nhậnthấy điều đó đúng và có nhiệttình, bắttay vàolàm ngaybâygiờ, aiai cũng làm thì còn logì không thựchiện nổi cuộc cảitổ nhỏbé nầy, nhấtlà bước thửnghiệm trên liênmạng chẳng tốnkém gì cả. Bàiviết này là một thídụ điểnhình vậy!

Ngườiviết bài nầy xin hoannghênh đónnhận ýkiến của tấtcả các bạn và của quývị caominh. Một người thì chỉ làmnổi cơn bãotố trong táchnước.

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dchph

Updated: San Francisco 13/5/2025

APPENDICES

 

APPENDIX A

Examples of some polysyllabic and dissyllabic vocabularies

The following tabulation of randomly selected wordlists will help the readers make judgement whether: (1) Vietnamese is a dissyllabic language, (2) it should be written in the natural way of combining associated syllables to form a word. This in return will help them understand why a Chinese dissyllabic word when changing into Vietnamese equivalents, it might not follow the same old pattern as monosyllabic words do, (3) make sense of elaborations on other credible findings by other authors that support the postulation of genetic affiliation of those Vietnamese basic words that are cognate to both Sino-Tibetan and Chinese etymologies, (4) analyze supplementary materials as useful tools to approach Vietnamese and Chinese historical phonologies.

I) Composite words:

Ngáoộp, yếuxìu, ủdột, giómáy, lộnxàngầu, liềntùtì, bủnxỉn, rửngmỡ, lậtđật, bệurệu, mốckhính, thúiình, bệrạc, bêtha, chìnhình, đẩyđà, thắcmắc, trịchthượng, trịchbồlương, ởtruồngnhồngnhộng, trầntruồng, tòmò, tấtbật, bứcxúc, bứcrức, nóngtánh, nóngmáy, nónglòng, mongngóng, táymáy, tấtbật, bângkhuâng, bộpchộp, bồihồi, hữnghờ, phảngphất, mơhồ, chạngvạng, chậtvật, khúcmắc, ngờvực, bạttai, tuyệtcúmèo, háchxìxằng, hộtxíngầu, tứđỗtường, sạchbách, yêuđương, thươnghại, ấmcúng, làmbiếng, tộinghiệp, mồcôi, goábụa, híhửng, thấpthỏm... càphê, càrem, càpháo, càlăm, càkêdêngỗng, lacà, càgiựt, càgật, càrá, càrà, càrỡn, càrờ, Càná, càna, càtàng, càchớncàcháo, càtrậtcàduột, càrăng, càdựt, càràng, càlắc, càrịchcàtang, càtàng, càtửng... cùlần, cùlao, cùlét, cầncù, lùcù, cùrũ... hoasoan, hoavôngvang, hoacứtlợn, hoamắt, tàihoa, hoatay, hoaliễu, đàohoa, hoahoèhoasói, bahoa, bahoachíchchoè ... bagai, batrợn, tàiba, ađồngbảyđổi, chúangôiba, hộtxíngầu, caochótvót, baphải, bahồi, bồhòn, bồcâu, baquân... táhoảtamtinh, cứuhoả, hoảlò, hoảdiệmsơn, nhảydù, bếpmúc, baola, thừamứa, đằmthắm, nhạtthếch, chánphèo, ếẩm... châuchấu, bươmbướm, đuđủ, chuồnchuồn, lạcđà, sưtử... dưahấu, dưagan, bíđao, khổqua... trảđủa, chénđũa, bùlubùloa, sàbát, viếtlách, xấcbấcxangbang, tầmbậytầmbạ, tầmphào, bảvơbảláp, trớtquớt, tầmgửi, contầm, bánhtầm, bánhít, bánhdây, bánhdày, bánhxe, coicọp, bắtcóc, bắtnạt, bắtđền, đánhcá, cábóng, cháphi, cátô, cáhồng, cáthu, cáẻm, cáchẻm, cáchép, cángừ, cáđộ, đánhđáo, độcđáo, laỏmtỏi, chầndần, càmràm, cằnnhằn, phànnàn, nhõngnhẽo, tiềnnong, ruồngrẫy, obế, tângbốc, bặmtrợn, tréocẳngngỗng, baquexỏlá, thảgiàn, diệuvợi, xaxăm, xaxôi, xalắcxalơ, sạchbách, bângkhuâng, mônglung, ngỡngàng, ngơngác, tọcmạch, heomay, cùichỏ, chânmày, bảvai, chómực, chómá, chóđẻ, nhàquê, nhàvăn, nhàngủ, nhàmát, nhàtu, nhàlao, laocông, laophổi, mộttay, taychơi, tayvợt, tàytrời, chẫmrãi, gấprút, lẹlàng, tệlậu, cửasổ, maymắn, hấphối, dốtnát, thơngây, ủmtỏi, đắngngắt, giàusụ, nghèonàn, chậmrì, lềmề, nhẹhẫng, bãithama, gạocội, ngáoộp, biểnlận, sinhnhai, etc.

NOTE: "Composite" used here is to convey the meaning of something closely affixed to a radical which can not be broken into separate syllables and used independently for either one or both is a bound morpheme even though in the Chinese original form each character can stand alone as a word that may convey a certain meaning. In the category the same etymon appears as a sole syllable in Vietnamese that cannot function by itself that is merely a morpheme and may not mean anything semantically but it needs to appear in combined forms that go with other syllable to make a complete word. This kind of composite words are found numerous in the Vietnamese language that are commonly used in daily life.

To have more clear picture of what it actually means, compare words in English of the same nature: windy, curious, vague, pitiful, lovely, creamy, marvelous, tomato, salmon, unique, butterfly, kitchen, handy, camel, melon, excited, handsome, etc. Can you break syllables in each of these words into separate units and still use each of them independently with its original meaning? Of course you cannot.

II) Dissyllabic compound words:

Mồhôi, nướcmắt, nhanhchóng, nóngnực, nổigoá, nhàthờ, trườnghọc, giấybút, sinhđẻ, vợchồng, chamẹ, anhem, nhàcửa, trờiđất, đồngruộng, tiềnbạc, bànghế, chuacay, maquỷ, thầnthánh, trờiphật, bảngđen, sôngnúi, nhànước, máybay, sânbay, nhàmáy, ghếngồi, bànviết, giườngngủ, phòngăn, quẹtlửa, máylạnh, tủlạnh, máyhát, lýlẽ, chờđợi, ănuống, rượuchè, cờbạc, cấmkỵ, cẩthả, etc.

NOTE: Just like compound words in English, e.g. blackboard, therefore, airplane, moreover, billboard, airport, bookworm, football, baseball, notebook, software, hardware, honeymoon, plywood, handicraft, aircraft, shipyard, graveyard, grapefruit, jackfruit, pineapple, etc.,

Vietnamese compound words are in great numbers. Each word-syllable in a word can be used independently as a word.

III) Reduplicative polysyllabic and dissyllabic compound words or binomes:

Lễlạc, tếtnhất, chắcchắn, lạnhlẽo, mấpmé, nướcnôi, nóngnẩy, nựcnội, caucó, cầukỳ, buồnbã, laođao, lậnđận, lếtthết, lúclắc, làulàu, vấtvả, tấttả, vậtvã, văngvẳng, lacà, dỡẹt, dỡình, ỡmờ, vờvĩnh, hữnghờ, chắcchiu, chătchíu, mằnmặn, ngọtngào, ngánngẫm, khờkhạo, giàgiặn, xaxôi, nặngnề, nhẹnhàng, tươmtất, rấmrớ, rầmrộ, rưngrưng, rộnràng, rùrì, rúrí, rờrẫm, rậmrực, tùtúng, phâyphây, phephẩy, phăngphăng, mêmẫn, chămchỉ, lolắng, mắcmỏ, rẻrúng, ấmức, viễnvông, mơmàng, sâusắc, đenđuá, hồnghào, hoahoè, dạidột, sờsoạn, mòmẫm, hẹphòi, rộngrãi, ấmức, thẳngthừng, quạuquọ, chắcchắn, vắngvẻ, côicút, lỗlã, dưdã, đauđớn, luônluôn, mêmãi, nhanhnhẩu, runrẩy, lắclư, lườilĩnh, liềnliền, nhạtnhẽo, nhạtnhoà, nhútnhát, dạndĩ, mạnhmẽ, nhẹnhàng, nặngnề, thấplètè, sạchsànhsanh, đồngxuteng, liềntùtì, lấplalấplững, bùlubùloa, híhahíhửng, xíxaxíxọn, lúngtalúngtúng, càrịchcàtang, lấplalấplững, bùlubùloa, híhahíhửng, tấtatấtửng, xấcbấcxangbang, lấplalấplửng, etc.

 NOTE: Reduplicative compound words are made of a one-syllable word plus a variation of that with a little change in sound. This type of words renders a subtle change in meaning of the radical. An affix to the original word is usually a reduplicative element that has a different tone and initial or ending comes before of after a radical. Comparable structures of this type of words are those of English "childish", "slowly", "talkative", "handy", "continuous", "fashionable", "horrendous", "fabulous", exited", "exciting", "initial", "vital", "likewise", "shaking", "shaky", "lonesome", "troublesome", "mimicry", etc. An affixed syllable or add-on component, just like those similarly structured words in English, cannot be used independently.

IV) Polysyllabic "Vietnamized" neighboring Mon-Khmer and Daic words:

They are words that were made up with the combined elements of all Sinitic Vietnamese, Sino-Vietnamese, and other indigenous words indiscriminately.

Bơsữa, sữatuơi, sữachua, dưachua, tráibơ, tráisu, súbắp, diễnsô, bầusô, bánhbìtquy, bánhít, bánhchưng, bánhxèo, nămhợi, nămgà, tuổidậu, tuổihợi, làmthịt, làmcao, làmtàng, làmlẻ, làmăn, mầnăn, nângcao, lênmặt, lêngiọng, xuốnggiọng, xuốngnước, câucú, thathiết, thêthảm, tủithân, mồcôi, đầunậu, băngđảng, xốngáo, súngống, daobúa, hồhỡi, tụctằn, cánúc, hầubao, đầuđuôi, đóikhát, sấmsét, tàylay, tèmlem, xegắnmáy, câulạcbộ, hầmbàlần, tạppílù, nồiniuêusoongchả, đaotobúlớn, nởmàynởmặt, bàconchòmxóm, đếnhẹnlạolên, bèogiạtmâytrôi, anhemcộtchèo, anhemcôcậu, anhemthúcba, mẹchồngcondâu, đèocaogióhút, tiềnrừngbạcbể, trànggiangđạihải, vòngvotamquốc, hốilộđútlót, etc.

V) Polysyllabic Vietnamized English and French words:

It is no doubt that writing foreign words such as 'Xan Phờ-ran-xít-cô' instead of 'San Francisco' is the most stupid way to do by the uneducated people; therefore, readers will not find such weird spellings in this paper but only the commonly accepted forms as reasonably natural as possible.

Càphê, càrem, xecamnhông, côngtennơ, đầukéocôngtennơ, phíchnước, sônước, canô, thùngphuy, lôcanh, origin, gin, gen, building, oánhtùtì, bíttết, lagu, sàlách, nướcsốt, xàbông, sôcôla, suwinggum, sabôchê, dămbông, phôma, yaua, vôlăng, mêgabai, internet, website, software, mashup, interview, rôbô, radiô, lade, photocópy, cọppi, ốcxygen, cạtbônát, đềphô, dốpdiếc, vốtka, virút, cờlê, mỏlết, tivi, video, dĩacompact, galăng, đôla, vila, tắcxi, xebuýt, phẹcmatuya, gạcmănggiê, cômpa, tráibôm, bômhơi, dăngxê, câulạcbộ, vacăng, ôtô, nhàga, ôten, dầuxăng, bùlon, cáisoong, chơigem, mànhìnhled, trượtpaten, chạymaratông, menbo, hợpgu, hợprơ, hămbơgơ, mesừ, mađam, xinêma, tuydô, kílômét, centimét, milimét, xebuýt, xemôtô, môtơ, đènmăngxông, xyláp, phạcmaxi, đốctờ, đìaréctơ, áoghilê, bộcomplê, ôpạclơ, micờrô, phắctuya, trảbiu, ốcxíthoá, sida, aid, căngxe, buyarô, rờmọt, móocchê, súngcanhnông, tủbuýpphê, chạyápphe, nhàbăng, trảcheck, sờnáchba, mìncơlaymo, bốtdờsô, aláchsô, ạctisô, căngtin, míttinh, Ácănđình, Hoathịnhđốn, Balê, Ănglê, Vaticăn, sôviết, bônxêvích, gạcđờco, gácgian, trứngốplết, hộtgàốpla, áobànhtô, áomăngtô, bugi, épphê, ácxít, átpirin, kýninh, đờmi, đờmigạcxông, đíplôm, đíplôma, găngtơ, ápphích, táplô, bancông, salông, khănmùxoa, lêmônát, rượurum, rượuvan, đườngrầy, xetăng, tănglều, miniduýp, carô, súngrulô, xerulô, mọtphin, xìphé, pháctuya, côngtắc, côngtơ, rôbinê, marisến, phôngten, bôlêrô, tănggo, rumba, phăngtadi, phuộcxét, xìcăngđan, sanđan, bigiăngtin, phúlít, batong, măngsông, đènpin, rờmọt, rờmoọc, boongtàu, tíchkê, bánsôn, đitua, vãira, đítcô, đăngxe, lăngxê, pianô, viôlông, honđa, trumpét, càtômát, xúchxích, patê, tráibơ, đắcco, xêrum, xiarô, xêry, băngrôn, băngnhạc, đồlen, rumba, bếpga, môđen, môđẹc, xilô, nồixúpde, pađờxuy, sơmi, balô, búpbê, tắcxi, buộcboa, côngtra, dềpô, áopull, quầngin, jắtkết, zêrô, sốpphơ, xếplớn, pátpo, vida, bida, côcacôla, pépsi, vôlăng, ămpiya, ampe, kílôoát, tăngdơ, xuỵtvôntơ, cátsét, ghisê, nhàbăng, tivi, gàrôti, chơisộp, kháchsộp, compiutơ, còmmăng, tíchkê, díppô, san-phơ-ran-xit-cô, etc.

NOTE: These variants of words of French and English origins are spelled in Vietnamese orthography. Even though words in this classification are in limited numbers, they are best representative of polysyllabic combining formation. They are loanwords of "foreign" origin. Their syllables are an integrated parts attached the others and cannot certainly be used as independent words even though the Vietnamese syllable itself may mean something else unrelated. How many that can you recognize besides the stupid 'san-phơ-ran-xít-cô'?

The implication of these examples is that if dissyllabic Sino-Vietnamese words are seen as "foreign" loanwords in the Vietnamese language, then their nature and characteristics are virtually the same, not to be separated.

VI) Culturally-accented Vietnamese words of Chinese polysyllabic origin:

ănđòn (deserved punishment) 挨打: ăidă

ăntiền (win bet) 贏錢: yínqián
ănnhậu (have a drink) 應酬: yìngchóu
ănmày (beggar) 要飯: yàofàn
dêxồm (lecherous) 婬蟲: yínchóng
hẹnhò (dating) 約會: yèhuì
đánhcướp (rob) 打劫: dăjié
đánhbài (play cards) 打牌: dăpái
tầmbậy (tầmbạ, sàbát) 三八: sānbà
chánngán (sick of) 厭倦: yànjuān
bậtcười (laugh) 發笑: fáxiào
bậtkhóc (cry) 發哭: fákù
banngày (daytime) 白日: báirì
bồcâu (pigeon) 白鴿: báigē
chạngvạng (at dusk) 旁晚: bángwăn
cảgan (daring) 大膽: dàdăn
khờkhạo (foolish) 傻瓜: săguā
ấmcúng (cozy) 溫馨: wēnqìng
muárối (puppetry) 木偶戲: mù'ǒuxì
xinlỗi (apologize) 請罪: qǐngzuì
xinchào (hello) 見濄 jiànguò
chắcchắn (certainly) 確定: quèdìng
đưađón (see off and pick up) 接送: jiēsòng
chờđợi (expect) 期待: qídài
yêuđương (love) 愛戴: àidài
thươngyêu (affection) 疼愛: téng'ài
khôngdámđâu (it is not so) 不敢當: bùgăndàng
banngàybanmặt (in broad daylight) 青天白日: qīngtiānbáirì
đấttrờichứnggiám (Heaven and the Earth be the witnesses) 天地作證: tiāndìzuòzhèng
trờibấtdunggian (God punish bad people) 天不容姦: tiānbùróngjiān
langbạtkỳhồ (take on an adventure) 狼跋其胡: lángbáqíhú
nhưcágặpnước (like a fish back in water) 如魚得水: rú​yú​dé​shuǐ​, etc.

NOTE: The official Pinyin writing for the Chinese words above are always correctly written in combining formation because they are polysyllabic in nature, except for the diacritic marks that fall on the wrong vowel, e.g., 醉酒 zuìjǐu VS 'sayrượu' (drunk), 真牛 zhēnníu VS 'chơingầu', 垂柳 chuílǐu VS liễurũ (willow), 拜求 bàiqíu VS 'váicầu' (prayer), etc. The implication of these basic and not-so-basic words of the same roots between Chinese and Vietnamese, in addition to those Sino- and Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabularies which are indispensable in the Vietnamese language, is that Chinese is classified as a polysyllabic language, so is Vietnamese.

APPENDIX B

The International Phonetic Alphabet in Unicode

APPENDIX C

Examples of some variable sound changes:

Thuận Nghịch Độc

by Duc Tran

The author, a commentator and translator for Radio Free Asia (RFA) as of 2019, constructs an etymological analogy based a poem by Phạm Thái (1777-1813) which is written in "Thuận Nghịch Độc" form, that is, standard reading is for Sino-Vietnamese sound:

青春鎖柳冷蕭房 Thanh xuân khóa liễu lãnh tiêu phòng
錦軸停針礙點妝 Cẩm trục đình châm ngại điểm trang

清亮度蘚浮沸綠 Thanh lượng độ tiên phù phất lục

淡曦散菊彩疏黃 Đạm hy tán cúc thái sơ hoàng

情痴易訴簾邊月 Tình si dị tố liêm biên nguyệt

夢觸曾撩帳頂霜 Mộng xúc tằng liêu trướng đỉnh sương

箏曲強挑愁緒絆 Tranh khúc cưỡng khiêu sầu tự bạn

鶯歌雅詠閣蕭香 Oanh ca nhã vịnh các tiêu hương.

while, as in old Chinese-based Nôm writings, Sintic-Vietnamese sounds can be also read in reverse (naturally some Sino-Vietnamese sounds, indispensable part of Vietnamese vocabularies, are included also):

香蕭閣詠雅歌鶯 Hương tiêu gác vắng nhặt ca oanh
絆緒愁挑強曲箏 Bận mối sầu khêu gượng khúc tranh

霜頂帳撩曾觸夢 Sương đỉnh trướng gieo từng giục mộng

月邊簾訴易痴情 Nguyệt bên rèm, tỏ dễ si tình

黃疏彩菊散曦淡 Vàng tha thướt, cúc tan hơi đạm

綠沸浮蘚度亮清 Lục phất phơ, rêu đọ rạng thanh

妝點礙針停軸錦 Trang điểm ngại chăm, dừng trục gấm

房蕭冷柳鎖春青 Phòng tiêu lạnh lẽo khóa xuân xanh.

from these reading we can see clearly the relations between those Sino- and Sinitic-Vietnamese words:

Các = Gác
Cẩm = Gấm
Cưỡng = Gượng
Liêm = Rèm, etc.

with this onset, we can apply the same patterns to other words:

Cận = Gần
Can = Gan
Cân = Gân
Cấp = Gấp
Cổn = Gợn
Các = Gác
Kê = Gà
Ký = Gửi
Kỵ = Ghét
Ký = Ghi
Tử = Chết
Tự = Chùa
Tự = Chữ (cái)
Thanh = Xanh
Vũ = Múa
Vũ = Mưa
Vân = Mây
Vạn = Muôn
Vọng = Mon
Võng = Mạng

and so on.

NOTE: Specifically with the examples above, in the comments regarding Chinese ~ Vietnamese cognates, with no exceptions Duc Tran seems to see only the Sinitic-Vietnamese sound changes in comparison with those of Sino-Vietnamese on one-to-one correspondence within the monosyllabic words even though he did mention about the correlation of those Vietnamese sounds to those of Mandarin sounds: "Cái lạ ở chỗ các ví dụ trên phần theo chiếu theo tiếng Bắc Kinh hay Pinyin đều theo một luồng phụ âm đầu nhất định." (That means "the interesting thing about the words in the example is that all consonantal initials as said in Beijing dialect or Pinyin follow a certain pattern of correspondent initials.") This is how it has been done by most of specialists in the Chinese-Vietnamese etymological fields.

APPENDIX D

The role of Vietnamese dissyllabism in exploring Vietnamese words of Chinese origin

New dissyllabic sound change approach

by dchph

Dec.8.2002 19:33 pm

Abbreviations:

SV: Sino-Vietnamese (HánViệt)
VS: Sinitic-Vietnamese (HánNôm)


Today's Vietnamese vocabulary stock consists of a great number of two-syllable or dissyllabic words. This characteristic of dissyllabism -- of language with dominant words composed of two syllables -- has become dominantly one of the main characteristics of present-time Vietnamese, including those two-syllable words built with two synonymous word-syllables. The same is true in modern Chinese synonymous dissyllabic words which have been coined the same way as model for those mirrored dissyllabic words of the same characteristics in Vietnamese. In fact, modern Vietnamese appears to show clearly that it is a language of dissyllabism in nature as found plentiful in this kind of composite words, that is, many of these words are comprised of two elements of word-syllable, which are almost synonymous with each other, e.g., tức|giận (mad/angry), trước|tiên (firstly/initially), cũ|kỹ (ancient/old), kề|cận (by/near)...

Why do all these matters have to do with the Vietnamese etymology? Close examination of the previously cited examples will reveal some sound change patterns that underline the etymology of those Vietnamese words that apparently have been alternations of Chinese dissyllabic equivalents. As disscussed above, the lexical and semantic approach can apply here. However, lexically, these composite words have different composition of which the two monosyllabic words that make up the dissyllabic words are variations of different Chinese word-syllables, for example,

tức|giận: (~ tứckhí) this dissyllabic word can be further broken into "tức" and "giận", two monosyllabic synonyms in Vietnamese, and so are in Chinese in its equivalents as qì 氣 and hèn 恨. However, a modern dissyllabic Chinese word shēngqì 生氣 is a much more plausible cognate to "tứcgiận", for which, interestingly enough, the Vietnamese word order is in reverse (this penomenon, to be explained later, is common in Vietnamese from Chinese dissyllabic words.)

trước|tiên : is cognate of shǒuqiān 首先 (SV: đầutiên), composed of "trước" (a Sinitic-Vietnamese sound of qian -- cf. Hainanese /tăi/) plus "tiên" (a Sino-Vietnamese sound for "qiān"). The concept-sound of "trước" has taken place of "đầu" in this case, that is to say, the "trước" has been associated with "đầu" shǒu 首 to form this dissyllabic word. This is called the sandhi process of association.

cũ|kỹ /kʊkei/: "kỹ" appears to be a reduplicate of "cũ", also a cognate with "jìu" 舊, a closer sound to "kỹ" than "cũ". The same composition and formation apply equally to
kề|cận /kekʌn/: is from "kàojìn" 靠近 (~ jièjìn 接近) which is also cognate of "gầngũi" and "gầnkề" , of which the syllabic-words of the the later two dissyllabic words are in reverse to fit into local speech habit.

Dissyllabism has beeen a later development in both Chinese and Vietnamese, however, "trước", "cũ", and "gần", as opposed to the Sino-Vietnamese "tiên", "cựu", and "cận", respectively, are old materials which point the same root for the same formation of those dissyllabic words with the same contextual denotation in both languages.

From there we can see why it is so Chinese about the Vietnamese language, both so intertwined with each other that sound change from one language to another must have occurred in the context of the characteristics that both languages share, in this case, the dissyllabic features of the two.

For the time being just take some of many sound change patterns at their face values, e.g., -ang > -at, -ong > aw, n- > d-, etc. even though sound changes do follow linguistic rules which will be explained later on. The main principle to bear in mind is that sound changes did occur in "phonological batches" or cluster of sounds as whole syllabic units such as -ương > -ang, -ong > -aw, -ang > -at, -at > an, etc., but not just phonemically n-, -at, -u-, -n-, -ng, etc., in a much later development As Chinese has become more and more disyllabic in nature at a later time, when its disyllabic words had changed into Vietnamese they also changed in dissyllabic clusters of sounds, in a whole entity of paired syllables, not singly as simple vowels into other vowels or an initial into another initial, or not even syllable by syllable on one-to-one correspondences.

Dissyllabic sound change patterns are an important point in the new approach used in this research of Vietnamese etymology of Chinese origin. The logic behind this argument is, in terms of historical evolution and linguistic characteristics, if Chinese has already been classified by the world's large universities' renown linguistic circles as a polysyllabic language, then Vietnamese should be considered as such, too. Only in this context can one be able to see how the sound changes have taken place and why dissyllabic words should have had the apprearance as we see them here in this paper. In other words, disyllabic words had carried along with their disyllabic characteristics when they transformed themselves in Vietnamese, so that is why with

"qì" 氣 we have "hơi" as in "qìchē" 氣車: "xehơi", "kiệt" and "xỉn" as in "xiăoqì" 小氣: "keokiệt" and "bủnxỉn", or "sáo" and "khứa" as in kèqì 客氣 (~kètào 客套): "kháchsáo" ~ "kháchkhứa"; however, with "shengqì" 生氣 we have "tứcgiận" (< giận\tức phonetically -- in reverse order - "iro") and "sheng" 生 by itself is "sống" (live).
Here are some other examples:


jiārén 家人: "ngườinhà" (in reverse order), but with rénjiā 人家, jiā becomes "ta" as in "ngườita", "cả" as in dàjiā 大家: "tấtcả", while by itself it is "nhà";
bāngmáng 幫忙: bênhvực, while "máng" 忙 has given rise to both "bận" and "mắc";
bāchăng 巴掌: "bạttai" ~ "bàntay";

As we can see, the magnitude of sound changes are multi-faceted and diverse when dissyllabic words are treated as the whole unit whereas the same portion that stands alone as a monosyllabic word would not affect the whole string of sounds of dissyllabic words, i.e., the sound changes for disyllabic words had happened without the constraints of those for monosyllabic words. If one still considers Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, then s/he will never fully appreciate the underlined notion of these hyphotheses which is used for a new dissyllabic approach of sound changes.

Once accepting this principle, one will never wonder why -ư corresponds to -a, -iê to -a, -au ~ -ông, -at ~ -an, -an ~ -ôt, -ai ~ ua, etc, and will not insist on -a- must be -ươ-, -ng must be -ng, or d- must be n- and so on in one-to-one relationship.

In fact, sound changes did happen within linguistic contraints, such as cultural factor as in "mẹ" ~ "mợ" or local speech habit as in "kháchkhứa". They migh also occurr following certain patterns and, of course, within a linguistic kinship boundary, e.g., English "cut" and Vietnamese "cắt" obviously are not cognates, but 隔 "gé" [kə2] and "cắt" is, given the the historical context of linguistic development of Vietnamese which has been going hand in hand with the evolution of the Chinese language, of which the vast vocabularies have penetrated into the Vietnamese language with various dialectal contacts at different times.

This new approach based on dissyllabism in studying Vietnamese of Chinese origin will be utilized in this research paper. By centering on the recognition of dissyllabic nature of the Vietnamse language, we will no longer look at sound change patterns as an isolate phonemic sound change event, but as a dynamic process that the whole sound string or cluster of sounds all have changed together independent of their monosyllabic word equivalents. This sound change patterns have occurred just like those of Latin polysyllabic roots that have given rise to many variations penetrating into the vocabulary stocks in the Indo-European languages.

Conventionally, therefore, in the aspect of romanized transcriptions, like their counterparts in Chinese, Vietnamese dissyllabic words in this paper shall be written in combining formation just as those of Mandarin are being transcribed in pinyin, such as

廢話 fèihuà ‘non-sense’ Vietnamese bahoa ~ baphải,
溫馨 wēnxīng ‘warm’ V ấmcúng,
開心 kāixīn ~ 高興 gāoxìng ’pleased’ V vuilòng .

In fact, what peculiar about words of dissyllabic formation is that sound changes from one sound to another is the dynamic phonological changes, having drastically veered away and been independent of the original sounds. We will examine this phenomenon at length to understand why sometimes they are all both phonologically and semantically distinct from what they originated from. The result of that will lay out foundation for the new dissyllabic approach and that will help us identify a vast majority of Vietnamese words having a Chinese origin.

Multiple sound changes of the same sole syllable in a dissyllabic word, however, at first sight, may help readers see sound change patterns that appear in its whole entirety instead of isolate syllables; however, at the same time, they may also cause confusion to the readers which leaves them with the impression that phonological variants given for the same Chinese monosyllabic root are ad hoc cases.

As to the dissyllabic characteristics of the examples cited above, while one may reconcile phonologically the sound change 費 fèi with ba, he will wonder how they can be connected semantically. Obviously this word has nothing to do with ba in the senses of ‘three" or "father...’ In fact, conceptually it renders phế 'waste' and bỏ ‘abandon’ connotations in Vietnamese. Individually the meaning of each syllable-word is not the same as that of the whole new dissyllabic word that makes the concept of "baphải" (non-sense). At the same time, the word ba- as well as -hoa individually does not mean anything lexically in Vietnamese as opposed to what we know etymologically of those two syllable-words in Chinese. Together as bound morphemes they to make what bahoa is as a unit. In this case, one plus one makes one, but not two -- one for one meaning. Structurally it is the same with baphải. In contrast to ba, however, it is easier to see why "fèi" has become "bỏ- "'unwanted, deserted’ as in

bỏphế 費除 fèichú, ‘eradicate',
bỏđi 費棄 fèiqì ‘abandon’,
đồbỏ 費物 fèwù ‘the unwanted’ (in reverse order),
bỏhoang 荒費 huāngfèi ‘deserted’ (in reverse order),

Like ba,bỏ is not necessarily always associated with 費 fèi. It is so because sound changes from Chinese to Vietnamese are manifold, especially from those of dissyllabic words. To gain more understanding of the idea that sound change is independent of etymological root -- originally of one-syllabe word or one Chinese character -- and influenced by both phonological and semantic association and dissimilation, let’s further compare some Vietnamese words derived from some of those Chinese dissyllables to result in Vietnamese homophones with bỏ

bãibỏ 排除 páichú ‘abolish’,
bỏphiếu 投票 tóupiào ‘to cast a ballot’,
bỏrơi 抛棄 pàoqì ‘abandon’ (~ bỏngõ)
bỏđi 離去 líqù ‘leave’ (~ rađi),
bỏqua 放過 fàngguò ‘let go’ (~bỏlỡ), alternation of 錯過 cuòguò, a doublet of 放過 ),
bỏmặc 不理 bùlǐ 'abandon',
bỏlỡ dịpmay 放過機會 fàngguò jihuì ‘let go an opportunity’ (~ bỏqua dịpmay),
bỏ tiền (vô túi) 放錢(進入口袋里) fàngqián (jìnrù kǒudài lǐ) put the money (into the pocket),
bỏtiền ra mua 花錢來買 huàqián lái măi: spend the money to buy,
bỏphí 白費 báifèi: to waste
bỏphiếu 投票 tóupiào: to vote

The sound change to bỏ in the above examples, including the innovations of other words, too, are due to different contextual settings. They involve not only phonological and semantic assimilation but also syntactical reshuttle through the reverse order of word structure as exemplified in đồbỏ and bỏhoang, which was undoubtedly a local development to fit syntactically into Vietnamese speakers’ speech habit.

Similarly, the fact that 話 huà phonetically evolves into hoa is acceptable, but in which way does it become phải ? The sound change rule /hw/ > /fw/ applies here as this phenomenon is very common in Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Fukienese as compared to Middle Chinese or Mandarin sounds. Moreover, in dissyllabic formation, /fwa/ can easily evolve into /fai/ while

話 huà in its original monosyllabic word evolved into lời ‘spoken word’ Sino-Vietnamese thoại (cf. correspondent patterns: 火 huǒ lửa, 夥 huǒ lũ).

For the same reasons,

快 kuài may become mau (also a loan graph for ‘happy’ Sinitic-Vietnamese vui ),
and it is not hard to understand why 點 diăn becomes -lên.

Of course, lên here has nothing to do with ‘ascend, get on’ and it is only a particle indicating a command, similar to ‘up’ in ‘hurry up’. Phonologically, it is easier to see [tjen] ~ [len]. Individually

點 [tjen] can also be tiếng ‘hour’, châm 'ignite', chấm ‘dot’ and 'dip', tí ‘a bit’, điểm, đếm 'count', etc.,

of which phonologically and semantically the different Vietnamese meanings match exactly what /tjen/ means in every definition of the word 點 diăn as defined in an ancient or modern Chinese dictionary. Let compare lên in other context:

lênđây 上來 shànglái ‘come up here’.
In this case, shàng corresponds to lên ‘ascend’, and -lái is a particle while -đây is assimilated to an adverb of direction in Vietnamese of the same sound (zhèi 這 in Chinese). Lastly,
溫 wēn can be ấm, but in which way that 馨 xīn becomes cúng? Of course, it is not the same as

cúng 供 gòng (SV cống) ‘make offerings to spirits’,
but a result of sound change, as 馨 xīn is also pronounced xīng, Sino-Vietnamese hinh, MC xieng <*hing, of which the velar x- becomes a labiovelar /k-/, /k'-/ as commonly occurred in Chinese. Let’s compare 慶 磬 罄 ..., all pronounced qìng and Sino-Vietnamese khánh, and consider its phonological variations as in
thơmlừng ~ thơmlựng 新香 xīnxiāng ‘fragrantly smell’.

The above examples demonstrate to us multifaceted sound changes from Chinese to Vietnamese, among which each of the above dissyllabic words is composed of bound morphemes, either or both of which can not be separated. It is a result of sound change of a dissyllabic word from which any syllable can give rise to a complete new sound that can be, by all means, different from the very same syllable if standing alone as a monosyllabic word. The new sound may or may not mean anything if separated from the compound form depending on the degree of its association with another word similar in sound or meaning. Let’s examine the syllable-word mau- in mauchóng 敏捷 mǐnjié ‘quickly’, which, in fact, a variation of 盡快 jìnkuài (> chóng + mau) and its colloquial variation as 馬上 măshàng.

In fact, Chinese dissyllabic words can become various sounds in Vietnamese, of which the order could be put in reverse order to fit into the local speech habit, and this will be discussed much more later on in different perspectives. In any cases, homophones and homonyms are plentiful in both Vietnamese and Chinese.

Regarding to the true nature of Vietnamese it has been wrongly regarded as monosyllabism (tínhđơnâmtiết 單音節性), or charateristics of a language based on its dominant one-syllable words, in its vocabulary, that is, Vietnamese is a language that is lexically, semantically and syntactically composed of one-syllable words. It might be true in ancient times, but certainly it is not so in modern Vietnamese. We can say that the misconception on these issues from the linguistic circle has misled specialists of Vietnamese to the point that has certainly hindered new break-through development in this field. For this reason, the result of this research is, hopefully, to correct the misconception about monosyllabism and to set out a new approach to explore areas of the Chinese origin of the Vietnamese language by way of this nouveau dissyllabic approach, departing from the old approach that is limited to only isolated monosyllabic and merely basic words. This Sinitic-Vietnamese study is also an attempt to establish kinship of both Chinese and Vietnamese with linguistic proofs in all comprehensive linguistic lexical aspects.

Indeed the two aspects of disyllabicism and Chinese origin are closely intertwined as much as the two languages themselves are to the point that studies in either language cannot satisfactorily be done without referring to the other. Karlgren (1915), Haudricourt (1954), Chang (1974) and Denlinger (1979), Pulleyblank (1984) and many others utilized Vietnamese when they studied Ancient Chinese phonology. Specialists of Vietnamese studies such as Haudricourt (1954), Lê (1967) and Ðào (1983) and some others also did the same by making use of Chinese dialects to shed light on etymology of Vietnamese words. They all see the affinity, whether genetic or not, between Chinese and Vietnamese, but until now nobody discovered that most of Vietnamese words are originated from Chinese since they have mostly based their research limited on monosyllabism, which has prevented them from seeing other variations in sound changes from the same monosyllabic roots.

In fact, the dissyllabic approach to find Vietnamese words of Chinese origin is based on the two new premises that, firstly, both modern Vietnamese and Chinese are dissyllabic languages, or of dissyllabism, that is, semantically each of the two languages as a whole is composed of a high percentage of two-syllable words. Once Chinese and Vietnamese basic words are found cognates, there maybe exists the kinship between the two languages since basic words were what a language originally had had to start with. As we will see, Vietnamese is closely affiliated with many ancient and modern Chinese dialects, literary as well as vernacular (to be called "Chinese" in general). This new approach has indeed enabled me to find a remarkable large number, about 20,000, of Vietnamese words of Chinese origin, many of which have been long regarded as Nôm words, or "pure" Vietnamese.

Again, this new dissyllabic approach is to treat each Chinese word, as it should be, since it is the correct way to deal with Chinese lexicography, as composed of one or more morphemes, or syllables, as represented by each Chinese character singly, regardless of its meanings associated with each individual morpheme whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic. In both Vietnamese and Chinese, a morpheme mostly coincides with a syllable, which is free to go with other syllables to form other words.

Sometimes, the syllabic combinations in Chinese may convey completely different meanings regardless of its written characters in Chinese and, consequently, in Vietnamese, for instance,

on the Chinese side,

măshàng 馬上: mauchóng 'quickly'
qímă 起碼: ítra 'at least'
piányì 便宜: bèo 'cheap'
dōngxī 東西: đồđạc 'things'
liáotiān 聊天: tròchuyện 'chat'
wúliáo 無聊: lạtlẽo (~ nhạtnhẽo) 'boring'
mòshēng 陌生: lạlùng 'strange'
huāshēng 花生: đậuphụng 'peanut' (Hai. /wundow/)
and here on the Vietnamese side,

mặnmà 舔蜜: tiánmì (~ mật\ngọt) 'tasty'
thathiết 體貼: tǐtiè 'heartily'
cẩuthả 苟且: kǒuqiě (~ ẩutả) 'carelessly'
vấtvả 奔波: bēnbó (~ tấttả) 'hand to mouth'
múarối 木偶戲: mùǒuxì 'pupetry'
trờinắng 太陽: tàiyáng 'sunshine'
bồihồi 徘徊: báihuái 'sadly'
chịuđựng 忍受: rěn\shòu 'endure'
bắtđền 賠償: péichăng 'ask for compensation' (~ bắtthường)

For those words on the Chinese side any linguist of Chinese knows that better than anybody else. In a Chinese dictionary, one can find characters or polysyllabic words which have multiple meanings and the Chinese graphs involved have nothing to do with the meanings they convey. In the case of Chinese evolving into Vietnamese scenario, those Vietnamese words carrying the same characteristics like those example as cited above are endless. It is no surprise to see that sometimes what has changed into Vietnamese is not exactly what it was originally in Chinese, for instance, the meaning of

起 qǐ among other things is ‘to rise’ (VS: dậy, hence
起義 qǐyì, VS: nổidậy ‘to rise against), but
起馬 qímă means ‘at least’ (VS: ítra),
興起 xìngqǐ ‘interested’ (VS: hứngchí and mừngrỡ) and
起頭 qǐtóu ‘start’ (VS: bắtđầu).

Other examples such as

孝順 xiàoshùn ‘filial piety’ (VS: hiếuthảo),
順利 shùnlì ‘smoothly’ (VS: suôngsẻ and trótlọt),
順風shùnfēng ‘favorable wind’ (VS:xuôigió and thuậngió),
順手 shùnshǒu ‘conveniently’ (VS: thuậntay, sẵntay and luônthể),
順便 shùnbiàn ‘conveniently’ (VS: luôntiện and sẵntiện).

The word-morphemes 起 and 順 are in bound form and have evolved into different sounds, meanings and words in Vietnamese. The morphemes ‘qǐ’ and ‘shùn’ are innumerable in the Chinese language. By actively persuing this avenue in search for words of Chinese origin, we will find that almost all the Vietnamese words have a Chinese origin!

As we have seen through all the illustrations in this paper, the misconception of dissyllabism of Vietnamese and Chinese have prevented specialists in the field of Vietnamese etymology from seeing that sound changes of individual syllables in dissyllabic formation are independent from its original monosyllabic equivalents. Regarding dissyllabism, in ancient times, both Vietnamese and Chinese might have been monosyllabic. It is easier to confirm that monosyllabic characteristics of Chinese based on literary works of more than two thousand years ago than to do so with that of Vietnamese where its oldest ones are only dated as far as ten centuries ago. However, basic words that both languages seem to share in common seem to point to the direction of monosyllabism.

In any case, in modern Vietnamese, as one can find in any Vietnamese dictionary thousands of dissyllabic and a few polysyllabic words even though they are written in separated syllables. In the past, many experts of Vietnamese insist on its monosyllabic characteristics as represented by Barker (1966, p. 10): “With the exception of certain compounds, reduplicative patterns, and loan words, Vietnamese and Muong are both monosyllabic languages.” If we take his saying to apply to the English language in certain aspects, it is also a monosyllabic language! Also, this statemenent just makes him look like that is all he knows about the Vietnamese language. Some Vietnamese linguist might have "worshipped" him, more or less, just simply because he was a western linguist who know something about Vietnamese. When he said “certain compounds, reduplicated patterns, and loan words”, anyone who is unfamiliar with the language may feel that there are only a small number of such words exist in Vietnamese. In reality, almost a whole vocabulary stock of Vietnamese are structured in such a way as we can see in any Vietnamese dictionary. In other words, his statement can be used to disqualify him as a specialist of Vietnamese. Ironically, many Vietnamese linguists in the field tend to worship those westerners who know something about Vietnamese to say something about it!

It is true that many of those dissyllabic words in Vietnamese can be analyzed into a combination of monosyllables which can be used independently and attach to other syllables to form other counpounds. Nevertheless, a great number of those words are composed of two or more syllables, or morphemes as to be considered in this case, that cannot be separated into single syllables to be used as independent words. One of the good examples is the most basic Vietnamese words about human body parts, which must have been originated from ancient time, such as cùichỏ ’elbow’, đầugối ‘knee’, mắccá ‘ankle’, màngtang ‘temple’, mỏác ‘fontanel’, chânmày ‘eyebrow’, etc. All of these are dissyllabic words since syllables of each word are unbreakable like their English counterparts. In this respect, the only difference is, like its sister Chinese language, each morpheme in its free form as a complete syllable can mean something else. For example, đầu also means ‘head’ and gối means ‘to lean against’. Other examples of a great number of dissyllabic words are in different areas such as càunhàu ‘growl’, cằnnhằn ‘grumble’, ‘bângkhuâng ‘pensive’, bồihồi ‘melancholy’, bùingùi ‘sorrowful’, mồhôi 'sweat', mồcôi; ‘orphan’, bằnglòng 'agree', taitiếng; ‘notorious’, tạmbợ; ‘temporary’, tráchmóc ‘reproach’, or Sino-Vietnamese words hiệndiện ‘presence’, phụnữ ‘woman’, sơnhà ‘fatherland’, and polysyllabic words such as mêtítthòlò; ‘irresistable’, húhồnhúvía ‘Oh my Lord!’, bađồngbảyđổi; ‘unpredictably’, hằnghàsasố; ‘innumerable’, lộntùngphèo; ‘upside down’, tuyệtcúmèo ‘wonderful’. (Read more detail of this discussion in Sửađổi Cáchviết ChữViệt) If those words are written in combining formation instead of being singly written in separate syllables, they certainly will give foreign learners of Vietnamese a different impression, including Barker hemself.

For the matter of polysyllabism, in the past renown vietnamese linguists such as Bùi Ðức Tịnh (1966, p.82) who had sided with Hồ Hữu Tường when he criticized and defied ideas that Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. Both of them treated Vietnamese as a dissyllabic language. In Vietnamese, the only fact that a high percentage of Sino-Vietnamese words (just like words having roots from Latin and Greek in the English language) as quoted above being used in today’s Vietnamese sufficiently constitutes the dissyllabic nature of the Vietnamese language, let alone other polysyllabic words of different categories. Many of those loanwords are unbreakable. The Koreans and Japanese have long recognized this matter and they always, scientifically, write Chinese loan words in “group”! Unfortunately, in today’s writing system of the Vietnamese language each of such dissyllabic words is still broken into two syllables where each of which when standing alone may not be related to the original meanings and may not mean anything at all!

Exactly the same thing can be said about the dissyllabic characteristics of the Chinese language. Any Chinese dialect nowadays is also a dissyllabic language. Regarding to this issue, Chou (1982, p.106) quoted others in his article:

Following Kennedy and de Francis, Eugene Chin said: ”If we admit that words, not morphemes, are the construction material of Chinese, we cannot but admit that Chinese is polysyllabic. If we may use the majority rule here, we will have no trouble establishing the fact that Chinese is dissyllabic.”

From this premise, given the fact that Vietnamese and Chinese are dissyllabic, we can trace each dissyllabic word in both Vietnamese and Chinese and he will find that, phonologically, a dissyllabic Chinese word can also become quite a few different words in Vietnamese. For instance, one Chinese word 三八 sānbā (Sino-Vietnamese: tambát), meaning “nonsense”, might have already evolved into tầmphào, tầmbậy, tầmbạ, bảláp, bảxàm, basạo, xàbát, xằngbậy... in Vietnamese.

As to the sound change from Chinese into Vietnamese words, those linguists, who started with the premise that Chinese and Vietnamese are both monosyllabic languages, try to look for only one related Vietnamese equivalent to one Chinese character, equally a monosyllabic word, and, in most of the cases, they seem to associate only one word of Chinese origin to the one that is in the Vietnamese language. That is, plagued with the old approach they sought the etymology of Vietnamese words by investigating and confining themselves to only isolated monosyllables to find their corresponding Chinese cognates.

Once and for all, let's face it, since both languages are dissyllabic languages consisting mainly of two-syllable words, the linguistic rules of sound changes from Chinese dissyllabic words into Vietnamese ones are just like those of other polysyllabic languages. For instance, in Indo-European languages polysyllabic words of the same root when changing into another language at least one of the syllables may not strictly follow the same phonological pattern in all languages, such as Latin gelatan > French gelée or variations of the word “police”: politi, polizei, policia, polizia, polite, polis, polisi, "phúlít" (old VS from French).

What does this rule have to do with Vietnamese words of Chinese origin? In the Chinese > Vietnamese scenario, though one Chinese character (coinciding with a syllable and a word) when changing into Vietnamese, theoretically, only one equivalent sound (word) exists, but, in reality, in many a case there are more than one Vietnamese sound for each Chinese character, for example,

元 yuán SV nguyên, ngươn , VS (tháng)giêng,
度 dù SV độ, VS đo, đạc,
粉 fén SV phấn, VS bún, bột, phở,
拜 bài SV bái, VSvái, lạy,
etc., or in compounds:

場 chăng SV trường, tràng, but in Vietnamese there are several sounds:
劇場 jùchăng (SV: kịchtrường) sânkhấu 'stage',
式場 shìchăng (SV: thítrường) trườngthi 'examination site',
戰場 zhànchăng (SV: chiếntrường) chiếntrận , hence, trậnchiến 'battle' (note: word order is in reverse in all three cases above),
一場夢 yì chăng mèng (SV:nhất trườngmộng) một giấc/cơn mơ/mộng 'dream',
一場病yì chăng bìng (SV:nhất trườngbệnh) một trận/cơnbệnh 'illness',
一場戲 yì chăng xì (SV: nhất trường hí) một xuấthát 'a show',
一場空 yì chăng kong (SV: nhất trườngkhông) một khoảngtrống 'nothingness, nada',
在場 zàichăng (SV: tạitrường) tạichỗ ~ tạitrận 'on spot, red-handed', etc.

The sandhi process of association has occurred not only in syllables where neighboring sounds with similar syllable-word and meanings can be assimilated, which might have already taken place before they were introduced to Vietnamese as in the above cases where zhèn 陣 (trận) or chù 黜 (xuất) had been associated with chăng å

- Ngườihiệuđính: dchph vào ngày Mar.16.2003, 19:54 pm

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APPENDIX M

The role of Vietnamese disyllabism in exploring Vietnamese words of Chinese origin
A new disyllabic sound change approach to be explored

by dchph

 Dec.8.2002 19:33 pm

Abbreviations:

SV: Sino-Vietnamese (HánViệt)
VS: Sinitic-Vietnamese (HánNôm)


Today's Vietnamese vocabulary stock consists of a great number of two-syllable or dissyllabic words. This characteristic of dissyllabism -- of language with dominant words composed of two syllables -- has become dominantly one of the main characteristics of present-time Vietnamese, including those two-syllable words built with two synonymous word-syllables. The same is true in modern Chinese synonymous dissyllabic words which have been coined the same way as model for those mirrored dissyllabic words of the same characteristics in Vietnamese. In fact, modern Vietnamese appears to show clearly that it is a language of dissyllabism in nature as found plentiful in this kind of composite words, that is, many of these words are comprised of two elements of word-syllable, which are almost synonymous with each other, e.g., tức|giận (mad/angry), trước|tiên (firstly/initially), cũ|kỹ (ancient/old), kề|cận (by/near)...

Why do all these matters have to do with the Vietnamese etymology? Close examination of the previously cited examples will reveal some sound change patterns that underline the etymology of those Vietnamese words that apparently have been alternations of Chinese dissyllabic equivalents. As disscussed above, the lexical and semantic approach can apply here. However, lexically, these composite words have different composition of which the two monosyllabic words that make up the dissyllabic words are variations of different Chinese word-syllables, for example,

tức|giận: (~ tứckhí) this dissyllabic word can be further broken into "tức" and "giận", two monosyllabic synonyms in Vietnamese, and so are in Chinese in its equivalents as qì 氣 and hèn 恨. However, a modern dissyllabic Chinese word shēngqì 生氣 is a much more plausible cognate to "tứcgiận", for which, interestingly enough, the Vietnamese word order is in reverse (this phenomenon, to be explained later, is common in Vietnamese from Chinese dissyllabic words.)

trước|tiên : is cognate of shǒuqiān 首先 (SV: đầutiên), composed of "trước" (a Sinitic-Vietnamese sound of qian -- cf. Hainanese /tăi/) plus "tiên" (a Sino-Vietnamese sound for "qiān"). The concept-sound of "trước" has taken place of "đầu" in this case, that is to say, the "trước" has been associated with "đầu" shǒu 首 to form this dissyllabic word. This is called the sandhi process of association.

cũ|kỹ /kʊkei/: "kỹ" appears to be a reduplicate of "cũ", also a cognate with "jìu" 舊, a closer sound to "kỹ" than "cũ". The same composition and formation apply equally to
kề|cận /kekʌn/: is from "kàojìn" 靠近 (~ jièjìn 接近) which is also cognate of "gầngũi" and "gầnkề" , of which the syllabic-words of the the later two dissyllabic words are in reverse to fit into local speech habit.

Dissyllabism has been a later development in both Chinese and Vietnamese, however, "trước", "cũ", and "gần", as opposed to the Sino-Vietnamese "tiên", "cựu", and "cận", respectively, are old materials which point the same root for the same formation of those dissyllabic words with the same contextual denotation in both languages.

From there we can see why it is so Chinese about the Vietnamese language, both so intertwined with each other that sound change from one language to another must have occurred in the context of the characteristics that both languages share, in this case, the dissyllabic features of the two.

For the time being just take some of many sound change patterns at their face values, e.g., -ang > -at, -ong > aw, n- > d-, etc. even though sound changes do follow linguistic rules which will be explained later on. The main principle to bear in mind is that sound changes did occur in "phonological batches" or cluster of sounds as whole syllabic units such as -ương > -ang, -ong > -aw, -ang > -at, -at > an, etc., but not just phonemically n-, -at, -u-, -n-, -ng, etc., in a much later development As Chinese has become more and more disyllabic in nature at a later time, when its disyllabic words had changed into Vietnamese they also changed in dissyllabic clusters of sounds, in a whole entity of paired syllables, not singly as simple vowels into other vowels or an initial into another initial, or not even syllable by syllable on one-to-one correspondences.

Dissyllabic sound change patterns are an important point in the new approach used in this research of Vietnamese etymology of Chinese origin. The logic behind this argument is, in terms of historical evolution and linguistic characteristics, if Chinese has already been classified by the world's large universities' renown linguistic circles as a polysyllabic language, then Vietnamese should be considered as such, too. Only in this context can one be able to see how the sound changes have taken place and why dissyllabic words should have had the appearance as we see them here in this paper. In other words, disyllabic words had carried along with their disyllabic characteristics when they transformed themselves in Vietnamese, so that is why with

"qì" 氣 we have "hơi" as in "qìchē" 氣車: "xehơi", "kiệt" and "xỉn" as in "xiăoqì" 小氣: "keokiệt" and "bủnxỉn", or "sáo" and "khứa" as in kèqì 客氣 (~kètào 客套): "kháchsáo" ~ "kháchkhứa"; however, with "shengqì" 生氣 we have "tứcgiận" (< giận\tức phonetically -- in reverse order - "iro") and "sheng" 生 by itself is "sống" (live).
Here are some other examples:


jiārén 家人: "ngườinhà" (in reverse order), but with rénjiā 人家, jiā becomes "ta" as in "ngườita", "cả" as in dàjiā 大家: "tấtcả", while by itself it is "nhà";
bāngmáng 幫忙: bênhvực, while "máng" 忙 has given rise to both "bận" and "mắc";
bāchăng 巴掌: "bạttai" ~ "bàntay";

As we can see, the magnitude of sound changes are multi-faceted and diverse when dissyllabic words are treated as the whole unit whereas the same portion that stands alone as a monosyllabic word would not affect the whole string of sounds of dissyllabic words, i.e., the sound changes for disyllabic words had happened without the constraints of those for monosyllabic words. If one still considers Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language, then s/he will never fully appreciate the underlined notion of these hypotheses which is used for a new dissyllabic approach of sound changes.

Once accepting this principle, one will never wonder why -ư corresponds to -a, -iê to -a, -au ~ -ông, -at ~ -an, -an ~ -ôt, -ai ~ ua, etc, and will not insist on -a- must be -ươ-, -ng must be -ng, or d- must be n- and so on in one-to-one relationship.

In fact, sound changes did happen within linguistic constraints, such as cultural factor as in "mẹ" ~ "mợ" or local speech habit as in "kháchkhứa". They might also occur following certain patterns and, of course, within a linguistic kinship boundary, e.g., English "cut" and Vietnamese "cắt" obviously are not cognates, but 隔 "gé" [kə2] and "cắt" is, given the the historical context of linguistic development of Vietnamese which has been going hand in hand with the evolution of the Chinese language, of which the vast vocabularies have penetrated into the Vietnamese language with various dialectal contacts at different times.

This new approach based on dissyllabism in studying Vietnamese of Chinese origin will be utilized in this research paper. By centering on the recognition of dissyllabic nature of the Vietnamese language, we will no longer look at sound change patterns as an isolate phonemic sound change event, but as a dynamic process that the whole sound string or cluster of sounds all have changed together independent of their monosyllabic word equivalents. This sound change patterns have occurred just like those of Latin polysyllabic roots that have given rise to many variations penetrating into the vocabulary stocks in the Indo-European languages.

Conventionally, therefore, in the aspect of romanized transcriptions, like their counterparts in Chinese, Vietnamese dissyllabic words in this paper shall be written in combining formation just as those of Mandarin are being transcribed in pinyin, such as

廢話 fèihuà ‘non-sense’ Vietnamese bahoa ~ baphải,
溫馨 wēnxīng ‘warm’ V ấmcúng,
開心 kāixīn ~ 高興 gāoxìng ’pleased’ V vuilòng .

In fact, what peculiar about words of dissyllabic formation is that sound changes from one sound to another is the dynamic phonological changes, having drastically veered away and been independent of the original sounds. We will examine this phenomenon at length to understand why sometimes they are all both phonologically and semantically distinct from what they originated from. The result of that will lay out foundation for the new dissyllabic approach and that will help us identify a vast majority of Vietnamese words having a Chinese origin.

Multiple sound changes of the same sole syllable in a dissyllabic word, however, at first sight, may help readers see sound change patterns that appear in its whole entirety instead of isolate syllables; however, at the same time, they may also cause confusion to the readers which leaves them with the impression that phonological variants given for the same Chinese monosyllabic root are ad hoc cases.

As to the dissyllabic characteristics of the examples cited above, while one may reconcile phonologically the sound change 費 fèi with ba, he will wonder how they can be connected semantically. Obviously this word has nothing to do with ba in the senses of ‘three" or "father...’ In fact, conceptually it renders phế 'waste' and bỏ ‘abandon’ connotations in Vietnamese. Individually the meaning of each syllable-word is not the same as that of the whole new dissyllabic word that makes the concept of "baphải" (non-sense). At the same time, the word ba- as well as -hoa individually does not mean anything lexically in Vietnamese as opposed to what we know etymologically of those two syllable-words in Chinese. Together as bound morphemes they to make what bahoa is as a unit. In this case, one plus one makes one, but not two -- one for one meaning. Structurally it is the same with baphải. In contrast to ba, however, it is easier to see why "fèi" has become "bỏ- "'unwanted, deserted’ as in

bỏphế 費除 fèichú, ‘eradicate',
bỏđi 費棄 fèiqì ‘abandon’,
đồbỏ 費物 fèwù ‘the unwanted’ (in reverse order),
bỏhoang 荒費 huāngfèi ‘deserted’ (in reverse order),

Like ba, bỏ is not necessarily always associated with 費 fèi. It is so because sound changes from Chinese to Vietnamese are manifold, especially from those of dissyllabic words. To gain more understanding of the idea that sound change is independent of etymological root -- originally of one-syllable word or one Chinese character -- and influenced by both phonological and semantic association and dissimilation, let’s further compare some Vietnamese words derived from some of those Chinese dissyllables to result in Vietnamese homophones with bỏ

bãibỏ 排除 páichú ‘abolish’,
bỏphiếu 投票 tóupiào ‘to cast a ballot’,
bỏrơi 抛棄 pàoqì ‘abandon’ (~ bỏngõ)
bỏđi 離去 líqù ‘leave’ (~ rađi),
bỏqua 放過 fàngguò ‘let go’ (~bỏlỡ), alternation of 錯過 cuòguò, a doublet of 放過 ),
bỏmặc 不理 bùlǐ 'abandon',
bỏlỡ dịpmay 放過機會 fàngguò jihuì ‘let go an opportunity’ (~ bỏqua dịpmay),
bỏ tiền (vô túi) 放錢(進入口袋里) fàngqián (jìnrù kǒudài lǐ) put the money (into the pocket),
bỏtiền ra mua 花錢來買 huàqián lái măi: spend the money to buy,
bỏphí 白費 báifèi: to waste
bỏphiếu 投票 tóupiào: to vote

The sound change to bỏ in the above examples, including the innovations of other words, too, are due to different contextual settings. They involve not only phonological and semantic assimilation but also syntactical re-shuttle through the reverse order of word structure as exemplified in đồbỏ and bỏhoang, which was undoubtedly a local development to fit syntactically into Vietnamese speakers’ speech habit.

Similarly, the fact that 話 huà phonetically evolves into hoa is acceptable, but in which way does it become phải ? The sound change rule /hw/ > /fw/ applies here as this phenomenon is very common in Chinese dialects such as Cantonese and Fukienese as compared to Middle Chinese or Mandarin sounds. Moreover, in dissyllabic formation, /fwa/ can easily evolve into /fai/ while

話 huà in its original monosyllabic word evolved into lời ‘spoken word’ Sino-Vietnamese thoại (cf. correspondent patterns: 火 huǒ lửa, 夥 huǒ lũ).

For the same reasons,

快 kuài may become mau (also a loan graph for ‘happy’ Sinitic-Vietnamese vui ),
and it is not hard to understand why 點 diăn becomes -lên.

Of course, lên here has nothing to do with ‘ascend, get on’ and it is only a particle indicating a command, similar to ‘up’ in ‘hurry up’. Phonologically, it is easier to see [tjen] ~ [len]. Individually

點 [tjen] can also be tiếng ‘hour’, châm 'ignite', chấm ‘dot’ and 'dip', tí ‘a bit’, điểm, đếm 'count', etc.,

of which phonologically and semantically the different Vietnamese meanings match exactly what /tjen/ means in every definition of the word 點 diăn as defined in an ancient or modern Chinese dictionary. Let compare lên in other context:

lênđây 上來 shànglái ‘come up here’.
In this case, shàng corresponds to lên ‘ascend’, and -lái is a particle while -đây is assimilated to an adverb of direction in Vietnamese of the same sound (zhèi 這 in Chinese). Lastly,
溫 wēn can be ấm, but in which way that 馨 xīn becomes cúng? Of course, it is not the same as

cúng 供 gòng (SV cống) ‘make offerings to spirits’,
but a result of sound change, as 馨 xīn is also pronounced xīng, Sino-Vietnamese hinh, MC xieng <*hing, of which the velar x- becomes a labiovelar /k-/, /k'-/ as commonly occurred in Chinese. Let’s compare 慶 磬 罄 ..., all pronounced qìng and Sino-Vietnamese khánh, and consider its phonological variations as in
thơmlừng ~ thơmlựng 新香 xīnxiāng ‘fragrantly smell’.

The above examples demonstrate to us multifaceted sound changes from Chinese to Vietnamese, among which each of the above dissyllabic words is composed of bound morphemes, either or both of which can not be separated. It is a result of sound change of a dissyllabic word from which any syllable can give rise to a complete new sound that can be, by all means, different from the very same syllable if standing alone as a monosyllabic word. The new sound may or may not mean anything if separated from the compound form depending on the degree of its association with another word similar in sound or meaning. Let’s examine the syllable-word mau- in mauchóng 敏捷 mǐnjié ‘quickly’, which, in fact, a variation of 盡快 jìnkuài (> chóng + mau) and its colloquial variation as 馬上 măshàng.

In fact, Chinese dissyllabic words can become various sounds in Vietnamese, of which the order could be put in reverse order to fit into the local speech habit, and this will be discussed much more later on in different perspectives. In any cases, homophones and homonyms are plentiful in both Vietnamese and Chinese.

Regarding to the true nature of Vietnamese it has been wrongly regarded as monosyllabism (tínhđơnâmtiết 單音節性), or charateristics of a language based on its dominant one-syllable words, in its vocabulary, that is, Vietnamese is a language that is lexically, semantically and syntactically composed of one-syllable words. It might be true in ancient times, but certainly it is not so in modern Vietnamese. We can say that the misconception on these issues from the linguistic circle has misled specialists of Vietnamese to the point that has certainly hindered new break-through development in this field. For this reason, the result of this research is, hopefully, to correct the misconception about monosyllabism and to set out a new approach to explore areas of the Chinese origin of the Vietnamese language by way of this nouveau dissyllabic approach, departing from the old approach that is limited to only isolated monosyllabic and merely basic words. This Sinitic-Vietnamese study is also an attempt to establish kinship of both Chinese and Vietnamese with linguistic proofs in all comprehensive linguistic lexical aspects.

Indeed the two aspects of disyllabicism and Chinese origin are closely intertwined as much as the two languages themselves are to the point that studies in either language cannot satisfactorily be done without referring to the other. Karlgren (1915), Haudricourt (1954), Chang (1974) and Denlinger (1979), Pulleyblank (1984) and many others utilized Vietnamese when they studied Ancient Chinese phonology. Specialists of Vietnamese studies such as Haudricourt (1954), Lê (1967) and Ðào (1983) and some others also did the same by making use of Chinese dialects to shed light on etymology of Vietnamese words. They all see the affinity, whether genetic or not, between Chinese and Vietnamese, but until now nobody discovered that most of Vietnamese words are originated from Chinese since they have mostly based their research limited on monosyllabism, which has prevented them from seeing other variations in sound changes from the same monosyllabic roots.

In fact, the dissyllabic approach to find Vietnamese words of Chinese origin is based on the two new premises that, firstly, both modern Vietnamese and Chinese are dissyllabic languages, or of dissyllabism, that is, semantically each of the two languages as a whole is composed of a high percentage of two-syllable words. Once Chinese and Vietnamese basic words are found cognates, there maybe exists the kinship between the two languages since basic words were what a language originally had had to start with. As we will see, Vietnamese is closely affiliated with many ancient and modern Chinese dialects, literary as well as vernacular (to be called "Chinese" in general). This new approach has indeed enabled me to find a remarkable large number, about 20,000, of Vietnamese words of Chinese origin, many of which have been long regarded as Nôm words, or "pure" Vietnamese.

Again, this new dissyllabic approach is to treat each Chinese word, as it should be, since it is the correct way to deal with Chinese lexicography, as composed of one or more morphemes, or syllables, as represented by each Chinese character singly, regardless of its meanings associated with each individual morpheme whether it is monosyllabic or polysyllabic. In both Vietnamese and Chinese, a morpheme mostly coincides with a syllable, which is free to go with other syllables to form other words.

Sometimes, the syllabic combinations in Chinese may convey completely different meanings regardless of its written characters in Chinese and, consequently, in Vietnamese, for instance,

on the Chinese side,

măshàng 馬上: mauchóng 'quickly'
qímă 起碼: ítra 'at least'
piányì 便宜: bèo 'cheap'
dōngxī 東西: đồđạc 'things'
liáotiān 聊天: tròchuyện 'chat'
wúliáo 無聊: lạtlẽo (~ nhạtnhẽo) 'boring'
mòshēng 陌生: lạlùng 'strange'
huāshēng 花生: đậuphụng 'peanut' (Hai. /wundow/)
and here on the Vietnamese side,

mặnmà 舔蜜: tiánmì (~ mật\ngọt) 'tasty'
thathiết 體貼: tǐtiè 'heartily'
cẩuthả 苟且: kǒuqiě (~ ẩutả) 'carelessly'
vấtvả 奔波: bēnbó (~ tấttả) 'hand to mouth'
múarối 木偶戲: mùǒuxì 'pupetry'
trờinắng 太陽: tàiyáng 'sunshine'
bồihồi 徘徊: báihuái 'sadly'
chịuđựng 忍受: rěn\shòu 'endure'
bắtđền 賠償: péichăng 'ask for compensation' (~ bắtthường)

For those words on the Chinese side any linguist of Chinese knows that better than anybody else. In a Chinese dictionary, one can find characters or polysyllabic words which have multiple meanings and the Chinese graphs involved have nothing to do with the meanings they convey. In the case of Chinese evolving into Vietnamese scenario, those Vietnamese words carrying the same characteristics like those example as cited above are endless. It is no surprise to see that sometimes what has changed into Vietnamese is not exactly what it was originally in Chinese, for instance, the meaning of

起 qǐ among other things is ‘to rise’ (VS: dậy, hence
起義 qǐyì, VS: nổidậy ‘to rise against), but
起馬 qímă means ‘at least’ (VS: ítra),
興起 xìngqǐ ‘interested’ (VS: hứngchí and mừngrỡ) and
起頭 qǐtóu ‘start’ (VS: bắtđầu).

Other examples such as

孝順 xiàoshùn ‘filial piety’ (VS: hiếuthảo),
順利 shùnlì ‘smoothly’ (VS: suôngsẻ and trótlọt),
順風shùnfēng ‘favorable wind’ (VS:xuôigió and thuậngió),
順手 shùnshǒu ‘conveniently’ (VS: thuậntay, sẵntay and luônthể),
順便 shùnbiàn ‘conveniently’ (VS: luôntiện and sẵntiện).

The word-morphemes 起 and 順 are in bound form and have evolved into different sounds, meanings and words in Vietnamese. The morphemes ‘qǐ’ and ‘shùn’ are innumerable in the Chinese language. By actively persuing this avenue in search for words of Chinese origin, we will find that almost all the Vietnamese words have a Chinese origin!

As we have seen through all the illustrations in this paper, the misconception of dissyllabism of Vietnamese and Chinese have prevented specialists in the field of Vietnamese etymology from seeing that sound changes of individual syllables in dissyllabic formation are independent from its original monosyllabic equivalents. Regarding dissyllabism, in ancient times, both Vietnamese and Chinese might have been monosyllabic. It is easier to confirm that monosyllabic characteristics of Chinese based on literary works of more than two thousand years ago than to do so with that of Vietnamese where its oldest ones are only dated as far as ten centuries ago. However, basic words that both languages seem to share in common seem to point to the direction of monosyllabism.

In any case, in modern Vietnamese, as one can find in any Vietnamese dictionary thousands of dissyllabic and a few polysyllabic words even though they are written in separated syllables. In the past, many experts of Vietnamese insist on its monosyllabic characteristics as represented by Barker (1966, p. 10): “With the exception of certain compounds, reduplicative patterns, and loan words, Vietnamese and Muong are both monosyllabic languages.” If we take his saying to apply to the English language in certain aspects, it is also a monosyllabic language! Also, this statemenent just makes him look like that is all he knows about the Vietnamese language. Some Vietnamese linguist might have "worshipped" him, more or less, just simply because he was a western linguist who know something about Vietnamese. When he said “certain compounds, reduplicated patterns, and loan words”, anyone who is unfamiliar with the language may feel that there are only a small number of such words exist in Vietnamese. In reality, almost a whole vocabulary stock of Vietnamese are structured in such a way as we can see in any Vietnamese dictionary. In other words, his statement can be used to disqualify him as a specialist of Vietnamese. Ironically, many Vietnamese linguists in the field tend to worship those westerners who know something about Vietnamese to say something about it!

It is true that many of those dissyllabic words in Vietnamese can be analyzed into a combination of monosyllables which can be used independently and attach to other syllables to form other counpounds. Nevertheless, a great number of those words are composed of two or more syllables, or morphemes as to be considered in this case, that cannot be separated into single syllables to be used as independent words. One of the good examples is the most basic Vietnamese words about human body parts, which must have been originated from ancient time, such as cùichỏ ’elbow’, đầugối ‘knee’, mắccá ‘ankle’, màngtang ‘temple’, mỏác ‘fontanel’, chânmày ‘eyebrow’, etc. All of these are dissyllabic words since syllables of each word are unbreakable like their English counterparts. In this respect, the only difference is, like its sister Chinese language, each morpheme in its free form as a complete syllable can mean something else. For example, đầu also means ‘head’ and gối means ‘to lean against’. Other examples of a great number of dissyllabic words are in different areas such as càunhàu ‘growl’, cằnnhằn ‘grumble’, ‘bângkhuâng ‘pensive’, bồihồi ‘melancholy’, bùingùi ‘sorrowful’, mồhôi 'sweat', mồcôi; ‘orphan’, bằnglòng 'agree', taitiếng; ‘notorious’, tạmbợ; ‘temporary’, tráchmóc ‘reproach’, or Sino-Vietnamese words hiệndiện ‘presence’, phụnữ ‘woman’, sơnhà ‘fatherland’, and polysyllabic words such as mêtítthòlò; ‘irresistable’, húhồnhúvía ‘Oh my Lord!’, bađồngbảyđổi; ‘unpredictably’, hằnghàsasố; ‘innumerable’, lộntùngphèo; ‘upside down’, tuyệtcúmèo ‘wonderful’. (Read more detail of this discussion in Sửađổi Cáchviết ChữViệt) If those words are written in combining formation instead of being singly written in separate syllables, they certainly will give foreign learners of Vietnamese a different impression, including Barker hemself.

For the matter of polysyllabism, in the past renown vietnamese linguists such as Bùi Ðức Tịnh (1966, p.82) who had sided with Hồ Hữu Tường when he criticized and defied ideas that Vietnamese is a monosyllabic language. Both of them treated Vietnamese as a dissyllabic language. In Vietnamese, the only fact that a high percentage of Sino-Vietnamese words (just like words having roots from Latin and Greek in the English language) as quoted above being used in today’s Vietnamese sufficiently constitutes the dissyllabic nature of the Vietnamese language, let alone other polysyllabic words of different categories. Many of those loanwords are unbreakable. The Koreans and Japanese have long recognized this matter and they always, scientifically, write Chinese loan words in “group”! Unfortunately, in today’s writing system of the Vietnamese language each of such dissyllabic words is still broken into two syllables where each of which when standing alone may not be related to the original meanings and may not mean anything at all!

Exactly the same thing can be said about the dissyllabic characteristics of the Chinese language. Any Chinese dialect nowadays is also a dissyllabic language. Regarding to this issue, Chou (1982, p.106) quoted others in his article:

Following Kennedy and de Francis, Eugene Chin said: ”If we admit that words, not morphemes, are the construction material of Chinese, we cannot but admit that Chinese is polysyllabic. If we may use the majority rule here, we will have no trouble establishing the fact that Chinese is dissyllabic.”

From this premise, given the fact that Vietnamese and Chinese are dissyllabic, we can trace each dissyllabic word in both Vietnamese and Chinese and he will find that, phonologically, a dissyllabic Chinese word can also become quite a few different words in Vietnamese. For instance, one Chinese word 三八 sānbā (Sino-Vietnamese: tambát), meaning “nonsense”, might have already evolved into tầmphào, tầmbậy, tầmbạ, bảláp, bảxàm, basạo, xàbát, xằngbậy... in Vietnamese.

As to the sound change from Chinese into Vietnamese words, those linguists, who started with the premise that Chinese and Vietnamese are both monosyllabic languages, try to look for only one related Vietnamese equivalent to one Chinese character, equally a monosyllabic word, and, in most of the cases, they seem to associate only one word of Chinese origin to the one that is in the Vietnamese language. That is, plagued with the old approach they sought the etymology of Vietnamese words by investigating and confining themselves to only isolated monosyllables to find their corresponding Chinese cognates.

Once and for all, let's face it, since both languages are dissyllabic languages consisting mainly of two-syllable words, the linguistic rules of sound changes from Chinese dissyllabic words into Vietnamese ones are just like those of other polysyllabic languages. For instance, in Indo-European languages polysyllabic words of the same root when changing into another language at least one of the syllables may not strictly follow the same phonological pattern in all languages, such as Latin gelatan > French gelée or variations of the word “police”: politi, polizei, policia, polizia, polite, polis, polisi, "phúlít" (old VS from French).

What does this rule have to do with Vietnamese words of Chinese origin? In the Chinese > Vietnamese scenario, though one Chinese character (coinciding with a syllable and a word) when changing into Vietnamese, theoretically, only one equivalent sound (word) exists, but, in reality, in many a case there are more than one Vietnamese sound for each Chinese character, for example,

元 yuán SV nguyên, ngươn , VS (tháng)giêng,
度 dù SV độ, VS đo, đạc,
粉 fén SV phấn, VS bún, bột, phở,
拜 bài SV bái, VSvái, lạy,
etc., or in compounds:

場 chăng SV trường, tràng, but in Vietnamese there are several sounds:
劇場 jùchăng (SV: kịchtrường) sânkhấu 'stage',
式場 shìchăng (SV: thítrường) trườngthi 'examination site',
戰場 zhànchăng (SV: chiếntrường) chiếntrận , hence, trậnchiến 'battle' (note: word order is in reverse in all three cases above),
一場夢 yì chăng mèng (SV:nhất trườngmộng) một giấc/cơn mơ/mộng 'dream',
一場病yì chăng bìng (SV:nhất trườngbệnh) một trận/cơnbệnh 'illness',
一場戲 yì chăng xì (SV: nhất trường hí) một xuấthát 'a show',
一場空 yì chăng kong (SV: nhất trườngkhông) một khoảngtrống 'nothingness, nada',
在場 zàichăng (SV: tạitrường) tạichỗ ~ tạitrận 'on spot, red-handed', etc.

The sandhi process of association has occurred not only in syllables where neighboring sounds with similar syllable-word and meanings can be assimilated, which might have already taken place before they were introduced to Vietnamese as in the above cases where zhèn 陣 (trận) or chù 黜 (xuất) had been associated with chăng å

dchph 

Mar.16.2003, 19:54 pm

x X x 

APPENDIX N

Only a few lines in the whole article is the riders for the case of Vietnamese "cá", or "fish", in Min dialects.
Look for it yourself -- it's fun to learn something!

Ketchup's Chinese origins a sticky subject for US foodies

Updated: 2013-03-22 11:24
By Michael Barris in New York (China Daily)
Source: http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/epaper/2013-03/22/content_16335504.htm

As a language expert, Alan Yu is used to all kinds of influences showing up in English words.

But even the University of Chicago linguistics professor is surprised at the Chinese origins of the word "ketchup".

"This is what academics, having dinner together, talk about as one of the more interesting bits of the English language," Yu says of the far-flung roots of many English words.

While German, French and Latin generally are said to have made the biggest impact on the English that Westerners speak, read and mangle, Chinese also appears as an influence in words such as kumquat, gung ho, and kow tow. But for millions of Americans used to dumping the beloved condiment on their French fries, scrambled eggs and hamburgers, none of those connections may be as startling as the Chinese link to ketchup.

In fact, HJ Heinz Co, the Pittsburgh-based maker of one of the world's best selling ketchup brands, confirmed in a statement to China Daily that ketchup "originated from a Chinese sauce pronounced catsup".

In a nutshell, here's the deal on ketchup, at least according to Dan Jurafsky, a Stanford University professor who has written a blog called "The Language of Food". Jurafsky's blog cites evidence that ketchup has roots in eastern China's Fujian province as a fish sauce. "This fish sauce in the Southern Min dialect in the 18th century was called something like 'ke-tchup', 'ge-tchup', or 'kue-chiap', depending on the dialect," Jurafsky writes.

"Those of you who speak Southern Min or Cantonese dialects will recognize the last syllable of the [American pronunciation of the word], chiap or tchup, as the word for 'sauce', - pronounced zhi in Mandarin," Jurafsky writes.

A 1982 Mandarin-to-Southern-Min dictionary, he says, confirms that the first syllable of the written Chinese name for ketchup is an archaic word pronounced gu in spoken Southern Min, and meaning a preserved fish. So ketchup is an "archaic word for fish sauce" in the Hokkien dialect of Southern Min Chinese, Jurafsky concludes.

Furthermore, Jurafsky says, early English recipes show that the original ketchup was indeed fish sauce, the stinky cooking sauce called nuoc mam in Vietnam, nam pla in Thailand, patis in the Philippines, all made from salting and fermenting anchovies.

Jurafsky's blog also sheds light on a long-time mystery - why ketchup sometimes is spelled "catsup". Since Hokkien isn't written with the Roman alphabet, the same archaic, Western process that transcribed fish sauce as ke-tchup, also delivered the world catsup, and even katchup.

In the statement provided to China Daily by Heinz, the company says its founder, Henry Heinz, "chose ketchup as the spelling" for his product to "differentiate" it from rivals' "catsup".

Linguist Yu agrees that the theories surrounding ketchup's origin are noteworthy. "It was a surprise to me," he says. "First, the tomato is not originally from Asia, so that is strange. What is even more strange is that it is somehow related to fish sauce."

In its original incarnation, ketchup was made with something other than tomatoes, Jurafsky notes. Tomatoes - a food not traditionally associated with Asian cuisine - were added to the recipe around 1800. From 1750 to 1850 its chief ingredient was fermented walnuts or sometimes fermented mushrooms, he writes. But as the blog points out, Samuel Johnson's seminal 1755 dictionary stated that English mushroom ketchups were "just an attempt to imitate the taste of an earlier original sauce that came from Asia."

Despite their abiding love for ketchup, Americans don't have a monopoly on how the popular sauce is used. Jurafsky's blog notes that people in China like to use it on fried chicken, and in Sweden it's a frequent pasta garnish. In Thailand, teens dip potato chips in ketchup, while in Eastern Europe it is a favorite pizza topping.

Taking her cue from Jurafsky's blog, Anzia Mayer, a writer for the China-focused blog Tea Leaf Nation, has dipped into scholarly literature to highlight other common English words with Chinese links. "I was shocked to find some common words that sounded really English to me," recalls Mayer, who is a senior at Amherst College in Massachusetts. Besides ketchup, her list includes kumquat, typhoon and gung ho.

At 22, Mayer has already made four trips to China and is "more or less" fluent in Mandarin. She hopes to become a Chinese teacher or journalist after graduation. Of her writing about the surprising influence of Chinese on common English words and expressions, she says: "I'm excited by the feeling of being able to make something foreign familiar."

michaelbarris@chinadailyusa.com

(China Daily 03/22/2013 page11)

APPENDIX O

Vietnamese Polysyllabism

October 2, 2012 @ 2:48 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Writing systems

There is a movement called Vietnamese2020 that aims to substantially reform the writing system by the year 2020. The main change would be to group syllables into words. As the advocates of this change point out, most words in Vietnamese are disyllabic (the same is true of Mandarin). The proponents of the reform believe that, among others, it would reap the following benefits:

1. achieve greater compatibility with the needs of information processing systems

2. comport better with the findings of cognitive science

3. put the kibosh on the false notion of monosyllabism, which they say is unnatural and does not exist in real languages

I myself had these additional thoughts:

1. Would the adoption of polysyllabism (i.e., linking of syllables into words) in Vietnamese obviate the need for so many diacritics (i.e., reduce homonymy)? Without knowing the precise details of Vietnamese romanization, the plethora of diacritical marks has always led me to suspect that the script may be fraught with redundancy and overspecification, especially if the basic unit of grammar were taken to be the word rather than the syllable. The fact that many Vietnamese in their casual writing omit the diacriticals and are still able to make themselves understood (see below) underscores this possibility.

2. Would the adoption of polysyllabism make indexing, dictionary compilation, etc. easier and more user-friendly? This has certainly been the case with Romanized Chinese and Japanese (e.g., in dictionaries and encyclopedias arranged according to alphabetical order by words), and I suspect that the same would be true of Korean as well.

I ran these proposals and ideas by a number of Western specialists in Vietnamese language and culture. Their reactions were, to put it mildly, unenthusiastic.

Bill Hannas notes that this sort of proposal has been around for a few decades at least, and that the following line in the proposal does not offer much hope for adoption: "In practice, while awaiting official orthography guidelines, hopefully, from a governmental body such as a national language academy, …"

Eric Henry states:

This is the first time I ever encountered this proposal. The article doesn't make it clear whether this idea has any government backing or not. To me the idea of pretending that Vietnamese compound expressions are unitary words in the same sense that "asparagus" or "daffodil" are words seems silly and artificial. The Vietnamese used to use hyphens to accomplish the same purpose; thus fangfa 方法 ("method") was "phương-pháp," and so on. Then people discovered that they could get along fine without hyphens, and that the absence of hyphens gave the page a pleasantly uncluttered look. Conjoining syllables in the manner proposed seems to me a way of reverting to hyphens [VHM: without the hyphens]. But then it's natural to be attached to whatever one is habituated to—and I happen to be habituated to un-conjoined syllables.

To which I replied, "ex cept in Eng lish".

Eric continued:

I don't see how polysyllabism could reduce the need for diacritics. Vietnamese people of course write to each other all the time with no diacritics and can still figure out 98% of the text, but everyone knows and feels that this is just a makeshift. It would perhaps be nice to eliminate the need for the circumflex and the half moon by inventing a few special vowel signs—but I don't see how the tone marks themselves could be represented in spelling (cf., for comparison, luomazi [National Romanization for Mandarin]: han, harn, haan, hann)—that would just be a nuisance, especially since Vietnamese has, not four, but six tones. Vietnamese orthography has already (i.e., centuries ago) made a move in the direction of new vowel symbols with the letters "ư" and "ơ."

Maybe a Vietnamese equivalent of DeFrancis's ABC Chinese dictionary could be created. It might be wonderfully useful for some purposes, as the ABC dictionary is wonderfully useful for some purposes. But I haven't really thought this through.

Another correspondent replied:

This has nothing to do with the government. It looks to me like it's the work of some overseas Vietnamese linguistics grad student or (former grad student) who has now gone slightly crazy because of the "East Sea/South China Sea/Really Far South Mongolian Sea. . ." issue.

The author has several pages. Another one (hocthuat.org) has a long study that argues for the linguistic connections between Vietnamese and Chinese, but it now has the following disclaimer:

STATEMENT OF RENUNCIATION OF THE SINITIC CAMP

Here comes a painful decision. I would like to renounce my long standing belief in what I have elaborated in this electronic publication about Sinitic Vietnamese. That is to say, I no longer believe in what I used to see as vestiges of sinitic linguistic elements in Vietnamese vocabulary stock that are postulated in my research paper. The reason for my taking this course of action is, admittedly, politically motivated because I do not want my work later to serve for unforeseen evil purposes, especially in the face of Chinazi's overt actions trying to impose its hegemonism onto today's Vietnam. My blood is boiling with revulsion and hatred after seeing a series of unrolling events currently taking place in the East Vietnam Sea. Civilized people mostly see that those behaviors could only be committed by warmongers, descendants of those same savages as vividly and accurately described in "The Ugly Chinaman" 醜陋的中國人 by Bo Yang 柏楊. Don't take me wrong, though both matters not related, given the fact that my blood is genetically embedded with Chinese DNA.

For Heaven's sake, please forgive me for all what I have been laboring on hitherto. I would appreciate your understanding and ask that you take this unstate [sic] moment of truthfulness as a statement of my renunciation of the sinitic camp and I shall accept all consequences thereof. My apology to my fellow scholars, too, and yet, if you still need to read my writings for some reason, focus instead on the antithesis of what is discussed herein, that is, "de-sinitize" them by taking the opposite view. You may still quote any material in this paper but remember to annotate your citation with this statement accordingly. You could post your comments and questions on Ziendan TiengViet.

It so happens that another language movement in Vietnam going on right now is called English2020; it aims to make all school leavers proficient in English by that year.

Steve O'Harrow comments:

There is an "English 2020" project being spearheaded by Professor Nguyen Ngoc Nhung on behalf of the SRVN Ministry of Education & Training that aims to make English language instruction available in a broad range of fields at the secondary and tertiary levels [by 2020]. It is the only domestic national-level language-related initiative I know of at this time in Viet Nam. One might be forgiven for suspecting that the proposers of the Vietnamese2020 movement stole the name "2020" from the Ministry of Education & Training English initiative.

The article you link here looks rather "iffy," to say the least. In reality, it is probably a scheme put on line by some Viet Kieu ["overseas Vietnamese"] someplace outside of the country itself. In my opinion, after my 50 years of Vietnamese language teaching and research in Viet Nam, Europe and America, there is a zero chance of this spelling movement taking hold. Why? Because the current system works well. It is known and used by nearly 90 million people.

The Vietnamese populace is already one of the most literate in Southeast Asia and it has been literate for a very long time. They are not likely to change what works well.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it." And believe me, they won't.

What is endlessly interesting to this observer over the years is that for a long time now, the handful of folks who identify themselves as Vietnamese but who live overseas, are of the impression that what they cook up in the cafés of Paris or the campuses of the USA is going to have some magic impact on the millions and millions of Vietnamese who are actually living their day-to-day lives in Viet Nam itself. There are all kinds of looney ex-pats out there and each one has a fantastic plot to do something, reform the language, overthrow the government, invent a perpetual motion machine that serves pho on the side. They're constantly going around appointing each other prime minister of governments in exile or re-claiming the Nguyen Dynasty throne. Mind you, founding a new goofy religion actually works sometimes – as long as you are really in Viet Nam, that is.

But if you are abroad, "fuhged-daboudit," [especially if you live in Brooklyn].

Responding to my technical questions about the possible value of a polysllabic approach to Vietnamese writing, Steve remarked:

Short answer: NO. Longer answer: I really do not know enough about the technology of information processing, etc. to be 100% sure and I do know that many Vietnamese disagree on which words are polysyllabic & which are not [Chinese loans are easier to judge, but Mon-Khmer vocabulary is another question and mixed lexemes are even fuzzier]. The main obstacle to information processing at this point in time seems to be the fact that we do not have decent optical character recognition programs, due to a lack of typographic consistency and the fact that Vietnamese printing in the past has been all over the map. However, none of the "fixes" will eliminate the need for the diacritics and there is a lot of misunderstanding among those folks who do not actually read/speak Vietnamese which marks are diacritical [only the five tone marks] and which are integral parts of letters [hooks, bars, and circumflexes]. A Vietnamese native speaker does not see, say, the letters "o" and "ô" or "e" and "ê" as being "o with / without a circumflex" or "e with / without a circumflex" – rather s/he conceives of them simply as completely distinct letters, as different as we would think of "e" and "o" in English. The folks whom this system confuses are mainly foreigners, so who gives a damn?

A 2nd point would be that there is a lot of disagreement on what constitutes a "word" in Vietnamese. Is "Không quân" [Airforce] one or two words? I really don't think we are going to come to any substantial agreement in the foreseeable future and I really don't think it matters a whole helluva lot, at least not to the Vietnamese reading public

Again, the main point is that the current Vietnamese writing system works well for Vietnamese people in Viet Nam itself, so any substantial changes would likely be counter-productive. Just remember the old US saying: IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON"T FIX IT! – it is just as true in VN as it is in the US. Tinkers be damned.

Finally, just before I was about to make this post, I received these brilliant remarks from a Vietnamese specialist who wishes to remain anonymous:

If Vietnamese were written as words, and not as syllables, there would be less need for diacritics (tones and "special"–in the sense that they lack Western alphabet equivalents–letters) because an equivalent amount of information (cues) is provided by the word division.

By adding information up front of one sort, you get by with less information of another sort. Word division in orthography means that society and its individuals have invested resources in an upgraded system that rewards users with greater clarity for less effort. You put the effort in at the beginning–deciding the rules and learning them.

We don't specify every phonological detail in English writing because we don't need them to get to meaning. The reader, if s/he cares about it, can supply those details later, after accessing the word-meaning. Often an unambiguous pronunciation is possible only after the word has been retrieved from one's mental lexicon. It surely does not derive from the successive letter-sounds. By the same logic, written Vietnamese words would be overspecified if they included all the diacritics in use at present.

Because indicating tone in computerized writing is such a bother, Vietnamese usually just leave them out of their informal correspondence, such as emails. The messages can still be understood, albeit with some difficulty. Word division would restore the missing redundancy.

Information technology, and indexing in particular, depend on having "tokenized" units, usually at the word level. Most of the tokenizing work is done already in languages with word division. For CJV (not K), however, a tokenizing function is needed.

It all comes down to the same rule: you can pay the cost once up front (create and learn rules for word division) or in perpetual installments.

It is remarkable that, although Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese have four different writing systems, they all are vexed with the problem of whether or not to join syllables into words. That, I believe, is the result of the latter three still retaining vestigial traces or influences of the Chinese characters. But even character writing could adopt word spacing if enough of its users would agree to follow such a norm.

[A tip of the hat to Jonathan Smith and thanks to Liam Kelley and Michele Thompson]
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October 2, 2012 @ 2:48 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Announcements, Writing systems

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45 Comments »

J.W. Brewer said,

October 2, 2012 @ 3:20 pm

For Chinese and Japanese, you may be characterizing the issue backwards – what is going on is not so much breaks between syllables rather than between words, but no information-conveying breaks at all except at the end of sentences and thus no visible distinction betweeen single-character (or single-syllable) words and multiple-character (or multiple-syllable) words, although in Japanese many individual kanji of course have polysyllabic readings. That lack of information-conveying breaks was once common practice for texts written in our alphabet, but was abandoned in favor of inserting blank spaces at word-breaks in the latter part of the first millenium A.D. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua. The Vietnamese situation may be different altogether.
Sili said,

October 2, 2012 @ 4:21 pm

Really Far South Mongolian Sea

This should probably not amuse me as much as it does.

I award the the author a swimming holiday to Austria.
JS said,

October 2, 2012 @ 4:31 pm

^
Chinese writing certainly provides "breaks between syllables" in the sense that the salient written units, characters, map (almost) without exception to single syllables of speech; the addition of physical "blank space" as that called upon to separate English words would, of course, be redundant.

However, Korean orthographical standards do call for word separation, meaning that in the case of (standard) Korean writing, both the syllable and the word are strongly marked in written text — though as one might expect, there are in the case of the word many cases in which decisions regarding division are variable and arbitrary.
Peter said,

October 2, 2012 @ 5:13 pm

^ I agree that characters neatly (and nearly without exception) subdivide an expression into syllables. Having blank spaces between the _words_ though–that would not be redundant. It would be kind of helpful (but no one will ever do it).
Victor Mair said,

October 2, 2012 @ 5:28 pm

@Peter

"that would not be redundant" — clear thinking on your part

"but no one will ever do it" — actually, a lot of people have done it (e.g., Chow Tse-tsung and Apollo Wu). Who knows? Someday it might just catch on. That would be a boon for IT specialists, dictionary makers, indexers, grammarians, and sundry others.
Peter said,

October 2, 2012 @ 5:52 pm

@Victor

That would be convenient. Considering that most Chinese (or, I suppose, Americans) can't tell the difference between a morpheme and a word, I'm not holding out a great deal of hope.
Ellen K. said,

October 2, 2012 @ 5:57 pm

In English we have cases where whether something is a word or two is somewhat arbitrary, and even cases where we don't agree on if it's one word or two. This doesn't seem to get in the way of our use of the written language. Curious that none of the writers, all writing in English, mention that we have this in English. My question for them would be, is this any different from English, other than that in English we've had time to standardize many of the cases that can go either way?
Victor Mair said,

October 2, 2012 @ 6:14 pm

@Peter

Most Americans (and other speakers of English) know what a word is (i.e., know where to put spaces between words) — in 99+% of the cases. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to hold these conversations on Language Log. And you can be sure that commenters would jump down the throats of us bloggersifweforgottoputinthosespaces.

As for what a morpheme is, that's specialized knowledge that can be left to linguists and others who delight in the study of languages.
tram said,

October 2, 2012 @ 7:39 pm

Funny example. Is "Airforce" one or two words?
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 2, 2012 @ 7:56 pm

I think in understanding this issue it's important to realize that, just like with Chinese (when it is divided), the compounds aren't really being divided into syllables–they're being divided into morphemes, and that they simultaneously get divided into syllables is just a coincidence.
JS said,

October 2, 2012 @ 8:47 pm

^ Hmmm… from a synchronic point of view it might be possible to claim that in Chinese and Vietnamese writing, compounds are being divided into syllables and that it is the correspondence of those syllables to morphemes which is only a coincidence… after all, in these two cases, the salient written unit's relationship to the syllable is (all but) invariant, while its relationship to the morpheme is much confounded by the significant and increasing number of morphemes that are longer than one syllable.

However, historically speaking, your view is reasonable as the preference for disyllabic "compound" words in both languages (which seems to have followed on processes of reduction of longer and otherwise more phonologically complex words to CV[C]?) means that the relationship between originally logographic Chinese characters and modern-day morphemes is indeed in some sense original and essential…
Brad said,

October 2, 2012 @ 9:15 pm

I think one of the non-English rebuttals should be:
So everyone needs to deal with the made up hassles of distinguishing between compound words, hyphenated compounds, and multi-word compounds?

It's a distinction that the writing system makes, yet the organization system for the dictionaries resolutely ignores it. Does the meaning of 'air' change dramatically when followed by 'man'? If it does, you put 'airman' in the dictionary whether it's 'airman', 'air-man', or 'air man'.
:-/

Every Japanese book that I have that has spaces between the Japanese words is either a kids book or a Japanese as a foreign language text. The kids books have spaces between the words because uninterrupted strings of hiragana or katana can be difficult to parse quickly.

And the native Japanese dictionaries intendend for children that I have get along just fine using Japanese kana ordering for the dictionary, so "alphabetizing" only benefits the people that have memorized the arbitary order of 26 letters instead of memorizing the arbitrary order of 52-some kana.

In the written form used by adults, spaces would be redundant because the information is either conveyed through other indications:
- grammatical particles indicating the end of the word
- kanji interrupting the hiragana streams
- punctuation
and once someone gets into things like verb conjugation and so on, distinguishing between the various components really becomes quite arbitrary.

All of the electronic dictionary work that I've done has involved looking up words using longest substring style lookup. So if X and Y are words, but someone also decided that XY is a word, you don't have to care. So if the electronic translation people need to build better word tables, that's not a very compelling argument to change tradition.

In other words, God save us from yet another spelling reform, especially if it's for someone else's language.
Ran Ari-Gur said,

October 2, 2012 @ 9:29 pm

@Ruben Polo-Sherk: I don't know Vietnamese, so please correct me if I'm being clueless, but — I don't think that's completely true. For example, the Vietnamese Wikipedia gives "London" as "Luân Đôn" — not, I submit, because it's composed of the morphemes "Luân" and "Đôn". (However, it also gives "Paris" as "Paris", and "Wikipedia" as "Wikipedia"; so there's definitely a tendency to write borrowed morphemes solid even when they're polysyllabic, but it competes with a tendency to write spaces between syllables even within polysyllabic morphemes.)
michael farris said,

October 3, 2012 @ 1:54 am

Some initial random musings.

There's a fair amount of variation in how borrowed morphemse (which have undergone Vietnamization) are written. If you take 'salad' I've seen all three:

xa lát

xa-lát

xalát

with the first being the most common.

Words that don't undergo Vietnamization (like Paris) remain written as one word.

Word division seems a thornier issue in Vietnamese that any other language I've examined. When I was actively learning Vietnamese there were times I could understand a sentence just fine but couldn't have hoped to divide it into words (or could think of a number of ways of doing so). Leaners of Thai and Khmer I've talked to report very similar experiences while learners of Mandarin mostly don't. It might be a SEAsia thing…

Yes Vietnamese speakers can get by in some contexts without diacritics (I used to receive emails from one which I could understand pretty well) but this is partly due to diacritics being used most of the time – you can sort of 'see' the diacritics when they're not there. I'm also assuming there's some deliberate vocabulary and syntactic choices being made to facilitate understanding. But diacritic free Vietnamee (minus other massive changes) seems like a non-starter.

IME unlike most writers of languages with diacritics, when a diacritic appears over a lower case i in Vietnamese speakers tend to write the dot and diacritic both (when writing by hand, in print the diacritic replaces the dot). I'm not sure what, if anything, this means, but it's sort of distinctive.

You really should do a post on those Viet Kieu who want a return of Chu Nom (character based script). They make the word division (or other orthographic reform) plans seem completely feasible (nb I'm not talking about scholars who are interested in Chu Nom from an academic point of view who do very valuable work but those with half-baked plans for compulsory education and the like)
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 3, 2012 @ 3:14 am

JS, Ran Ari-Gur: Good point bringing up the polysyllabic morphemes.

First of all, the polsyllabic morphemes in Chinese or Vietnamese are basically anomalies in one relevant sense: they cannot combine with other morphemes to form compounds in the way monosyllabic morphemes generally can. There are also very few of them.

So it is not unreasonable to ignore them when figuring out how to transcribe Vietnamese, which has a large substructure of monosyllabic morphemes, and, because the importance of these monosyllabic morphemes, decide to simplify and standardize by making each syllable written separately, which is what they did with quoc ngu. And so that is how you get Lon Don. With foreign words, though, as michael farris said, it's not entirely standardized. The other exception is in cases like with the current featured article on Vietnamese wikipedia, which has "dreadnought" in it, which is clearly not written in quoc ngu–it's written English–and so isn't subject to the syllable-dividing rule.

With pinyin, it's essentially the same. The substructure of Chinese consists almost entirely of monosyllabic morphemes and so, if someone decides to write with spaces to separate those morphemes, they may, for the sake of consistency, separate syllables of polysyllabic morphemes as well. But the motivation cannot be to distinguish syllables–that doesn't really make any sense, I think. If you argue that this is done to mimick the boundaries between Chinese characters, you get back to the point of morphemic structure, since a major function of Chinese characters is to support this kind of structure. It is possible, of course, to write a language like English, with no such structure, in Chinese characters, but the system of two-character compounds would not fit in general (and therefore there would really be no reason to not write each character separately if you transition from that into an alphabetic script). This is essentially an innate feature of the language, and not the writing system.

So, to put it simply, when disyllabic morphemes are split, this is done basically to be consistent in a system that, in order to accomodate a substructure of monosyllabic morphemes, has been standardized (by convention or personal choice) to have spaces between syllables. The chief concern is the division between morphemes.

(In case anyone doesn't understand what I mean by "substructure of monosyllabic morphemes", I'll explain it this way: Vietnamese and Chinese have it, and English doesn't. It's the thing that makes the issue of word division a real pain in the ass in the Vietnamese and Chinese, and not a problem at all in English. With Vietnamese and Chinese, because of the importance of the organization at the morpheme level, the concept of "word" doesn't fit well.)

(Not really part of my argument, but maybe something to think about: We write "New York" with a space, but, though originally it was two morphemes, it is now really just one. So we do sort of have this in English, too.)

(Ran Ari-Gur: I am not the all-knowing god of Vietnamese.)
richard howland-bolton said,

October 3, 2012 @ 6:02 am

"ex cept in Eng lish"?
"ex cept in Engl ish" surely :-)
Victor Mair said,

October 3, 2012 @ 6:31 am

@richard howland-bolton

surely not
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 3, 2012 @ 6:44 am

Shouldn't it be Eng glish?
Gene Buckley said,

October 3, 2012 @ 7:24 am

Linguistically, compounds like air force are single words composed of other words: this is the beauty of hierarchical structure. Orthographies make different choices about how to handle that layered structure in writing. English is inconsistent, sometimes using a space, hyphen, or no division at all, often related to how familiar or "lexicalized" the compound is: water tower vs. waterfall.

Spelling practice varies over time and space; hyphens used to be more common, and still are relatively more common in British than in American orthography. German, where these compounds have the same linguistic structure as in English, has a more consistent orthography, regularly writing compounds as one word (Wasserturm, Wasserfall) regardless of length; see this dramatic Afrikaans example, since it (like Dutch) follows the same practice.

In Chinese, and therefore in Sino-Vietnamese, the compounds mainly at issue are closer to English per-mit, con-fer, and tele-phone. Because the meaning of the whole is often not very predictable from the meaning of the components, speakers shouldn't have much trouble learning to treat most such items as single written words, although there would no doubt be a role for (somewhat arbitrary) standardization. I think Victor's point is that to make no reference at all to word structure (whether by using spaces nowhere or everywhere) is to leave the reader completely on his or her own, when an orthography could give some significant information through the judicious use of spaces.

It's another question whether further compounding should be written as a single word. Victor, as I take it, is mainly talking about the equivalent of per mit, although there will also be words like build ing that are semantically more transparent. Today Vietnamese writes the equivalent of build ing per mit. A writing reform that ended with building permit might be superior to buildingpermit, since the spaces show the relative grouping of (pairs of) morphemes where they do the most good, while still identifying the internal constituency of larger compounds. If Vietnamese and German represent the extremes, English orthography might for once actually be rather sensible, if only it were more consistent.
Victor Mair said,

October 3, 2012 @ 7:28 am

That's why it's "English".
Matt Anderson said,

October 3, 2012 @ 7:55 am

Ruben Polo-Sherk,

Maybe I don't understand your point exactly, but, in Mandarin, polysyllabic words can certainly combine with other morphemes to form longer words. For example, húdié 蝴蝶 'butterfly' can combine with gǔ 骨 'bone' to form the word húdiégǔ 蝴蝶骨 'sphenoid'; xìbāo 細胞 'cell' can combine with zhì 質 'substance' to form xìbāozhì 細胞質 'cytoplasm'; and lǚyóu 旅遊 'tourism' can combine with qū 區 'district' to form lǚyóuqū 旅遊區 'tourist area'. &, while the individual syllables of xìbāo and lǚyóu can themselves be said to be morphemes, húdié is itself a single morpheme.
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 3, 2012 @ 8:30 am

Certainly polysyllabic words can combine with other morphemes. My point about the restriction on polysyllabic *morphemes* doing so was with regard to *how* they do it. The only way they can is basically through the same mechanism that we use to get "tennis racket" and "toaster oven". 蝴蝶骨 is basically "butterfly bone" in this same sense. There's an important difference between that sort of union and the one in, for example 理解, or 看见.
M (was L) said,

October 3, 2012 @ 9:37 am

Does it make a lot of sense to bust a gut over foreign names and words? Every written language is challenged by this. Every language has to deal with it, and often by special localization rules that differ for each commonly-encountered foreign language. Often, it's a matter of "drop back ten and punt."

It seems to me that whatever Vietnamese decides to do with Vietnamese vocabulary, and with loan-words that have become sufficiently adopted that they are now de facto Vietnamese vocabulary, is one question – - – but not a decision that ought to be driven by foreign words. Tail wagging the dog, no?
Steve said,

October 3, 2012 @ 11:57 am

POINT ONE: The folks who worry about joining Vietnamese syllables or not joining Vietnamese syllables are in the same league with theologians worrying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. 90 million Vietnamese use an orthographic system that works well for them. In the early post-WW2 period, they undertook a massive literacy campaign that worked very well because, for a native speaker of Vietnamese, the writing system is not nearly as difficult to learn as say, the English system is for native speakers of English.
POINT TWO: If one makes the axiomatic statement that "As the advocates of this change point out, most words in Vietnamese are disyllabic (the same is true of Mandarin)," one begs the question of what constitutes a "word." Many commentators appear to be judging whether and utterance in Vietnamese is a word based on whether what is expressed can be called "a (i.e., one) word" in, say, English or French. This is, in my opinion, a highly subjective stance.

In any event, judging the matter as a non-native speaking student of both Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese for the last 50+ years, it strikes me that the rate of apparent monosyllabicity in Vietnamese is much greater than in Mandarin Chinese – indeed, Vietnamese appears to have the highest rate of monosyllabicity and the lowest rate of phonemic redundancy of any language I have taken a scholarly interest in. For what it's worth…
Steve said,

October 3, 2012 @ 12:17 pm

While this discussion is very interesting for us [and to me especially, since this is basic to what I have been doing every day for the past half century], it is rather meaningless from the point of view of the users of the Vietnamese writing system. It is very unlikely that any writing reforms will be instituted in the foreseeable future. They would cause more chaos that benefit. For example, if you look at Ho Chi Minh's manuscripts and other handwritten materials, you will see that he often liked to write "z" for "d" and "r" and "gi" – these are reflexions of the similar Northern pronunciation of the graphs in question [odd, since he spoke with a Central accent in day-to-day conversation]. Because of Ho's iconic status in much of Viet Nam [but clearly not all of Viet Nam], some true-believers have pushed the idea that the writing system should make the same substitution. However, there are other regions in Viet Nam where there is no "z" sound whatsoever and where "d" and "r" and "gi" do not represent the same sounds anyway. And there is even a very small part of the country where "d" and "r" and "gi" are pronounced as separate contrasting sounds.
What this means is that one immediately begs political questions of national unity when one advocates writing reform of a system that is both universally employed [except in a few private spheres] and widely accepted from the Ca Mau peninsula to the Chinese border.
So I come back to my sainted mother's old Indiana wisdom: "if it ain't broke, don't fix it!"
Ran Ari-Gur said,

October 3, 2012 @ 1:11 pm

@M (was L): I don't think anyone is suggesting otherwise. I fear you might be refuting a straw man . . .
michael farris said,

October 3, 2012 @ 1:40 pm

Apropos of what Steve has written it's important to note that Quoc Ngu is not a transcription of a particular dialect or language variety (which is still arguably the case for Pinyin) but an orthography that has slowly evolved to work for speakers of dialects with rather different phonemic inventories.

Each distinction made in the script reflects a difference made somewhere (except for i and y as full syllables and for all I know somewhere does make that distinction) but nowhere makes all the distinctions (though a few dialects might come pretty close) and which differences are levelled varies from region to region (or village to village).

It is not calculated to look appealing to westerners but it does a remarkably good job of providing a working unified orthography for the language.
M (was L) said,

October 3, 2012 @ 2:59 pm

@Ran Ari-Gur – I was responding to the handwringing about Lon Don. What matters is how you write Hanoi in Vietnamese. How you write London or Paris or East Lansing doesn't really come into it except as a footnote.
JS said,

October 3, 2012 @ 3:28 pm

Ruben Polo-Sherk:
It would indeed be interesting if this were a principled distinction… but is noun compounding really "importantly different" from the sort of example you mention (li3jie3 理解, from two verbs in "parallel," or kan4jian4 看见, from two verbs in "series")? It seems possible that, historically, there simply haven't been enough disyllabic+monomorphemic verbs around to feed such processes… and such as have appeared more recently do get up to a certain amount of funny stuff, esp. of a "reduplicative" nature (e.g., lao1laodaodao 唠唠叨叨, shu3shuluoluo 数数落落, etc.)
Jongseong said,

October 3, 2012 @ 4:13 pm

Korean has been written with spaces between words since at least the 1930s; before that, spacing depended largely on the author, and before that, spaces were not used.

Spacing continues to vex Koreans, but this is largely due to the agglutinative morphology. For example, suffixes are supposed to be written without spaces and dependent nouns are supposed to be spaced, but Korean is full of cases where the same form can behave as a suffix or a dependent noun, as in daero 대로. As a suffix meaning "based on" or "following", you have beop-daero 법대로 ("following the law") with no space; as a dependent noun meaning "as", you have mal-han daero 말한 대로 ("as spoken") with space (I'm using the hyphen to separate morphemes in the romanization). Think of the confusion in English between "a while" and "awhile" or "maybe" and "may be", but much more frequent in the language.

Compound nouns are another source of ambiguity, much as in English (which has the additional option of hyphenation to confuse matters further—"crybaby", "cry-baby", or "cry baby"?). Korean rules allow for optional spacing in many cases, which I guess is pragmatic.

I'm less familiar with North Korean rules, but in general they use spaces quite a bit less than in South Korea. Compound nouns are generally written without spaces, and I think even dependent nouns may be written without spaces, so that the example above would be mal-han-daero 말한대로 in North Korean spelling.

I don't think you could come up with a spacing rule for Korean that is at once simple and can satisfy everyone. However, for all the confusion about correct spacing, you wouldn't find anyone arguing for going back to no spaces between words. Korean is so much more readable with spaces. For what it's worth, Koreans don't have the confusion between syllables and words regarding their own language, though they have the advantage that polysyllabic morphemes are so common in Korean.

Knowing next to nothing about Vietnamese and based on the simple fact that it is an isolating language with limited affixation, I would think spacing rules for Vietnamese would be simpler than for Korean.
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 3, 2012 @ 4:39 pm

The issue is semantic: Polysyllabic morphemes are independent in a way that the monosyllabic morphemes, when functioning as part of a compound, are not. They contain the entirety of the meaning. Now, even if it can be used independently, the monosyllabic morphemes, when they are serving to construct a compound, do not–the meaning of each is part of a large set of fundamental "nuts and bolts" that are put together to have meaning that can stand by itself. This fundamentalness is what I was talking about, and there are no (or at least trivially few) disyllabic morphemes in this group of fundamental ones.
Matt said,

October 3, 2012 @ 8:09 pm

One interesting thing about spaces in Japanese kids' books is that they don't come between words and particles. So in kana it's "いぬが はなを" (dog-NOM flower-ACC) but in Romaji it's (usually) "inu ga hana o". (Although the Portuguese missionaries used the same separation as modern kana: "inuga fanauo".) One useful effect of adding spaces to Japanese orthography would be the provision of a final, by-fiat answer to what exactly constitutes a word in Japanese. (Tongue only partly in cheek.)
wren ng thornton said,

October 3, 2012 @ 8:27 pm

@Ellen K:

There are certainly ambiguous cases in English, but I think the issue is one of severity. Most of the English examples I can think of are ones where the compositional structure has been lost to us (e.g., "a lot", "after all") and we treat the set phrase as a single word. (The other examples are compound nouns, but German seems to do fine with eliminating the spaces there.) However, to pick Japanese as an example, because of its agglutinative nature the issue of distinguishing words is problematic even for productive structures.

For example, Japanese uses a lot of verb compounding. This is vaguely similar to English's system of modal verbs, except that it's extremely productive instead of involving a closed set of forms. Depending on the verbs involved, these compounds could be (a) entirely compositional, (b) syntactically compositional but with non-compositional semantics, (c) semantically non-compositional to the point of being aspectual/affective markers, often with phonetic non-compositionality, or (d) non-compositional to the point that they are considered to be simple inflections rather than compounds. In the conventional romanization we treat most of (d) as single words; treat (a), (b), and the remainder of (d) as separate words; and waffle back and forth over (c). But because there's a continuum here —from clearly compositional processes through to tense/aspect/mood/polarity inflections— wherever you draw the line is going to be problematic.

To pick another issue, in the traditional romanization we separate off case morphemes from their noun (etc). This is strange, but then there's a continuum between case morphemes and postpositions, so again there's this issue of where to draw the boundary (if indeed any boundary should be drawn). And this gets confounded into other issues too. For true adjectives, the morpheme converting them into adverbs is traditionally romanized as part of the same word. Whereas for adjectival nouns, the morpheme converting them into adverbs is traditionally written as a separate word (since it's related to the dative). And that morpheme coincides with one for converting verbal stems into adverbs, but for verbal stems people waffle back and forth about whether it should be separated or not. That morpheme is also a form of the copula, so surely you'd want to be consistent about how you treat the copula elsewhere right? Etc. Etc.

If Vietnamese is at all similar, it's no wonder they settled on spaces between each morpheme/syllable. It's a bit extreme, but at least it's consistent, eh?
Ran Ari-Gur said,

October 3, 2012 @ 11:04 pm

@M (was L): Re: "I was responding to the handwringing about Lon Don": I don't see how you can have been, seeing as there wasn't any . . .
JS said,

October 4, 2012 @ 12:01 am

Ah… I am not clear on all points, but sense in your last comment a view of Chinese and Vietnamese word formation rather different from that which I have in mind: where I tend to think mostly about larger words formed from smaller words proper by a variety of processes (some of which might be properly called "compounding" and some not), it seems you view these languages as engaging in word-building from stores of (often bound) morphemes (the "nuts and bolts") in a more self-conscious manner — a la "classical" compounding in English, or novel unions of Sino-Japanese elements in Japanese?

These two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, of course… but my tendency to see the latter sort of "compounding" as more exceptional and less interesting might be the reason I have been slow to appreciate your suggestion regarding the relative productivity of monosyllabic vs. disyllabic morphemes in compounds (a difference I suppose I might see as merely a reflection of the sorts of words available in the language at a given time.)
Matt said,

October 4, 2012 @ 12:31 am

Also, part of role that Chinese characters play in Japanese orthography is indicating word division. The basic principle is that "A change from kana to kanji usually indicates that a new word has begun."

人類社会のすべての構成員の固有の尊厳と平等で譲ることのできない権利とを承認することは、世界における自由、正義及び平和の基礎であるので、

jinruishakainosubeteno koseiinno koyuno songento byodode yuzurukotonodekinai kenritoo shoninsurukotowa, sekainiokeru jiyu, seigioyobi heiwano kisodearunode…

That simple rule above gets us about halfway to a working tokenizer — of the 12 "words" above, at least 6 or 7 are arguably "really words" if you accept the particles-are-part-of-the-word-they-follow argument. The lexicon needed to mop up the edge cases isn't unworkably enormous.

Of course, this doesn't mean that kanji are necessary for Japanese writing to make sense (as harped on endlessly in other threads), as any shift to a kanji-free writing system would surely see the introduction of spacing as well. But in my opinion this is part of the reason why there is such resistance to ideas like "only write Sino-Japanese words with kanji; write the native vocabulary (like 譲る in the example above) in kana" — the arrangement of different types of characters conveys the same sort of information as whitespace, albeit less efficiently and unambiguously.
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 4, 2012 @ 8:31 am

JS: I'm sorry, but I'm not entirely sure what you're saying, so forgive me if I'm talking about something entirely different.

Aren't these two types of compounding entirely different phenomena? The first one isn't really particular to Chinese, and doesn't have anything to do with the morphological substructure, so I left it out of my original post. In fact, my point was that these two-morpheme compounds are *different* from compounds like "tennis racket" (if that's what you mean by "'classical' compounding"?).

Do you mean that you see the mechanism for establishing the meanings of two-(bound) morpheme compounds from their constituent parts as irregular to the point that you consider these compounds to be mostly "set" combinations, and therefore unitary?

If so, I'll try to explain why I see it the way I described it.

From my own experience learning them, I find that a many (a majority?) of compounds are understandable entirely from their constituent morphemes. More specifically, in the past, when I came across an unfamiliar compound, but knew each morpheme, I would be able to understand what that compound meant from my knowledge of those morphemes. In fact, there have been times when I wanted a particular word, but hadn't learned it yet, and was able to successfully "derive" it from morphemes that I already knew (If you want examples of the kind of compounds I derived, some I remember now are 区分、両日、根源、外面的、変容).
JS said,

October 4, 2012 @ 9:59 am

^ Thanks for your remarks. Basically I feel that compounding from bound morphemes in Chinese at least, while it certainly exists, is not terrifically productive — such words (dian4shi4 电视 and the like) smell more like our coinages from Greek/Latin roots (what I imprecisely called "classical" compounding) or the Sino-Japanese contribution to CJK (ke1xue2 科学). The examples you raised earlier (li3jie3 理解, kan4jian4 看见, myriad others) are instead in origin free-free syntactic adjacencies (the latter arguably still phrasal), and I see no reason in principle why polysyllabic morphemes couldn't wind up involved in such lexicalization processes. So this second is indeed the "tennis racket" category, though much richer in practice than such a designation might suggest.

Incidentally, in neither case would I see the meanings of these Chinese "compounds" as generally transparent given their individual components, though the latter sort were at some point freely composed and thus are arguably so from time to time…
Jason said,

October 4, 2012 @ 11:26 am

@ JS

I think you are confusing compounds, which are similar to Germanic words in English (e.g. airport, kitchen table), and agglutination, which accounts for Greek and Latin words in English (e.g. deconstructionism). Mandarin, like English, employs both; however, compounding is by far the more productive form.
Ran Ari-Gur said,

October 4, 2012 @ 3:29 pm

@Jason: By "coinages from Greek/Latin roots" or "'classical' compounds", I assume that JS is referring to words like "biology", "telescope", "interject", etc., where a single word is formed by compounding (?) two bound morphemes ("bio-" and "-ology", "tele-" and "-scope", "inter-" and "-ject", etc.). Lexically and semantically, they're very similar to compounds of free morphemes like "life science" and "distance viewer", and to verb-particle idioms like "throw in".
JS said,

October 4, 2012 @ 8:53 pm

^ So… yeah, dian4shi4 etc. strike me as "biology"-type words, built self-consciously from the nuts-and-bolts Ruben Polo-Sherk has referred to, while the core of the Mandarin lexicon consists more of "life science"-type words (though of course of very diverse phrasal origins, found across word classes, and often with constituents no longer free.)

@Jason, not sure what you would want to call "agglutination" in Mandarin as distinct from "compounding"… perhaps -de suffixation to create "one who does X" meanings, -hua suffixation to create "ish"-ish meanings, and the like? In which case you would have processes limited in number but very productive indeed…

Apologies if I've derailed discussion… to return to the point, I might say I've found it interesting that those with knowledge of Vietnamese language and writing seem to find the suggestion of word division so asinine. The situation surely can't be so different from that of Mandarin, where IN THEORY (this naturally being as far as the present discussion means to extend), word division would be a workable and an at least marginally useful orthographical device.
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 4, 2012 @ 11:16 pm

Ok, now I see what you're saying. I think that our disagreement comes from how we are viewing the processes involved in compounding for the "core" of the lexicon.

We agree on the fact that polysyllabic morphemes can form part of "life science" compounds, but I am claiming that there is an important distinction between "life science"/"tennis racket"/蝴蝶骨 compounds and ones like 空間/変化. In the former, both parts are stand-alone, independent words, and you are using the life/tennis/butterfly to specify the kind of science/racket/bone. This is not the same construction involved in 空間 or 理解. (If anything, the former is a lot closer to the "biology" type in construction). Whether or not polysyllabic morphemes can involved in a particular process has, obviously, nothing to do with how many syllables they have; it has to do with the fact that, whatver the reason, all polysyllabic morphemes in Chinese are stand-alone, independent words, and not building blocks*.

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm splitting compounds into three types (some of my examples are Chinese; others are Sino-Japanese, but the mechanism is the same):

1) 电视, 化学, etc. These are essentially the same as "classical" compounds in English.

2) tennis racket, 蝴蝶骨, etc. This exists in lots of languages and is unremarkable.

3) 空間, 想要, 見解, 区分, 理解, 変化. This is what I mean by the core of the lexicon.

*If you know of any exceptions, please let me know, but I maintain that they'd still be statistically rare enough to be irrelevant to my larger point.
JS said,

October 5, 2012 @ 11:06 pm

^ To be "compounds" at all, all items under your (2) as well as (3) must be lexemes in their own right, with transparency or lack thereof merely a function of time, among other factors, correct? Surely da4ren(2) 大人 ("descriptive" compound; currently 'adult' and formerly 'your honor', etc.) is no different from hu2die2gu3, with li3jie3 and others (though very often of entirely different first syntactic structure) distinct from these only due to gradual loss of transparency? So, my claim was only that polysyllabic morphemes, though relatively few in number, may also engage in such processes.

I don't think we should speak of privileged "building blocks" in Mandarin aside from "suffixes" like -de, -jia, -men, etc., and arguably the bound forms on occasion exploited in your (1).
Ruben Polo-Sherk said,

October 7, 2012 @ 6:21 am

It seems that we've been using arguments that assume one interpretation or the other on whether these morphemes are lexemes or not, basically arguing from inconsistent paradigms. It seems to me that you see every morpheme, with the exception of things like -学, 电视, and -的, as always functioning as a lexeme. In Sino-Japanese, that interpretation is absolutely untenable–there's no question that the compounds themselves are the lexemes, but in Chinese, it's not so clear. There's only a valid distinction between polysyllabic morphemes and monosyllabic ones (or, more precisely, between bound and free ones) if you *don't* see every morpheme as a lexeme (excepting the agglutinative ones). If things like 理解 are taken to be clearly two words instead of one, then there is, of course, no utility to having the concept of a core process for forming the vocabulary at all (but my earlier point would nevertheless be correct–then every element of the lexicon, with a few very rare exceptions, is still monosyllabic). I'm not going to try to convince you or anyone else that things like 理解 are actually unitary in Chinese, since I don't believe that myself: many tools for analyzing other languages (for example, the concepts of parts of speech and word boundaries) are not suitable for Chinese, and everything looks fuzzy when you look at it from those perspectives. I'll only conclude with an argument for transparency and compositionality of these compounds: suppose you know what 理論、 理解、 解説、説明、and 回答 mean; you can infer what the "meanings" (or parts of meanings) are represented by 理 and 解. And then if you see 解答 for the first time, you can understand it compositionally. (I'm not claiming that *every* compound works like this–there are many, of course, that are rather opaque–but I do think that the majority remain compositional.)
Gpa said,

October 14, 2012 @ 4:29 pm

Vietnamese borrows mainly from Cantonese, which is a remnant from Middle Chinese, not Mandarin, which is a bunch of reduced sounds from Middle Chinese, so using Mandarin seems irrelevant. And using Japanese is more irrelevant. Most of the words in Japanese use ancient Chinese monosyllabic combinations with other monosyllabic words to form a disyllabic or polysyllabic word. Koreans due to their borrowing from Chinese, just like Japanese which borrows across the many varieties of Chinese dialects, so any Chinese dialect's original word is now not their own anymore. Basically, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese use the same method to convey Chinese disyllabism: Using approximate sounds via their devised writing systems, all via Chinese, to form the Chinese words, which might or might not sound like the original Chinese word anymore, due to Japanization, Koreanization and Vietnamization of these original Chinese words. 蝴蝶: 蝴 & 蝶 both mean "butterfly/butterflies", which are rarely separated to form other disyllabic / polysyllabic words in Chinese.

Source: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4233

APPENDIX P

Strong Sino-Vietnamese Word Choice in the Northern Vietnamese Sub-dialect vs. Southern Sub-dialect

 

LIST I

Ấntượng = Đángghinhớ, đángnhớ

Bang = Tiểubang (State)
Bắcbộ/Trungbộ/Nambộ = Bắcphần/Trungphần/Namphần
Báocáo = Thưatrình, nói, kể
Bảoquản = Chechở, giữgìn, bảovệ
Bàinói = Diễnvăn
Bảohiểm (mũ) = Antoàn (mũ)
Bèo = Rẻ (tiền)
Bồidưỡng = Nghỉngơi, tẩmbổ, sănsóc, chămnom, ănuốngđầyđủ, hốilộ
Bứcxúc = Dồnnén, bựctức
Bấtngờ = Ngạcnhiên
Bổsung = Thêm, bổtúc

Cáchly = Côlập
Cảnhbáo = Báođộng, phảichúý
CáiA-lô = Cáiđiệnthọai
Cáiđài = Radio, máyphátthanh
Cănhộ = Cănnhà
Căng (lắm) = Căngthẳng
Cầulông = Vũcầu
Chảnh = Kiêungạo, làmtàng
Chấtlượng = Phẩmchất
Chấtxám = Trítuệ, sựthôngminh
Chếđộ = Quychế
Chỉđạo = Chỉthị, ralệnh
Chỉtiêu = Địnhsuất
Chủnhiệm = Trưởngban, Khoatrưởng
Chủtrì = Chủtọa
Chữacháy = Cứuhỏa
Chiêuđãi = Thếtđãi
Chui = Lénlút
Chuyênchở = Nóilên, nêura
Chuyểnngữ = Dịch
Chứngminhnhândân = ThẻCăncuớc
Chủđạo = Chính
Cocụm = Thuhẹp
Côngđoàn = Nghiệpđoàn
Côngnghiệp = Kỹnghệ
Côngtrình = Côngtác
Cơbản = Cănbản
Cơkhí (tĩnhtừ!) = Cầukỳ, phứctạp
Cơsở = Cănbản, nguồngốc
Cửakhẩu = Phicảng, Hảicảng
Cụmtừ = Nhómchữ
Cứuhộ = Cứucấp

Diện = Thànhphần
Dựkiến = Phỏngđịnh

Đàotị = Tịnạn
Đầura/Đầuvào = Xuấtlượng/Nhậplượng
Đạitáo/Tiểutáo = Nấuănchung, ăntậpthể/Nấuănriêng, ăngiađình
Đạitrà = Quymô, cỡlớn
Đảmbảo = Bảođảm
Đăngký = Ghidanh, ghitên
Đápán = Kếtquả, trảlời
Đềxuất = Đềnghị
Độingũ = Hàngngũ
Độngnão = Vậndụngtríóc, suyluận, suynghĩ
Đồngbàodântộc = Đồngbàosắctộc
Độngthái = Độnglực
Độngviên = Khuyếnkhích
Độtxuất = Bấtngờ
Đườngbăng = Phiđạo
Đườngcaotốc = Xalộ

Giacông = Làmăncông
Giảiphóng = Lấylại, đemđi
Giảiphóngmặtbằng = Ủichođấtbằng
Giảnđơn = Đơngiản
Giaolưu = Giaothiệp, traođổi

Hạchtoán = Kếtoán
Hảiquan = QuanThuế
Hàngkhôngdândụng = Hàngkhôngdânsự
Hátđôi = Songca
Háttốp = Hợpca
Hạtnhân (vũkhí) = Nguyêntử
Hậucần = Tiếpliệu
Họcvị = Bằngcấp
Hệquả = Hậuquả
Hiệnđại = Tốitân
HộNhà = Giađình
Hộchiếu = SổThônghành
Hồhởi = Phấnkhởi
Hộkhẩu = Tờkhaigiađình
Hộichữthậpđỏ = HộiHồngThậpTự
Hoànhtráng = Nguynga, tránglệ, đồsộ
Hưngphấn = Kíchđộng, vuisướng
Hữuhảo = Tốtđẹp
Hữunghị = Thânhữu
Huyện = Quận

Kênh = Băngtần
Khảnăng = Cóthểxẩyra
Khẩntrương = Nhanhlên
Khâu = Bộphận, nhóm, ngành, ban, khoa
Kiềuhối = Ngoạitệ
Kiệtsuất = Giỏi, xuấtsắc
Kinhqua = Trảiqua

Làmgái = Làmđiếm
Làmviệc = Thẩmvấn, điềutra
Liênhoan = Đạihội, ănmừng
Liênhệ = Liênlạc
Linhtinh = Vớvẩn
Lợinhuận = Lợitức
Lượctóm = Tómlược
Lýgiải = Giảithích

Nắmbắt = Nắmvững
Nângcấp = Nâng, hoặcđưagiátrịlên
Năngnổ = Siêngnăng, tháovát
Nghệnhân = Thợ, nghệsĩ
Nghệdanh = Tên (nghệsĩ)
Nghĩavụquânsự = Điquândịch
Nghiêmtúc = Nghiêmchỉnh
Nghiệpdư = Đilàmthêm, nghềphụ, nghềtaytrái
Nhàkhách = Kháchsạn
Nhấttrí = Đồnglòng, đồngý
Nhấtquán = Luônluôn, trướcsaunhưmột
Ngườinướcngoài = Ngoạikiều
Nỗiniềm = suytư

Phầncứng = Cươngliệu
Phầnmềm = Nhuliệu
Phảnánh = Phảnảnh
Phảnhồi = Trảlời, hồiâm
Phátsóng = Phátthanh
PhóTiếnSĩ = CaoHọc
Phikhẩu = Phitrường, phicảng
Phivụ = Mộtvụtraođổithươngmại
Phụchồinhânphẩm = Hoànlương
Phươngán = Kếhoạch

Quátải = Quásức, quámức
Quántriệt = Hiểurõ
Quảnlý = Quảntrị
Quảngtrường = Côngtrường
Quânhàm = Cấpbực
Quyhoạch = Kếhoạch
Quytrình = Tiếntrình

Sốc (“shocked) ” = Kinhhoàng, kinhngạc, ngạcnhiên
Sơtán = Tảncư
Sư = Sưđoàn
Sứckhỏecôngdân = Ytếcôngcộng
Sựcố = Trởngại

Tậpđòan/Doanhnghiệp = Côngty
Tênlửa = Hỏatiễn
Thamgialưuthông = Lưuhành
Thamquan = Thămviếng
Thanhlý = Thanhtoán, chứngminh
Thânthương = Thânmến
Thicông = Làm
Thịphần = Thịtrường
Thunhập = Lợitức
Thưgiãn = Tỉnhtáo, giảitrí
Thuyếtphục (tính) = Cólý, hợplý, tinđược
Tiêntiến = Xuấtsắc
Tiếncông = Tấncông
Tiếpthu = Tiếpnhận, thâunhận, lãnhhội
Tiêudùng = Tiêuthụ
Tổlái = Phihànhđòan
Tờrơi = Truyềnđơn
Tranhthủ = Cốgắng
Trítuệ = Kiếnthức
Triểnkhai = Khaitriển
Tưduy = Suynghĩ
Tưliệu = Tàiliệu
Từ = Tiếng, chữ

Ùntắc = Tắtnghẽn

Vấnnạn = Vấnđề
Vậnđộngviên = Lựcsĩ
ViệnUngBướu = ViệnUngThư
Vôtư = Tựnhiên

Xáctín = Chínhxác
Xecon = Xedulịch
Xekhách = Xeđò
Xửlý = Giảiquyết, thihành

LIST II

Bắtmắt = Đẹpmắt, Ưanhìn, Hấpdẫn
Bìnhổn = Quânbình, ổnđịnh
Cănhộ = Cănnhà
Cảitạo = Tùkhổsai
Chuicửahậu = Côngdu
CụcĐườngbiển = Hànghải
CụcĐườngsắt = Hỏaxa
Cókhảnăng  = Cóthể
Dũngcảm = Mạnhmẽ
Đạitrà = Quymô
Đápán = Câutrảlời, Đápsố 
Đẳngcấp = Giaicấp    
Đilàmsuốt = Đilàmsuốtngày, suốtbuổi
Độngthái = Độngtĩnh
Độngviên = khuyếnkhích
Giámềm = Giárẻ
Giáhữunghị = Giátượngtrưng
Giảmtốc = Giảmtốcđộ
Giaodịch = Thươngthảo
Hâm, Tửng = Khùng, mátgiây
Hộlý = Dâmnô
Hiểnthị = Xem, Thấy
Khẩutrang = Băngvệsinh
Khẩntrương = Gấprút, Khẩncấp
Làmchủ = Nôlệ
Lênlớp = Dạyđời, Sửalưng

Mặtbằng = Diệntíchđất

Nhânthân = Thânnhân
Phảnbiện = Phảnđối
Quantâm = Lolắng
Quảngbá = Quảngcáo, Truyềnbá
Quảnlý = Sởhữu
Sânbay = Phitrường
Tàichủnướclạ = Tàucộngxâmlăng
Tàuvũtrụ = Phithuyền
Tiếnsĩhữunghị = Tiếnsĩgiấy, tiếnsĩdỏm
Tiếnđộ = Tiếntrình
Tiếpcận = Gầngũi, Giaotiếp
Tưvấn = Cốvấn
Tốchất = Tưchất