Talk:Vietnamese language

genetic classification?

'Britannica claims that Vietnamese is one of the , not descended from Chinese. Do you have a better source?

-- I don't know what an Austroasiatic language is, other than perhaps a language used near Australia or Asia. The old characters are very similar to Ok. The languages you cited are members of the Tai languages, which is a different group altogether. As to what the Austroasiatic languages are, I think the best answer for now is the languages related to Vietnamese and Cambodian, which do not include Chinese. If they sound similar, though, I would bet that Chinese has had a big influence on Vietnamese, including probably the system of writing. Permission to say so above?

--Go ahead and Be bold in updating pages; I don't mind. Interesting that you bring up Cambodian, though, because that's the language I'm most familiar with - and it's closer to Laotian and Thai than anything else. Cambodian and Thai are about as close to each other as Spanish and English - *lots* of roots and words that are similar or the same, and the written languages are also very close. (Thai and Lao are about like Spanish and Italian, or even Spain-Spanish and Mexico-Spanish). Those three all have strong roots in Pali and Sanskrit. Doing a little research, however, http://www.saigon.com/~nguyent/hoa_04.html seems to agree with you, so let's go ahead and make the change.

Vietnamese as Austroasiatic

2002.03.09: As someone who has pretensions of knowing something about linguistics, I can confirm that Vietnamese is considered by linguists to be an Austroasiatic language, part of the Austronesian languages grouping. This language grouping can, very roughly speaking, be divided into four major areas: Vietnamese/Cambodian, Malagasy language, the languages of the Indonesian & Phillipine archipelagos (with exceptions), and then the Oceanic (or Polynesian) languages.

I think Austroasiatic have never officially became a part of Austronesian. ASutroasiatic-Austronesian should be as far as Austronesian~Tai-Kadai Visit this page www.ethnologue.com/family_index.asp --qrasy-- 10:37 PM June 5th, 2005(GMT+7)

tonogenesis speculation

Most notable is that Vietnamese is, to my knowledge, the only one of these that is tonal. I'd hazard a guess that the tonal system of Vietnamese arises from the influence of the Sino-Tibetan and Tai/Daic languages surrounding it and Khmer. But I'd be overstepping the limits of my knowledge trying to make any actual *claim* that such is the case.

There are other languages related to Vietnamese that have tone. The general hypothesis is that tones were developed historically from the influence of surrounding consonants. (Consonants in all languages affect the frequency of vowel formants.) Here is a cool link about some of this: http://www.anu.edu.au/~u9907217/languages/AAlecture6.html There was an article in Language about this too.

Ish ishwar 14:22, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)

unicode

I'm inclined to add a section to this page that includes the Unicode characters for several of these symbols. It's kind of hard to connect the written form with these ASCII adaptations. -- Taral

I would recommend using the Unicode forms for the correct orthography in the text where possible (as numeric character references, since we're still using ISO-8859-1 for the text encoding), with ASCII adaptations only as a parenthetical backup for those with old browsers/crappy fonts/text consoles. (Images are another, also unappetizing, possibility.) Brion VIBBER

Already done. :-) pgdudda

Please can somebody just specify a unicode font or 3 in the text? They are easy enough to get and one at least (Lucida Sans Unicode) seems to come with either Windows or some Windows apps. Numeric character references only work if a suitable font is provided anyway. I would recommend that the font faces be provided explicitly in the HTML rather than the stylesheets, since many browsers cannot understand standard CSS.

origins of Roman alpha usage?

I'd be curious to know roughly when Vietnam began using the Roman alphabet. Seems that would be useful to add here and/or in History of Vietnam. Wesley

bad translation

The English translation of the poem is horrible. However, I'm not qualified enough to do it justice. "Four scores and two ten years" is too wordy. The first line of the poem literally says "A hundred year within the life of a person..."

computers & unicode

It would good if the computer support section mentioned that there are both combining characters and precomposed characters for Vietnamese in Unicode — and the reasons why and possible problems because of the two systems. — Hippietrail 23:21, 4 Jun 2004 (UTC)

history inaccuracies

The history section isn't totally accurate:

Vietnam actually had two ways to use Chinese characters: chu nho and chu nom.
Vietnam is not surrounded by countries which use "ideographic" characters. Thailand, Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos all use syllabaries ultimately from the same source as Devanagari.

— Hippietrail 03:08, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)

diacritics?

Can someone explain why the vietmanese writing has so many markings? Also, can someone list the prounciations of each letter of that is possible like in spanish?

Vietnamese is a tonal language, and some of the diacritical marks signify the tonal quality of a syllable (such as o versus ò, in which o has the level tone and ò has a falling tone). Another class of diacriticals signify whether a vowel is pronounced "long" or "short" (such as o versus ô, where ô is pronounced like "oh" in English, while o is pronounced somewhat similarly to "ah"). These two types of diacritical marks can be combined in the same letter, indicating for example a long "oh" with a rising tone, and can appear somewhat complicated to one unfamiliar with the orthography. Please take caution with my explanation, however, as I am merely a student of the language, and I am neither fluent nor literate in the language.

— Ryanaxp

pronunciation additions

Hi. I added a lot stuff about vowels & gave my sources. I got rid of the SAMPA vowel chart. SAMPA is very unsophisticated & is only used on the Net. But, since there is the technology to write mostly decent IPA now, I think it should be used. I recommend a comparison of Nguyễn & Thompson. Nguyễn's work is current (he died in 2000, I think). Thompson did his field work around Saigon in the 50s & later had Vietnamese consultants in America in the 60s. But he moved on to Native American linguistics. I would guess that most American textbooks are based on Thompson (?). I want to add more about diphthongs & the writing system, but I that will come later. Comments, you can email.

Ish ishwar 10:59, 22 Nov 2004 (UTC)

too much?

Am I writing too much? Someone please advise. Create a separate Vietnamese phonology section?

Ish ishwar 05:29, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)

I think you're doing fine. The article is small as it is. DHN 23:58, 25 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Amen to that. Superb job, Mr. Ishwar. Pointing out the inconsistences in the phonetic representations is essential, and you have done that. My only quibble is the choice of Hà Nội as the "main" dialect. It's like choosing British or American variants of English as the correct one. I'm used to the HCMC variant. I might add some corrections a little later to compare HN versus HCMC.

Hi. Thanks for the encouragement. I would like to continue adding more information about some of the other varieties of Vietnamese. I didnt choose the Hanoi variety for any reason other than this variety is the main focus of the works I am consulting (which are mostly Nguyễn 1997 & Thompson 1965). Thompson has published on Saigon (HCMC) Vietnamese in an earlier article in Language. There are some other things (some written in Vietnamese & French) which I dont have. Cheers! - Ish ishwar 07:06, 2005 Jan 19 (UTC)

new phonology article

Hi.

I am thinking about making a separate Vietnamese article on the sound system because the page is in excess of 32 kb & I want to add a considerable amount of material on a phonetic description of (1) consonants, (2) tones, (3) orthography, (4) dialectal variation (only phonetics though). This will probably make the page a little unwieldy.

My question to you is: What to call the article?

I cant see a standarized naming convention for this. Below are some names of similar articles from different languages:

So we could have one or two or three articles with names modeled after the above depending on how we divide the information up. I dont see a point in creating separate alphabet and spelling pages (for Vietnamese or English).

Assuming the new article(s) is/are agreed upon by everyone, then the remaining question is what to leave in the main Vietnamese language article.

Suggestions/comments?

- Ish ishwar 19:28, 2005 Jan 28 (UTC)

Great idea.

There seems to be a consensus on phonology for the French and Spanish articles. You can create an article entitled Vietnamese phonology and have Vietnamese pronunciation and Vietnamese dialects redirect there. DHN 22:47, 17 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Phono update:

created Vietnamese phonology
move detailed info from this article to phonology article
inprove tone chart
greatly simply phono description

One important thing to note is that I have made a decision to use only the orthography in this article. Readers who are interested in phonetics/phonology are referred to the phonology article for IPA transcription and more detail description & analysis. My reason for doing this is that the use of phonetic notation may be unnecessarily complicated for the non-phonetically-oriented, more casual reader. This practice has been adopted in many pedagogical works and even in the rather technical works by Thompson (1965) and Nguyễn (1997). Some authors may take issue with this, though — so I'm letting you know. (If you are interested, I have a discussion with another linguistically-oriented reader about using orthography in Navajo.)

- Ish ishwar 19:39, 2005 Mar 1 (UTC)

Redirects added

I added the redirects for "Vietnamese pronounciation" and "Vietnamese dialects. I hope it helps.

--Tphcm 06:31, 15 May 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Khmer Krom and the population of Vietnamese speakers

I noticed the number of speakers of Vietnamese listed in the chart was revised downward with a notice added about the Khmer Krom. However, from my experiences in Vietnam, the great majority (indeed, if not the totality) of Khmer Krom living in the Saigon area spoke Vietnamese natively. This does not mean that they did not also speak Khmer natively, as well, and perhaps the number of Khmer-speakers should include such percentage of Khmer Krom who are believed to speak Khmer. However, I think it would be a mistake to exclude Khmer Krom speakers of Vietnamese from the tally of Vietnamese speakers as much as it would be to exclude, by way of analogy, Welsh-speakers (who indeed number over half a million) from the tally of English-speakers, because as with the Khmer Krom and the Vietnamese language, essentially all native Welsh-speakers (apart from toddlers and possibly a dozen or so elderly people) are also native English-speakers. --Ryanaxp 15:50, May 24, 2005 (UTC)

I think we should count second-language speakers since the field is "total speakers". Even if the the Khmer Krom don't speak Vietnamese natively, the vast majority do speak Vietnamese (as do most other minorities in this 80+ million people country). DHN 04:35, 2 Jun 2005 (UTC)

hi. you could also just list both. a discussion in the article body could explain this further. — ishwar (SPEAK) 05:25, 2005 Jun 2 (UTC)

Use Unicode in language description pages?

Please can somebody more skilled than I put Unicode font faces (eg: Lucida Sans Unicode, Doulos SIL) into language description pages? It is VERY annoying to see little square boxes where we KNOW a readable character must live.

The HTML entity construction {&[#]nnnn;} does not always work, especially on older browsers -- I use IE5.01 and Opera 6.05.

I would also suggest that a larger range of Unicode fonts be given for users' browsers to choose from -- I mentioned Lucida and Doulos simply because they fell into my machine on another excursion. This is especially important if the font faces are embedded in external stylesheets.

Lead paragraph

"Although it contains much vocabulary borrowed from Chinese and was originally written using Chinese characters, it is considered by linguists to be one of the Austroasiatic languages, of which it has the most speakers by a significant margin (three to four times the number of speakers of the other languages combined)".

Is this sentence a little backwards? In other words, wouldn't it be more informative to mention the genetic language family first, and only after the Chinese information? In a way that would be more objective, more centered on Vietnamese itself and less centered on a foreign language as a point of reference. ~ Dpr 06:32, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

yes, it is a little bit misleading. it was written by authors who apparently thought it was related to Chinese languages (you can get this from some of the first comments on this talk page), and thus worded in this way. perhaps some were surprised to find that it wasnt. i associate this type of confusion with thinking that Chinese and Japanese languages are related or that all Native Americans speak the same language, etc. please continue your edits. peace. – ishwar (speak) 06:54, 2005 Jun 22 (UTC)

Overseas Vietnamese

Can we get a link for overseas Vietnamese? Thanks ~ Dpr 06:33, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Try Viet Kieu and Vietnamese American. DHN 09:01, 22 Jun 2005 (UTC)

DHN, thanks for the help but if you read the definition of Viet Kieu in the article, it clearly applies only to a subset of overseas Vietnamese and inherently NOT "overseas Vietnamese" as a comprehensive group: namely, it defines Viet Kieu as only those who left after 1975...an enormous part of the overseas Vietnamese left far before 1975. Therefore Viet Kieu should be separate from overseas Vietnamese (OV), or the definition of OV and Viet Kieu should be defined in the article to be the same entity, and also to include those who emigrated pre-1975. Hope that makes sense. Thanks! ~ Dpr 00:55, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The article's definition is wrong. Việt Kiều in Vietnamese had nothing to do with whether they left before or after 1975. This is similar to huáqiáo in Chinese (with Viet replacing Hoa). This term was in use long before 1975. BTW: Of the about 3 million overseas Vietnamese, about 300,000 left before 1975 (mainly to neighboring countries and France). DHN 05:58, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Cool. I already suspected what you just confirmed...though I had overestimated the size of pre-75 emigrants. I can fix the article when I have time, or anyone else can go ahead. Peace! ~ Dpr 06:18, 23 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Additions

Are the additions of User:172.155.60.145 linguistically sound? The "influence" of Mandarin? ~ Dpr 07:26, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

The text you refer to was re-added on June 30, 2005, although the editor who added it has not justified such an assertion by providing documentation. I therefore reverted the article to an earlier version that did not include the text that asserts a connection between Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese phonologies. Without any appropriate documentation, such a theory apparently amounts only to a pet theory—which is impermissible original research. —Ryanaxp June 30, 2005 15:53 (UTC)

It is conceivable that the author meant "similarity" rather than "influence", thereby being attempting a descriptive not a causative statement? ~ Dpr 1 July 2005 01:53 (UTC)

Vowels

This is absolutely incorrect!

There are two of these semivowels: y and w. Vietnamese has many diphthongs of this type. Furthermore, these semivowels may also follow the first three diphthongs (iâ, uâ, ưâ ) resulting in triphthongs.

Vietnamese, for example, has no "w" – not even the W sound, except in foreign words embedded in the text. (The Vietnamese Wikipedia is named "Wikipedia", but it'd be phonetically written as Ui-khi-pé-đi-a or something like that.) Such a sound at the end of a word would be written as an o following another vowel. Furthermore, there's no such thing as iâ or ưâ in Vietnamese text.

–Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs, blog) 29 June 2005 01:23 (UTC)

I see what the writer wanted to explain, but it's a little bit short and not accurate. I think the writer wanted to say that Vietnamese has diphtongs and triphtongs and how they are built. That can be better seen in the section about syllable structure in the Vietnamese phonology article. Vietnamese has 14 nuclei: 11 are a,ă,â,e,ê,i,o,ô,ơ,u,ư. The other 3 are: iê/ia, uô/uo, and ươ/ưa. Vietnamese has indeed the two semivowels /w/ and /j/ that can combine with the above nucleuses (but some combinations are not allowed!) The W-sound in Vietnamese is written u or o like in uă, uâ, oa, oe, uy, uơ, for example Wikipedia would be rendered as Uy-ki-pê-đia, pronounced We-ghee-pay-dear. /w/ can be before OR after certain nucleuses. In contrast /j/ can only appear after the nucleus like in hai or cây. That's how triphthongs are built: a /w/ before and another /w/ or /j/ after the nucleus: e.g. ngoai (/Nwaj/), khuỷu (/Kwiw/). To sum it up: Vietnamese has semivowels that can add to the full vowels to form diphthongs and triphthongs.

--- Retval 29 June 2005 21:06 (UTC) ---

"Obvious"

To whom is it obvious that labeling the Vietnamese name of the language as Vietnamese? To most, surely. But at the risk of sounding condescending, yet--I believe--accurate, I suggest it is necessary to appeal to the broadest common denominator. Moreover, sometimes language names are glossed in a language other than that being described, thus leading to possible confusion. Thanks ~ Dpr 1 July 2005 01:55 (UTC)

It seems ridiculous to me to use the term that we're defining to define it. DHN 1 July 2005 02:51 (UTC)

It may very well be ridiculous to refer to the very language we're defining in such close proximity to its own definition, but not intrinsically ridiculous because there is still some remote possibility for ambiguity. In any case, I fully concede, as your proposed approach seems to be the standard across Wikipedia. Thanks ~ Dpr 4 July 2005 04:30 (UTC)