Prologe and introduction

The background

Symbols and conventions

Historical periods in the development
of Vietnamese

The distribution of the indigenous languages before the Vietnamese

MAP OF...

the Tang Dynasty 760 A.D.

the Yangtze River Basin

the Austroasiatic languages

territories of dynasties in China

the Qin's boundary

proto-Chinese immigration routes

Vietnamese       Chinese
What Makes Chinese so Vietnamese?

An Introduction to Sinitic-Vietnamese Studies

(Ýthức mới về nguồngốc tiếngViệt)

DRAFT

Table of Contents

dchph

Chapter One

I) Introduction

I am going to introduce some new findings in the study field of Vietnamese (V) etymology to be called Sinitic-Vietnamese (VS) (S) with a great number of words that are either derived from or sharing with northern Chinese Mandarin (M) as a result of its localization and innovation by speakers in the colonial government in Annam, now northern Vietnam. The term Sinitic-Vietnamese may also embrace another class of Vietnamese vocabulary, best known as Sino-Vietnamese (SV), that in turn had its deep root in Middle Chinese (MC) that was changed over time by officials serving imperial rulers from northern China. Like any southern Chinese dialects such as Cantonese or Fukienese, those Sinitic, or Chinese, components constitute most of the Vietnamese linguistic aspects today. In this survey, we shall focus mainly on the Sinitic-Vietnamese words which can be traced as far back into the linguistic past of Old Chinese (OC), which is in turn affiliated with the Sino-Tbetan linguisitc family (ST). For those fundamental Vietnamese cognates found in the latter Sino-Tibetan languages, they appear to have descended from Taic-Yue language family that had existed in the China South (華南 Hoanam) region long before the Chinese.

Etymologically, even though many commonly cited basic words in Vietnamese are currently considered as from Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer subfamily (AA MK) of a larger Austric family by the historical linguistic world; yet, it is postulated that all of them must have evolved from the same roots that once belonged to Taic-Yue strata, an ancient language family at least ancestral to proto-Vietic or Annamese (Annamite) and Daic, including those currently being grouped as Chinese dialects in the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family such as Cantonese and Fukienese. Why is their division? Their nominal difference lies in the fact that that is implicitly due to their synchronic nature in classification. For example, 'Sinitic' was derived from the name of the "Qin" State in the 3rd century B.C.; however, the same concept is embraced to refer to those pre-Chin(a) or proto-Chinese entities way far back not only beyond the Qin Dynasty but remotely surpassed the Shang-Xia Dynasties up to 5000 years ago. As for the modern Vietnamese it started to form in the 12th century (Nguyễn Tài Cẩn. 1978. See Appendix I), we may be able to step back and identify most of Sinitic-Vietnamese words from extracted data of the last 3000 years before present (B.P.) based on available Chinese historical records. Beyond that period there had existed hypotheses from many early authors such as De Lacouperie (1887) and specialists from the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer camp.

The following introductory sections will give readers a preliminary preview of what should be expected throughout this elongate work. Primarily, the author will go over main points covered throughout the paper and, at the same time, build a rapport with some good examples of Sinitic-Vietnamese words to entertain readers by which many of them have never encountered before with respect to their Sinitic or Sino-Tibetan etymology because many etyma were mislabeled as of Mon-Khmer (MK) origin. Secondarily, even though it is not the main objective of this paper but its what is called the next level of achiement in the field, undeniably prominent Sino-Tibetan etymological evidences (see Chapter 10 - Parallels with the Sino-Tibetan languages can be used to renew a long standing issue of whether or not we should consider to re-classify Vietnamese into the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family (ST). The first revelation ever in this field of study with ample Sino-Tibetan evidences result from the forthcoming comparative work presented hereafter are based on the newly found Vietnamese words in Sino-Tibetan languages. That said, the author will be focusing not only on Vietnamese and Chinese cognates but also those found in Sino-Tibetan etymologies. The new findings will lend supports to the Sino-Tibetan theorization to rebut existing Austroasiatic theories on the Mon-Khmer origin (AA-MK) of the Vietnamese language. Lastly, some housekeeping for terminologies and conventions, and so on, will need our attention to make sure that we will be on track talking about the Sinitic-Vietnamese subjects on the same terms.

A) What makes Chinese so Vietnamese?

For posing such an intriguing question above, the subject matter of this section is built on the premise that in the prehistoric period in the region of China South (華南) there first had existed the ancient Yue aborigines and then the early Chinese emerged from the fusion of the Yue natives with those of the proto-Tibetan people who advanced from southwestern plateau. Altogether they were parts of all other populace in other states in the B.C. period prior to their being totally conquered by the Qin State (秦國). The subsequent collapse of the short-lived Qin Empire (221 B.C.-207 B.C.) gave rise to both the Han Empire (漢朝) in the north and the NamViet Kingdom (南越王國) further in the south and with the former having conquered the latter in 111 B.C. Not until 1050 years later in 939 A.D., the ancient Annam prefecture, located in today's North Vietnam, separated the ancestral Yue's territory under the rule of NanHan State (南漢國) to become an independent state after a long period under the Chinese rule with heavy Sinicization. Populace of Annam were descendants of the racial admixture of the early Yue and the later Han colonialists who had overstayed their mission in the southern land to have avoided the war-ravaged turmoils in the mainland in the last decades prior to and after the collapse of the Tang Dynasty. The Vietnam's history, hence, has been that of survivors of those Han sojouners and Southern Yue people all having emigrated from the China South region (CS). While the modern name 'Việtnam' as best known today means the "Yue people of the South", on their way advancing toward the south, they mixed further with local people and, altogether, they made up the Kinh majority. In other words, like the 'Chinese', no people are "pure" Vietnamese.

The introduction in this chapter on the Yue entities in ancient Annam will be elaborated with the history of ancient China that supports the theorization that

(1) the Sinitic elements emerged only after the Yue entities had been in existence, e.g., the Zodiac table of 12 animals, '/krong/' (river) for 江 jiang

(2) the Yue forms in the Sinitic language subfamily of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family are attested by nearly all fundamental words in Vietnamese, e.g., 'gà' (chicken) for 雞 jī, 'ngà' (tusk) 牙 yá, etc., and

(3) the Sinitic-Vietnamese lexicons in the Vietnamese language came into existence after the Han colonial periods, e.g., 房 fáng for 'buồng' (room), 車 chē for 'xe' (carriage). (See Chinese cognates with ancient Vietnamese words)

As opposed to 'Sinitic', the term 'Yue' as transribed in Chinese variants 越, 粵, 戉, 鉞... used in this paper is to denote indigenous linguistic strata with fundamental words on which the proto-Vietic language had evolved and spread to various pre-Han forms as well, that is, an older ancestral form of Archaic Chinese (ArC) in the 'pre-Qin' era hundreds of years B.P., of which the latter Sino-Tibetan and Sinitic variant etyma later had abundance of time to have made multiple round trips back (and forth) to contribute more into the ancient Vietnamese vocabularies and vice versa, under different appearance. In effect, historical records indicate that both aboriginal Yue and proto-Chinese lexical items by then would have blended well into an admixture of what was known as a common diplomatic language called Yáyǔ (雅語) used among ancient pre-China's states as recorded in Chinese annals; that probably was the Taic-origin speech spoken by subjects of the Chu State (楚國) in the Spring and Autumn Period (春秋時代), B.C., which was the mother-tongue that had given rise to all other Daic-Kadai languages that the Dai and Thai people speak at present. Meanwhile, Yue is descent linguistic subfamily of the Taic, that has also formed what is known as ancestral Vietnamese roots. The author hence finds it appropriate to entitle this paper as What Makes Chinese So Vietnamese? (工) to spring forth the fact that there first had existed the Yue and only then came the Chinese on the Flowery Land.

The ancient Annamese — a historical name for that of the 'ancient Vietnamese' — language emerged with the Old Chinese forms of the later Western Han (206 B.C. to 24 A.D.) had been brought into the Annamese land by the Han colonialists. Linguistically, elements of Ancient Chinese of the era that followed. (T) As Annam became a sovereignty in 939 A.D., it continued to use Chinese characters, though, called ChữNho (儒字), or Classical Chinese 文言文, as her writing system. In the meanwhile, the Vietnamese language as we recognized it had not fully formed until the 12th century (See also Nguyễn Ngọc San. 1993, p. 5). In the 15th century Vietnamese literary works were found to be written in another modified form of Chinese-character-based scripts known as ChữNôm (𡨸喃) (字). In the 18th century when the Western missionaries came to the country to propagandize the Gospel, they encountered difficulties in learning the complicate Vietnamized Chinese scripts, so they created the Romanized Vietnamese system. Since the early 20th century their new writing system based on the Latin alphabets had gained popular acceptance for its ease of use and even though it was not officially adopted by governmental decree until 1945. However, such national script is called 'Quốcngữ' had earlier won full support of the French colonial government that eagerly wanted to drive out Chinese influence in Annam. In essence, the new medium of writing was actually only to transcribe all the Vietnamese and HánNôm (漢喃) words, the latter of which consist of both categories of Sinitic-Vietnamese (漢喃) and Sino-Vietnamese (漢越), into the new Romanized forms, whence the French lexicons left barely a few of residues as we see now.

Bùi Khánh-Thế in his article (printed in the scientific journal of Tập san khoa học Trường ĐHKHXH&NV — National University of HCM City, issue 38. 2007. pp. 3–10. regarding the interaction and interchange of the Chinese language throughout Vietnam's history, the author quoted Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1998) as summed up the table below.

Table 1. Division of Historical Periods in the Development of the Vietnamese language

Based on the formation of the Hán-Việt pronunciation of the Middle Chinese, Annam dịchngữ (安南譯語 Translated Annamese Words) and the Annamese-Latin-Portugese Dictionary by Alexandre de Rhode (1651), H. Maspéro devised similar division of 5 development periods:

A) Proto-Việt (prior to the 9th century)

B) Archaic Vietnamese: the 10th century (formation of the Hán-Việt)

C) Ancient Vietnamese: the 15th century (Annam Dịchngữ)

D) Middle Vietnamese: the 17th century (Dictionary by A. de Rhôde 1651)

E) Contemporary Vietnamese (19th century)

Source: Table 1 by Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1998, p. 8) quoted by Bùi Khánh-Thế. (See Appendix I)

What is introduced in this preliminary preview will be elaborated on and expanded further in the next chapters. Our goal is to establish groundwork for the theory that both Chinese and Vietnamese fundamental words that shared the same Yue etyma, which is known in Vietnamese as 'Việt' (越 Yuè) and in Cantonese as 'Jyet6' (粵 Yuè), grew on top of the Sino-Tibetan stratum where the historical Chinese language of the later period were made up the classical literary language with many native words collected in Yayu (雅語 - See De Lacouperie, 1887) might have been derived mainly from the Chu language (楚國語) and had been a de facto diplomatic language among ancient states in the Spring and Autumn Period (春秋時代, 771 B.C.-403 B.C.), and it evolved into Old Chinese, Ancient Chinese, and Middle Chinese. After the Qin State unified and ruled the mainland of China, the Sintic linguistic elements flowed back and penetrated into several major Yue languages to have evolved into highly Sinicized Yue speeches, such as those of the Wu, Fukienese, Cantonese, Vietnamese languages, that is, all with Sinitic elements were supplanted on top of the original Yue soil. Such linguistic cycles can help explain the existence of Vietnamese cognates with the Sino-Tibetan fundamental etyma and, like other aforementioned Yue languages, they also made up the Sinitic linguistic subfamily until Annamese went its own way after independence in the 10th century.

For over the span of hundreds of years that followed, for the fact that the native Yue roots of common aboriginal etyma as found in Old Chinese and Ancient Chinese had synchronically returned to the Sinitic speeches and became parts of their vocabulary, overall, their lexical appearance were "re-packaged" under different forms. Besides sharing tonal values that spread from 3 to 10 tones across all Sinitic languages, their other linguistic characteristics even show only subtle discrepancies in articulation in regional vocabularies that grossly encompass nearly all lexical doublets — words from the same root — especially from proto-Taic, Taic, and Daic-Katai, e.g., 'kao' or 'gạo' for 'dào' 稻 (rice), elephant, whale, fox, rhinoceros, etc. (see APPENDIX G: Tsu-lin Mei, The case of "ngà"), names of the twelve animals in the well-known Chinese zodiac table found themselves recyled and re-used in other minority languages in China South, not to mention minor variants, except for the item 'hare' 兔 tù (VS thỏ), other eleven of the respective animals in the modern Vietnamese language are noted that they originated from some common indigenous languages, which are attested by the same etyma used by ethnic groups living in China South. As a matter of fact, recycled lexicological materials show in as recent as in our contemporary time as attested in the linguistic exchange among regional languages, e.g., Chinese-based Japanese words of modern concepts such as 共和 gònghé (republic) and 民主 mínzhǔ (democratic) were borrowed back into Chinese, as mentioned earlier

As seen through the usage frequency of Chinese and Vietnamese cognates in fundamental realm, which is both appear to contain residues of basic words from the "Yue" stratum. Such course of linguistic interchanges in effect had taken place long before the Qin and Han (漢朝 206 B.C.-220 A.D.) empires ever expanded to colonize the China South (華南) region. Many of such words were also positively identified in attested contexts in the Chinese Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典), a monumental work compiled by great scholars in the Qing Dynasty under an imperial decree issued by Emperor Kangxi. (Y)

In many facets history of both countries have been intertwined with each other until Annam successfully broke away from China. The written history of Vietnam had never been compiled by her own historians pretty long after the 10th century. What had happened before that period was mainly based on Chinese annals without cross references. Likewise, linguistically, research on the Vietnamese or Chinese linguistics will be insufficient if that of the other is left outin our discussions, especially for those of Old Chinese and Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma along with their shared linguistic peculiarities (See Wangli, 1957.) In effect, ancient Vietnam had been effectively a prefecture of China known as Annam for more than 1000 years prior to 939 A.D. Such a historical note will help explain why there exists a massive amount of Middle Chinese loanwords in the Vietnamese language. The last historical linguistic stage that followed the disintegration of Nan-Han State (南漢) in post-Tang era influenced greatly the formation of the Vietnamese language, on the one hand, by having brought learned vocabulary used by mandarins and scholars in the imperial court to the common mass by a larger scale to have become the everyday language, on the other hand, that made Middle-Chinese stock in Vietnamese somehow to appear similar to Cantonese for its full preservation of Middle Chinese 8-toned system, especially the 8th Entering Tone (入聲 Rusheng). To get the records straigth though, actually Vietnamese is more like Mandarin in terms of its colloquial usages of vernacular nothern Chinese Mandarin than Cantonese, not to mention its peculiarly phonological /-owng/ finals. We will return to the matter of Mandarin's likelihood later in this paper.

In any case, that is not all what makes Chinese so Vietnamese. Something else very much older had existed as Yue linguistic elements only in archaic forms being buried underneath the heavy Sinitic camouflage that has made so many indigenous Taic-Yue words to be mistaken as Chinese that, for the same matter in Vietnamese. Meanwhile, on the contrary, they are treated as "thuầnViệt" or "pure Vietnamese". Given Vietnamese as representative of the Yue survivor descents as previously mentioned, ancient Yue linguistic vestiges are pronounced in special Vietnamese way of those Chinese variations that are, in a way, sound modulators for those toneless words in several other Sino-Tibetan languages. So, while its Yue-origin words were masked as Chinese, the Taic-Yue words that made their way into Sinitic languages were shown in ancient proto-Vietic language. That is how "Vietnamese", or "Yue" to be exact, is regarded as to have existed before the early Sino-Tibetan speakers as forefathers of the Chinese moved in the China South region. For that matter, we will examine all the fundamental cognates with Taic-Yue, Chinese, and Vietnamese etyma being found across many Sino-Tibetan etymologies in detail in Chapter 10 .(未)

Let us return now to what we have just touched on above regarding words of higher-level in Middle Chinese — in similarly contextual usage in both Cantonese and Vietnamese — prior to the Tang Dynasty (618-906) that have become the indispensable Sino-Vietnamese stock in the Vietnamese language. Technically speaking, Sino-Vietnamese and Sinitic-Vietnamese are of two distinct lexical classes with the latter one having many layers of doublets piled up on top the former ones as a result of vernacular forms of Mandarin that has stretched out at least from the Han Dynasty through the Ming Dynasty in the 15th century.

Respectively, vocabularies identified in the Sino-Vietnamese realm could also be overlapped by those of the Sinitic-Vietnamese as well, though, because the extension of rich Middle Chinese vocabulary stock as attested in spoken Vietnamese that have been so widely used on daily basis by the common mass. The cited examples below illustrate a process of how those Sino-Vietnamese lexicons have been localized to make them sound like native words, hence, they becoming Sinitic-Vietnamese, i.e., no longer retaining the original meanings, a phenomenon more being more commplace in Janpanse Kanji than in Sino-Vietnamese, though, e.g., 'lịchsự' (polite) < '歴事 lìshì' (originally 'experience') or 'tửtế' (kind) < '仔細 zǐxì' ('meticulously'), etc; otherwise, they are of a larger set of vocabulary stock of Chinese origin being localized by systematic pronunciation that had evolved directly from a variety of Middle Chinese, assumingly postulated as close as to an ancient Shaanxi (陜西) dialect spoken in Chang'an 長安, the old capital of the Tang Empire in today's Xi'an City (西安市).

As the ancient Vietnamese evolved into the late Middle Vietnamese language needed then were functional words to construct sentences that imitated French grammar structurally as late as the early 20th centry. On its becoming coloquial speech, lexically, the Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies which must have come from a vernacular form of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 A.D.) as it might be still reserved somewhat in the highly Sinicizing style as, comparabale to the spoken Cantonese language. As recently as the 16th century, many Middle Chinese words transformed into the Sinitic-Vietnamese grammatical function words (虛辭) — equivalents of English although, not, in, at, from, and, hence, herewith, albeit, etc. — that evolved into linguistic necessity for non-flectional cases in grammar for both Vietnamese or Chinese (See Nguyen Ngoc San. 1993. pp. 138-142). As a matter of fact, ancient Vietnamese had used the classical Chinese (文言文) style (文) — which had been in use since the Tang Dynasty and diminished as late as toward the end of the 19th century — what sounds somewhat mystic in Tang-styled poetic stanza and overly cryptic in Vietnamese literary proses prior to the development of romanized Quốcngữ accompanied by its newly written transformation with a colloquial style (See Nguyễn Thị Chân-Quỳnh. 1995).

Comparatively, in Vietnamese there exist Sinitic components similar to what Middle Chinese has contributed to the makeup of Cantonese or, further into the remote past, Han's Old Chinese to the other Minnan subdialects, i.e., Fukienese, Amoy, Hainanese, or Chaozhou. Both Han and Tang lexicons contributed more new words into the Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabulary in the cycling patterns that recurred in the Vietnamese language in the later time. Given the fact that the two major southern dialects have been crowned with a Sinitic brand in the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family and that the principle of linguistic essence will rule based on major linguistic attributes and characteristics (cf. Latin-dominated French or bare-bone Anglo-Saxon of the English language, or Australian English vs. Indian English, and so on so forth.), all find similar linguistic models as such, e.g., hybrid Bulgarian, Africaan vs. Dutch, or Latin-French vs. Gaulish, Haitiian French vs. Marocan French..., the same theoretical principle can be equally applied to Vietnamese throughout our work about linguistic classification of Sinitic-dominant Vietnamese. It is, however, not up to any Sino-Tibetan theorists to go for in full force to clearly label Vietnamese as one of those in the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family with ample etymological support, or even simply of the Sinitic branch by just following the Cantonese model, though.

For the Sino- or Sinitic- prefixes being used to denote the concept "Chinese" in the linguistic classification, let us not be blindfolded by the name as it is being called. Sometimes it is nominally just a matter of academic convenience, especially for the western scholars, to designate an already widely accepted name, in this case, to call the entity "Chinese" even though it did not exist in the timeframe it is referred to, given the archeaological fact that the Yue entities had already been in existence long before what was considered as of China that emerged along with its subsequent aforementioned linguistic elements that came into being. In other words, it is an academic technique to make use of pre-existing terminology currently affixed to a popular domain name so as to conveniently refer to its prenatal forms that are well-known to the academic world. Such naming convention for conceptual designation is normally accepted in historical linguistic circles, especially in this case, because people know "Chinese" but might not have heard about "Yue". For the same matter, they may not buy the idea if the term is referenced with "Việt" or even /Jyet8/, herein with "Vietnamese" in the title of the book instead of "Yue". That is what makes Vietnamese so Chinese.

In terms of the frequency of lexical usage both Sinitic-Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese classes are on equal footing with and complementary to each other in the Vietnamese language by choice. Both sets of vocabularies are equally used in all walks of life, not only for literary writings in old and modern Vietnamese but also daily speech by the common people in all social settings. The fact that similarities in many fixed expression usages found in Vietnamese are still being used in modern Mandarin suggests that Early Mandarin could be a concurrent speech used by the mandarins in conducting official business such as imperial decrees, legal documentation, or reports to the Tang's imperial court in Chang'an (長安) (安), which had been more than once served as officially written language used in government and diplomatic communiqué (See Table-1 above by Nguyễn Tài Cẩn.)(W)

Intrinsically, each class of vocabulary stock is embedded with a history of its own becoming. Terminologically, the core linguistic term of 'Sinitic-Vietnamese' (VS), specifically used in this paper, indicates a mixture of basic items buried in the Yue substrate with Old Chinese (OC) elements on top of it in addition to other lexicons in the 'Sino-Vietnamese' (SV) class of Middle Chinese (MC) loanwords.

To wrap up for what is expected to come, let us start with the baseline first. It is universally reckoned in the academic world that (1) the "proto-Chinese" (Sino-Tibetan) never existed in places where they are now about 5000 years B.P., (2) Chinese has never been a race but culture and, interestingly, its history is that of emigrants who, each individual and everyone accounted for in the mainland of China, always want to get out of that flowery yet repressive kingdom, (3) for a rather ancient entity that Indo-European scholars prefer to call "Austro-Asiatic", it is de facto the Yue that had existed therein before the newcomers moved in who later became "Chinese". In this paper, the former are indigenous natives being referred to as "Taic" that gave rise to both (a) Daic-Kadai and (b) Yue, and (c) Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer = Taic+Yue entities while the latter evolved into what known as (d) Sino-Tibetan = Taic + proto-Tibetan, and (e) Han = Taic + Yue + Sino-Tibetan, (f) Vietnamese = Yue + Han.

Linguistically, on examining all of prevalent "Sinitic" pecularities that exist in the Vietnamese etyma, e.g., tonality, morpheme, phonology, dissyllabicism, and virtually the rest of subtle linguistic attributes in all word classes, most observers hold a strong inclination for their Chinese origin — exactly like the case of those designated supposedly Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer or Daic Katai words in Vietnamese — because when an etymon posited as it appears, the linguistic rule states that the closer the cognates appear, the greater chance they are loanwords. All attributes do not match certain sound change patterns or semantics at the same time, though, such as Thai /kao/ vs. Viet. /gạo/ (rice) with '稻 dào' (SV đạo) instead of 'lúa' (husky rice grain) as posited by the late renown Russian linguist A. Starostin. The axiom may or may not be true for the whole etyma. It is so said for in some other cases, antithetically, at times an etymon derived from a morphemic syllable that falls into the linguistic category of "words" is governed only by phonologically interchanging paradigms that, at the same time, display other linguistic features but tonality that do not match in many stances of which each derivative is still considered as a loanword for its apparent affinity, e.g., 兒 ér (SV nhi) > VS 'nhỏ' for 'child', hence, VS 'nhí' for 'baby' and 'nhínhảnh' with 'nhảnh' being a reduplicative morphemic syllable for the concept of 'childish' in Vietnamese like English "-ish" in this specific case, so we can conclude that the etymon 'nhi' originated from Middle Chinese and its other cited derivatives hence derived from the same source, all Chinese loanwords.

Both Vietnamese literary and coloquial forms from the Tang's speech were blended well into Annamese — as Vietnamese has been avoided being called as such due to its modernness as opposed to the same issue of the aforesaid terminology "Chinese" (H) — that have practically been widely used in different social settings including the common mass, past and present, not limited only to the circle of literati, to be exact. Such historical fact explains why the systematic Han-Viet or Sino-Vietnamese version and popular usage of its Middle Chinese vocabularies continue living on beyond the independence mark of the 10th century to have given birth to Ancient Vietnamese and become an integrative part of the Middle Vietnamese language and modern Vietnamese as we see it. (差)

With regards to other southern Chinese dialects, contrary to the common belief with the exception that thei tonal values carry similar ranges up to 9 tones, Vietnamese otherwise is more in line with Mandarin than all Cantonese, or Minnan and Wu subdialects, especially in lexical respects. In effect, only a few indigenous 'Cantonese' words were found cognate to those of 'thuầnViệt' or basic native Vietnamese, e.g., Cant. equivalents of 'sihk5' with Viet. 'xơi' (eat), 'jahm3' ~ 'uống' (drink), 'kâj5' ~ 'gà' (chicken) ... versus the rare cases of 'fajng1kao1', 'pin5tow2', or 'tzuo3' that do not go with 'ngủ' (sleep), 'nơinào' (where), or 'rồi' (already), with the Mandarin cognates only, that is, 卧 wò, 哪裏 náli, or 了liăo, espectively.

Figure 1.1: Tang Dynasty 700 AD
Source: from "The T'ang Dynasty, 618-906 A.D.-Boundaries of 700 A.D." Albert Herrmann (1935). History and Commercial Atlas of China. Harvard University Press.

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Similarly shared Yue etyma above could also probably be traced back further into remote ancient times when proto-Tibetan and ancestral Yue languages both were blended with the later Viet-Muong that in turn had roots in the Taic linguistic family. Proto-Yue languages once had been widely spoken by the aboriginals inhabiting a vast region of China South （華南）, overlapping some parts of faraway regions in China North along northern banks of the Yangtze River (揚子江), which is also known as the Changjiang (長江), as ranging habitats of the ancient Taic indigenous people who gave birth to the Yue people ('BáchViệt' 百越 BaiYue, the term possibly derived from 'Bod' ). (華) To be clear, the Yue, like the Eastern Yue (東越）and the Southern Yue（南越), were not ancestors of the contemporary Daic people but both were descended from the same ancestral Taic family. Altogether, racial admixture of the Taic-Yue aboriginals and proto-Tibetan nomads who had moved in from the southwestern China gave rise to what was later known as the Sino-Tibetan entities and, hence, the proto-Chinese who established the Xia Dynasty approximately some 5000 years ago. Further down the line for more than 4000 years later, the subjects of the newly unified empire of Qin State (秦國 206 B.C.) consisted of the Chu State (楚國) populace of Taic-Daic people, and, along with the Yue descents who made up the population of the southern Yue (越國) and the Wu (吳國) vassal states of the Western Zhou Dynasty. When the Han faction took over the Middle Kingdom from the Qin State, including territories in China South, linguistically, subjects of the whole Han Empire must have been decreed to use the same official court's language (X) spoken by the founder of the Han Dynasty, King Liu Bang (劉邦) who had been originally a Chu subject, like his generals and followers under arms, all could have spoken the Chu dialect, that is a Taic-Daiclanguage, so did the Yue people, ancestral Zhuang people, further in the south after the annexation of the NamViet Kingdom (南越王國) in 204 B.C. — "Nam" (南) to mean 'south' and "Việt" (越) to mean "Yue" or /Jyuet8/, both characters pronounced somewhat similarly in both Vietnamese and Cantonese in the ancient times, so they are transcribed as such throughout — including ancestors of the early ancient "Cantonese" — who also called themselves as "Tang people" and "Vietnamese" is "the Yue people of the South". That would explain why they all shared at least etyma from the same ancient substrate.

Figure 1.2: Map of the Yangtze River Basin
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_the_Yangtze_River.gif

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With respects to the proto-Vietic language, after the split of the Viet-Muong groups over the divide of those indigenous people who resisted to the Han's occupation of their ancestral land and those who submitted and collaborated with the Chinese colonizers, like that of the Cantonese speech, comparatively, the early Sino-Vietnamese development and its proactive adoption into the old Vietic language to have become an ancient form of early Annamese had gone all the way through many centuries long in transformational stages evolving into the Middle Vietnamese period, especially with that of active phrases absorbing variants of the Tang's language by the newly emerged Kinh elite group, that is, the process of localization of the Middle Chinese words and expressions in addition to some minor changes in phonology, syntax, and semantics. The whole process could have occurred before and continued on long after the end of the Tang Dynasty (618-906). For the whole process, the localization of adapted Middle Chinese exical stock throughout the periods of colonization, which corresponded to the state of Chinese lexicography that had gone through volatile periods from the Han to the Tang dynasties in terms of phonological to semantic crystalization (Tang Lan. 1965. p. 110).

Having deeply shared the same historical background, analytically, Sino-Vietnamese and Cantonese sound change patterns that had evolved from Middle Chinese apparently followed the same phonological paradigms in both literary, e.g., literature or academics, and spoken forms at least until the 10th century before each language finally veered off their common path, i.e., sharing the same lingo-franco of the 'NamHan Kingdom' (Southern Han - 南漢), as each had gone its own way until their vocabulary stock later either disappeared with some lexical redundancy of doublets or gradually stablized as they appear in both Sino-Vietnamese stock at one hand and the so-called Tang's language as commonly referred to Cantonese in our contemporary time. For general readers Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma normally look indiscriminate not only to the naked eyes of untrained novices in linguistics but even tho those of language teachers with respects to sound changes and their etymological deviations, formally and colloquially. The author so said because he happened to survey a few school bilingual tearchers in general fields such as languages arts or ESL classes in US schools, they honestly admitted they had never noticed the similar lexical interchages between the two languages at all. For example, all of them have had no ideas that instances that Sino-Vietnamese word 'quốcgia' 國家 guójiā (nation) corresponds to Cantonese /gok7ga5/ (nation). While laymen in historical linguistics may be able to recognize such phenomenon of their interchanges by regularity rules, it is quite possible that the very same audience would vehemently argue against the variance of Sinitic-Vietnamese form 'nướcnhà', surely a cognate derived from the same root like 'quốcgia' but under the context that the concrete homonyms "nước" (water) plus "nhà" (home) have formed an abstract word that conveys more of the meaning of "country", not to mention a newly derived concept of 'body of government' called "nhànước", a reverse syllabic-morphemic word form, to say the least.

Long after the 'NamHan Kingdom' (南漢帝國) ceased to exist in 971 A.D., even though Annam had been separated, spatially and temporally, from its control since 939the then Cantonese and the Sino-Vietnamese, anthropologically, could have still shared a lot of physical similarities directly from the late Tang speech even though the two languages must have been already distinguishable from one another — as they analogously do now with the people in Guangxi Autonomous region with the localized version of Cantonese they called Baihua (白話). However, in our contemporary era, that would no longer be the case for the Cantonese-speaking descents living within the parameter of old Southern Han (the same old name as Guandong Province is still being called.) As a matter of fact the Cantonese speakers had been highly Sinicized by their multi-tiered blood mixture with the "Tang's Chinese" from the far north after hundreds of years under the rules of different dynasties in China, the China South region as a whole and Guangzhou prefecture, specifically, faced with massive waves of migratory move from the other region caused by raging wars — the An Lushan's Rebellion War in Tang's Ming Huang's reign that killed and displaces millions of people, for example (see Bo Yang, 1982-1992, Vol. 49 — and hungers that shifted racial balance. Their speeches, as a result, experienced the same life cycles of inevitable changes. In other words, up until the 10th century, it was highly probable that the Cantonese speakers in Guangzhou and Annamese speakers in Tonkin could communicate with each other verbally in some Sinicized speech such as Yue's Baihua (白話).

Besides, with respect to their common aboriginal root, etymologically, several Cantonese basic words such as 'hâj2' (be), 'pin5tow2' (where), 'majt7je6' (what), 'fajng1kao1' (sleep), 'kuj2' (tired), etc., may exist only in Cantonese while in Vietnamese those words might have been replaced with early Chinese which later were grouped into the Sinitic-Vietnamese category that will be the main subject focused in this paper. In the aboriginal layer of Yue that some Cantonese fundamental etyma sharing with Vietnamese such as 'lưỡi' 脷 Cant./lej6/ (tongue), 'bông' 花 /fa1/ (flower), 'biếu' 畀 bì /pej3/ (give), 'khui' 開 /hoj5/ (open), 'xơi' 食 /sik8/ (eat), 'uống' 飲 /jam3/ (drink), 'thấy' 睇 /t'aj3/ (see), 'đéo' 屌 /tjew3/ (fuck), or 'ỉa' 屙 /o5/ (to poop), etc., still remain only a smaller shared portion of Yue indigenous elements, though, which could be Taic-Yue remnants in both Vietnamese and Cantonese. For example, for 雞公 jīgōng, VS 'gàtrống' /ga2ʈowŋʷ5/ that corresponds to archaic Cantonese /kaj5koŋʷ1/ (rooster) is a rare but solid proof to identify their Yue linguistic affiliation in the lowest substrate, syntactically; both had been of the same root before being Sinicized. Specifically for the same sytaxtic matter, the modern grammatical order of [adjective + noun], e.g., M 公雞 gōngjī, is of Sinitic elements having grown on top of an aboriginal Yue linguistic substratum where both entities shared more similarities when they were still at monosyllabic stagein language development.

Nowadays, Vietnamese and Cantonese linguistic shares of semantics and syntax might be no longer be the case, e.g., VS 'gàtrống' vs. ancient Cant./kâj1kong1/ (鶏公）, that they used to be close to one another for historical reasons. Respectively, both languages had emerged from different Taic-Yue branches long before their speakers became common subjects of the NamViet Kingdom (南越王國), aka 'Southern Han', in 204 B.C. In addition, the discrepancy between the two related languages also lies in the degree of influentiality of both the Han prior to 111 B.C. and thereafter and the Middle Chinese factors from the 7th century onward asserted on each language with permanent marks. For example, the Vietnamese still use 'đôiđũa', cognate of the Han's usage of 箸子 zhúzi for 'chopsticks' while the Cantonese, like Mandarin speakers, call them /faj1zej3/ or Mandarin kuàizi (筷子); however, in most of the cases, the pronunciation of Cantonese 走 /zow3/ derived from the Middle Chinese, and its usage is likely the same as that of Mandarin to mean "go" while in Sino Vietnamese 'tẩu' /təw3/ means "run" that is in turn equivalent to 去 qù or Cantonese /hoj6/ which is cognate to Sino-Vietnamese doublets 'khu' /kʰu1/, 'khử' /kʰɨ3/, 'khứ' /kʰɨ6/, and its VS variants 'khừ', 'khự', 'khử', 'khứa', including 'đi' (go) (cf. Hanoi subdialect /xɨ6/), with various meanings that originated from that of Ancient Chinese of the Han's period, expanding to convey the meaning 'eliminate', 'get rid', 'cut off'.

Categorically, however, regardless of its ancestral Yue root, Cantonese is sill classified as one of the Sino-Tibetan languages, correctly though, mainly for their prominent Sinitic elements with Middle Chinese lexical forms which overwhelmingly surpass ancient Yue etyma (cf. Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer presence in Vietnamese). There is no wonder Cantonese has unofficially been called 'the Tang language' (唐話 /Tong2wa4/). It seems that quantitative and qualitative factors weigh in here in judgement and designation of the Cantonese language under the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. As previously mentioned, for the reason that the main lexical stock amassed in both Cantonese and Sino-Vietnamese in effect evolved from the same Middle Chinese source, on which the grouping of Cantonese into the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family were based, it is also logical to reconsider the possiblity to reclassify the Vietnamese language into the same family. The issue specifically brought up here is to purport comparative analyses with regard to relevancy of Sino-Vietnamese and Cantonese under Middle Chinese linguistic perspective as widely recognized. The fact that prominent Sinitic elements exist in Cantonese were the results of their native speakers' close contact with the northern migrants of succeeding China's dynasties for the past 2200 years or so B.P., the Cantonese speakers and their language still remain distinctive, though, not only from that of the Vietnamese, specifically, but also others of the rest of other regions in China. However, it is not hard to see why later on Cantonese ethnic components had gradually become more of the mixed stock in the face of the influx of other migrants coming from other northern parts of the Great Tang Empire (大唐帝國) that continued on as China mainland being conquered by nothern rulers, the Northern Song's Kims (Jurchens), the Liao's Tartars, the Mongols, the Manchurians. From beginning, interestingly, the 'Cantonese people' (廣東人 /Gong3dong1jajn2/) were composed of mainly descendants of those who called themselves the Tang subjects (唐人, Cantonese /Tong1jajn2/), especially since the 7th century onward, as thos Chinese descendants known as Hoa ethnic group in Vietnam and across other Southeast Asian countries. On the sidelines, linguistically, the Vietnamese could pick up the Cantonese dialect, or at least imitation of of pronunciation, easily by Vietnamese speakers of all walks of life.

Anthropologically, with respects to the Yue-before-Sinitic factor, according to some similar Zhuang and Vietnamese legends as to be told, either the Vietnamese (越 Viet) or Cantonese (粵 Jyet) populace might come out as descendants of different branch of the Yue (戉) prior to the second century B.C. (Z). The earlier 'Jyet' (白話 Báihuà) speakers, probably of the so-called Zhuang (壯族) origin, spread from the Guangdong (廣東) to the present Guangxi Province across the whole region historically known as the Southern Mountainous Range Region (嶺南道 Lingnan Dao). They inhabited a larger area of the ancient NamViet Kingdom (204 B.C.–111 B.C.) with its ancient capital situated in 'Phiênngung' (廣州番禺 present Guangzhou's Fanyu) ruled by the first king whom the Vietnamese called Triệu Đà (趙佗 Zhao Tuo) and his heirs. (V). After the whole Cantonese region, a part of the kingdom's territory, was annexed into the Middle Kingdom (中國), the Sinicization process that had started before 111 B.C. accelerated and continued on, which caused further deviation of Cantonese and Vietnamese as two distinctive entities, of which each had difted separately on each own destiny of historical journey that only Annam earned her independence from China's rule in 939 A.D.

Naturally, the modern Cantonese people's genetic tissues are not totally the same like those of their native ancestors prior to the annexation of the NamViet Kingdom into the Han Empire (111 B.C.) nor even decents of those who had been living therein whence up until around the 10th century because by that era, should their kins have emigrated to the Annamese land — so supposed because that must have regularly occured throughout the history of both nations (of which for China do you still remember the axiom that said "History of the Chinese people is of those China's mainlanders who always want to emigrate out of their native land to escap either hunger or repression whenever they have the chance!" while for the ancient Annamese they also advanced further to the south to flee from the China's historical long arms — they would have found themselves not much different from those locals under the same respective statehood then. It is also interesting to to note that the border beween China and Vietnam were widely open from the past until 1949 when Mao's communist regime was set up there.

Suppose that if Annam were still under the rule of China until present day, her national destiny would have long gone through the same development — fate, to be exact — that was bestowed onto the 'NamJyet' land (Canton) as now being called Guangdong Province, which, historically, had produced millions of emigrants to all over the globe, besides the adjacent Annam and other Southeast Asian countries since the ancient times. Reversely, if the greater 'Canton' region had gained its statehood like Annam in about the same period, it would have enjoyed status of sovereignty of an independent country and their language could have remained somewhat different like Annamese, so to speak, and it would have been questionable if being grouped into the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, so would Fukienese and Hainanese and so on. Completely Sinicized modern Cantonese descendants could only see Canton's truly glorious past, sadly, though monumental museum of archaeological ruins of massive mausoleums built by kings of NamViet — by the way, the name spelling could be accurately as such as is pronounced where applicable — in China's city of Guangzhou today. It is so said in order to point out the fact that Cantonese is a completely Sinicized Yue language as opposed to Vietnamese at present time for the simple reason that the former one has been a Chinese province in one form or another continuously since 111 B.C. until now while the latter broke off from the China's colonial status since 939 A.D. as repeatedly emphasized throughout since its significance is tantamout to her national history as well.

For the magnitude of large-scaled immersive Sinicization process, tremendous impact from its fall-out that had stricken the ancient Canton region was much more extensive than what Chinese encroachers from the north could have committed on the Annam's soil even after her independence such as that of the Ming's 25-year rule of Vietnam in the 15th century, to say the least. The Chinese influential factor is a fact of life that has traversed her national history. Vietnam has been trying to balance herself in acting as vassal state depending on how the traditionally Chinese archenemy had up to its power in order to maintain her sovereignty even if more than 1000 years have passed by since the end of the total 1004 years her antecedent Annam had been under the colonial rule of imperial China.

The Vietnamese people are always nostalgic about the Yue heritage while many Cantonese speakers ignorant about it or completely deny their Yue roots even if they are. The Cantonese model is singly raised here because the case of Sinicization of Yue subjects (南越居民) in the NamViet Kingdom had taken a heavy toll on both ethnic and linguistic development of the ancient Yue people (越人). What happened in the Canton's region that was recorded in history as Ouyue (歐越) was similar to that of ancient Annan (安南), or LuoYue (雒越), given other historical events in the process of the Han's colonization that spread out into SôngHồng Basin, or the Red River Delta of today's northwest region of Vietnam, located further down in the southwestern part of NamVietn since the Han's conquest in 111 B.C. The Han's policy of colonization thereupon left permanent early Sintic birthmarks of the lately emerged Sinicized Yue speeches which, hundreds of years later, Cantonese and Vietnamese have become to be known of.

With all similarities of the Vietnamese and Cantonese languages, on the one hand, they still stop short of a one step further to have them bonded as kin to each other for we could barely find those newly discoverd Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma and the Chinese equivalents sharing the common ancestral root per se (Refer back to the legend of the Magic Sword that tells the story of the and Zhuang people — of coourse they did call themselves as the same same name then — as ancestors of the ancient Cantonese. (Z). On the other hand, for all Sino-Vietnamese etyma and those Sinitic vocabulary in Cantonese, their Chinese affiliation is affirmative, as a matter of fact without the need to prove them, attested in not only their usages of variants of Middle Chinese words but also their share of peculiar attributes and unique traits which make up linguistic commonalities such as tonality, e.g., 8-toned Vietnamese vs. 9-toned Cantonese, and phonological systems, e.g., endings -m, -p, -t, -k, etc.

Along with those Sino-Vietnamese words definitely evolved from Middle Chinese etyma, some had made long and round trips from ancient Yue to Old Chinese and passed down to Vietnamese, of which the Cantonese language lacks due to its overly shadow of Sinicization. For example, in the case of the cultural items such as the duodenary cycle of the twelve animals in the zodiac systems used by the Chinese, including those ethnic minority groups of China South, including Vietnam and southern Mon-Khmer cultures alike since ancient times. For example, any general reader with an average level of linguistic cognizance would readily accept the posit of 'mẹo', an older Sinitic-Vietnamese form of 卯 máo — that was later re-introduced into the Vietnamese culture as SV 'mão' — is for 'cat' (V mèo) originally etymologically, which is definitely not for 'hare' (兔 tù, SV thố, VS thỏ) as many Chinese Sinologists have tried to either to intentionally deceive or convince themselves and other Chinese fellowmen to believe.

Similarly, consider the case of 未 wèi for VS 'dê' /ze1/ (goat). It is possibly that 未 was descended from some ancient form sounding somewhat */ze1/ or */je1/ that must first have entered the Chinese language in duonary forms used in the zodiac system where the pronungciation of the character 未 is adapted to transcribe a foreign word for the animal 'goat' in place of the word 羊 yáng (northern Chinese nomads called 'sheep'). The Sinitic-Vietnamese 'dê' /je1/ indicated what 未would have sounded, that is, something close to that of modern Mandarin 'wèi' /wej4/ [ cf. SV 'vị' /vej6/ versus VS 'dê'/je1/ \ ¶ v- ~> z- (modern Vietnamese southern subdialect reflects more of ancient sound system than the contemporary nothern subdialect) ] that appeared hundreds of years after Middle Chinese /mwɤj2/ [ cf. SV(2) 'mùi' /muj2/ via ¶ /mjw- ~ w-(vj-/) ] rather than what were borrowed back from the Old Chinese /*mjəts/ [ 《說文》 未, 味也。|| Note: 味 wèi (SV 'vị', VS 'mùi' (taste) ] by the Yue populace of the NamViet Kingdom or the Annam State. Specifically, the character 未 wèi can be transliterated as both SV 'vị' to indicate both the SV 'mùi' as 'goat' as in 'Năm ẤtMùi" (Year of the Goat) and the later meaning 'upcoming'. While there existed no initial /v-/ in Chinese and Vietnamese in ancient times that would suggest it could have been pronounced as /jej/ in Vietnamese southern subdialect. It was possibly /wj-/, though. The Sinitic-Vietnamese form 'dê' /je1/, meanwhile, is also plausibly a doublet cognate to 羊 yáng (SV dương /jɨəŋ1/, cf. Tchewchow /yẽ/ or 'yeo', all with the same concept of 'goat' and 'sheep' by the northern Chinese). In terms of zodiac duonary forms, for the specific year 1955, 2015, 2075... its formal equivalent 乙未年 YǐWèinián (the 'Second' Year of the Goat) is more commonly known in modern Chinese as 羊年 Yángnián, meaning simply 'Year of the Goat'. As a matter of fact, while young Chinese nowadays may not recognize what 乙未年 YǐWèi Nián precisely is, ironically, Vietnamese youth mostly know exactly what "Năm ẤtMùi" means. The point to emphasize here is that 未 wèi in Chinese was possibly a loanword from an ancient Yue form plausibly reconstructed as */ʐẽ/ which has a different presentation from 羊 yáng, a pictograph that draws a shape of the head of a goat or sheep. Both 未 wèi and 羊 yáng could be an interchange for both the concept 'goat' and 'sheep' because they are related to not only the meaning but also phonology { as its etymology best demonstrated in the character 美 měi (SV mỹ /mej4/) 'beautiful' since 羊 yáng over 火 huǒ 'fire' of course makes some 'beautiful taste' whereas 美 měi and 未 wèi (cf. 'mùi' /muj2/) are also related in both sematics and etymology. } (Refer back to the Footnote (未))

For all those elaboration on the Vietnamese cognates with the two cases of zodiac animals in Chinese as exemplified above, their implications will be applicable to other similar Sino-Tibetan related linguistics researches, say, what comes next could be Viet. 'ngọ' ~ 'ngựa' 午 wǔ (horse)，'sửu' ~ 'trâu' 丑 zhǒu (buffalo), etc. New approaches could be initiated to study possible the Vietnamese linguistic affiliation with those etymologies of Sino-Tibetan languages as to be illustrated later in this paper based on the wordlists tabulated in Shafer's works (1966-1974). For example, Vietnamese 'cẳng' for Old Tibetan (OB) 'rkań' (foot), 'mắt' OB mig (eye), 'sông' OB kluń (river) vs. Vietmuong */krong/, 'bò' OB 'ba' (cow), and so on so forth, all appear to have originally existed in or evolved into the Vietnamese language prior to Sinitic contamination in much later periods.

In fact, our new hypothesis as elaborated etymologically above could be postulated based on those Vietnamese etyma that have shown as Sino-Tibetan cognates as having directly been descended from other Sino-Tibetan languages rather than via any Chinese conveyance, too many of them to say they are coincidental. New theorization may in turn be proposed for some new linguistic classification of Sinitic-Vietnamese to be created in its own class. Perhaps that could be a sub-division to be put on par with the Sinitic branch — for the reason the the Yue having existed prior to the proto-Chinese as previously mentioned — of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family (because those cited Vietnamese fundamental words in Chapter 10 appear to be cognate to all Sino-Tibetan etymologies as we go into detail.) To put everything in perspective, modern 'Chinese' dialects and their subdialects have been called 'Sinitic' — that is, the reason that 'dialects' of the Chinese language are of its Sinitic branch — because the terminology indicates a Sino-Tibetan related matter, academically, not because the "Sinitic" had existed before the "Yue".

Like that of "Sinitic", the term 'Yue' (M) — it would much precisely better be called 'Viet" — being used in this paper carries the implication that neither the ancient Yue aboriginals nor self-acclaimed descendants of the ancient LacViet (雒越 LuyoYue) people in our contemporary era, that is to say the Yue were not of descents from a pure race, neither were their languages. Linguistically, those Yue attributes and shared portions of indigenous etyma in the languages spoken by ethnic groups living in the regions of both the China South and North Vietnam would give rise to doublets as cognate variants as recorded in Chinese classics. For example, Kangxi Dictionary (康熙字典) recorded 淂 dé (SV đắc) that is related to the old Viet /dák/ to mean 'water' vs. 水 shuǐ (SV thuỷ, phonetically, cf. 踏 tă for VS 'đạp') of which the meaning of 'river' in turn appears in other forms such as 川 chuān or 江 jiāng for Vietnamese 'sông' or 'river'.

Doublets similar to those etyma are vestiges of some archaic speeches spoken by the native people living inside the perimeters of those ancient states which would later be annexed to become parts of the larger China, namely, those of Shu State (屬國), Chu State (楚國), Yue State (越國), and later the NamViet Kingdom (南越王國) of which their subjects were of the racial mixture of ancient LacViet (雒越), Xi'ou (西甌) or ÂuViet (歐越), and MinYue (閩越) or Dong'ou (東甌) tribal conglomerations.

The Chinese-Han people by then were the fusion of proto-Tibetan people who made up the Qin population that had been composed of populace from other 6 ancient states, especially the Chu subjects, consisting of all the Daic and Yue tribesmen, anthropologically. From the time the NamViet Kingdom was annexed to the Han Empire in 111 B.C. as subjects of the Han Empire were further mixed with the Yue people surpassing the Lingnan southern region and the same process repeated again and again in space and time. The proportionate nature of the ethnic composition of the Han populace probably remained the same racial fusion like that of the Chu level by the time the Han Empire was established, yet, its overall population must have been less than before all preceeding wars. That is to say, the Yue-Daic factors were still dominant among the Han subjects after the Chu State lost its contention to the Han. It is so said because, hisorically, the Han's first King Liu Bang (劉邦) and his generals, subordinates, as well as most of their infantry as a combat arm, all had been of the Chu fighters against the Qin's army before the Han's final victory. The "Han" and Han-related entities evolved from a short form of Hanzhong (漢中), a remote prefecture in today's China's Shaanxi Province where Liu Bang had been bestowed as governor by the last Duke Xiang Yu (項羽) on behalf of the last King of Chu. They both turned against each others and for that reason that the winners did not consider themselves of the Chu subjects for a good reason, they called themselves the Han people; hence, the Han entities exist in parallel with the term "Chinese", a derivative of "China", along with "Sinitic" and "Sino" all from "Qin". They could be called by other names, Cathay, Tang, or Qing, etc., but the true nature of their racial mixture are that of a united of states of China.

Similarly, the long period of national developnment of Vietnam had begun with the biological makeup of the early Vietnamese people who had been descended from the racially mixed Yue — LacViet, XiLuo, OuLuo — of the NamViet Kingdom. It is unlikely that the Vietnamese people have been genetically pure as descendants directly straight from the already ancestral Yue tribemen aforementioned after 1004 years under the Chinese rule until 939 A.D. In addition, since her independence Annam's people had managed to govern their own sovereign state which is now called Việtnam (越南) that literally means 'The Yue of the South', not 'Advancing to the South' as some mistaken belief due to an interpretaion of the character 越 for what today's Vietnam's southern territory that kept expanding; the ancient Chinese transcribed sound of the name "Việt" or "越" as 'advance' or 'surpass", but that should be the transliterated sound recorded by Chinese history as 戉, 粵, 鉞, etc., the three words to mean a tool or weapon similar to 'axe'. However, after more than a millenium of the southward migratory movement, the contemporary Vietnamese have been a racial admixture of native people along the way already, that is, the Cham and the Mon-Khmer people, to be specific. Archaeological evidences and anthropological history point to such supposition.

Linguistically, new etymological survey put forth in this paper includes the historical perspective above in terms of synchrony and diachrony. The approach having been explored is more like random captures of motion-pictured frames in a long historical video clip and that could be set fast forwarding and rewinding, back and forth, zooming in and out, that we can elaborate on but the chronological timeframe may not be all clear with the etyma under examination, for instance., 'béo' (greasy) for 油 yóu as in 油膩 yóunì (VS 'béongậy') based on the pattern ¶ /y- ~ b-/ in the Mandarin /yóu/ sound coresspondences with these words 郵, 由, 柚, 游, etc., that all match nicely to those Sinitic-Vietnamese phonology, that is, 'bưu' (postal), 'bởi' (because), 'bưởi' (pomalo), 'bơi' (swim), respectively. The interchanges are plausible but how to come up with the latest sound splits is based on the new approach to be presented in later this book.

As attested in the Sino-Tibetan etymologies the diachronic transformation of the modern Vietnamese parallels to a theory about the early Southern Yue tribesmen who run their own countries across the China South before the Han dominion> The proto-Tibetans who had fanned out from ancient China's southwestern region where pcharged northward and mixed with the native people in the perimeter of the Shu State （蜀國）in today's Sichuan Province of China all the way up to area northeastern triburies of the Yangtze River, who have been assumed to be extinct based on archaeological excavation with their artifacts left in the ruins deep in the wilderness. They started the Yin-Shang Dynasty building up the Yin State (殷朝 or "NhàÂn", 1600 B.C.-1046 B.C.) that once invaded ancient Vietnam as recorded in her legend and the Chinese history as well In between 1220 B.C.-1225 B.C. Throughout the next two millennia the pre-Chinese blended with Taic-Yue people and gave birth to the so-called 'Chinese' that had begun before the pre-Qin-Han's era. For those Yue people who had split from the same Taic group like that of the same Daic ancestors who had established the Chu State, including the early ancestral Zhuang, or 'Bod', people who later made up the Yue State (越國) and Eastern Yue (東粤) states. As the "Ân" invaders advanced southward with so powerfully aggressive force, the Yue natives fled from their homestead emigrating southward. Both of these two major racial entities — Qin-Yue racial admixture in the length of some millenia — had encompassed both northern and southern migratory routes that covered all points of migratory routes from the pivot that spread from today's Yunnan to Zhejiang and Fujian provinces of China and from regions and then making an U-turn southward that covered Hubei, Jiangxi, and Jiangu provinces stretching down all the way to the southern hemispherical regions now being postulated in the Austric, Austronesian, Austroasiatic, and Autro-Thai hypotheses, anthropologically and linguistically. In short, languages in the whole region are related by any measure. The differences lie in the fact that they haved been called under different names. (See Terrien De Lacouperie. 1965 [1887] )

How has that given rise to the classification the Vietnamese language per the Austroasiatic theorists as of the Mon-Khmer linguistic sub-family then? How does it stack up with the Sino-Tibetan or the ancient Yue etymological evidences proposed in this paper at the same time, then? Under the ethnicity perspective, the Austroasiatic theorization took the position on the Mon-Khmer origin of the Vietnamese and their language mostly based on the formation of the Vietnam's ethnic minorities (who we considered as the latecomer.) Altogether, they are of Austroasiatic origin, large and small, that make up the total of 54 groups (to match the tally of the last 2010 census, among them many speak at least one Mon-Khmer language, such as those living along Vietnam's western mountainous ranges and southernmost territory.) (See the distribution map of the Austro-Asiatic languages before the Vietnamese migrated into the central region from the 12th century onward.)

With regards to the statement that the Mon-Khmer elements under our racial-component perspective they were only the latecomers, be reminded again that Vietnam has acquired the southernmost territory from the ancient Khmer Kingdom for only 310 years as of now. In the contemporary era the territorial area in the Vietnam's geo-political map is historically much larger multiple times than what used to belong to the ancient Annamese land of 2 millennia ago, excluding what is to be compared with the historical part of the old region of the NamViet Kingdom that consisted of today's Guangdong Province of China. Seeing through the Austroasiatic perspective, today's Vietnam's territory embraces even more indigenous Mon-Khmer inhabitants of ethnic minorities living in within their old respective native landfor more than 2200 years before present (B.P.), or even the prehistoric period as postulated by the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists. To put everything in the scope of ethnicity, for over 85.7 percent of the Kinh populace make up the majority of the population of more than 91 million people, so to speak, the majority of them descended from a mixture of the Yue stock from the China South region before they further mixed up with the Chamic and the Khmer minorities south of the 16th parallel only after the 12th century. Linguistically, for what is found to be related to Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, those of Sintic-Vietnamese accounted for even more than 95% of the Vietnamese vocabulary stock in addition to both basic and fundamental words found in the earlier Taic origin that exist in all ancient languages involved, and, notably above all else, of which the same percentage of linguistic commonalities and peculiarities become their indispensable parts in the modern linguistic forms.

Archeaologically, specialists in the Austroasiatic camp theorized that the Indo-Chinese peninsula as the cradle of the Khmer origin where indigenous substratrum had revealed the Mon-Khmer basic words in Vietnamese and anything grew up on it was seen as Chinese loanwords brought in by emigrants from the China South who had immigrated to Vietnam. Their theorization aimed to negate the notion that the ancient Yue entities were just covered under the Austroasiatic guises. As a result, they missed the points that, firstly, the Yue and Austroasiatic people were possibly descended from the same root as those of the native people in China South and the fact that, secondly, the Vietnamese are made up of the racially mixed populace — Chinese of Yue origin from the China South and earlier resettlers in the Red River Delta having moved in from the southwest region whose Indigeneity turned out to be those who were postulated by the Austroasiatic camp as ancient Mon-Khmer speakers — who finally become new masters in their resettlements who built their own state in the southern land. In effect, the Vietnamese of the last mellenium were a racial admixture with the late Chamic and Khmer people whose ancestors had ealier inhabited in the vast region that has been incorporated into their geo-political map one by one since the 12th century.

The author's position on this issue is that, for whatever name it is called, it could be Austroasiatic that gave rise to those Mon-Khmer languages, but anything directly to ancestral language of today's Vietnamese (See Table 1 above). Anthropologically, before the Mon-Khmer people from the southwest region moved in, both groups of the aboriginals and new settlers could have been intermingled in the same locality and they all had been descended from the same Taic ancestors in the northern Vietnam's Red River's Delta area that stretched further to northern region of China South as discussed above. The whole scenario as such is only to explain the existence of the commonality of a few of shared basic words among Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer languages.

Figure 1.3:Map of territories of dynasties in China
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Territories_of_Dynasties_in_China.gif

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In our specific Vietnamese case hereof, spatially and temporally, changes in migratiory movement of newcomers from the north to the south only caused displacements of indigenous natives from their home habitat, mostly from a fertile land to less arable mountainous regions. Those new resettlers from China South who moved in after the Qin-Han period also brought with them their own speeches that were mixed with the local Taic-Yue speech for the next 1000 years. It is probably that about 1200 years ago the people in both Annam and Canton within the NamHan Kingdom (南漢帝國) could probably be able to communicate with each other, at least with some vernacular form of regional Mandarin as attested in literarary words with the fully developed Hán-Việt (漢越), or Sino-Vietnamese, vocabularies that are supposedly descended directly from the Middle Chinese, especially during the last 289 years under the rule of the Tang Empire. Linguistically, that kind of fluidity in communication transition as proved by linguistic history has never been so with other Mon-Khmer speakers in any whatsoever manners except for the late influence that fell on those Muong ethnic groups who had them as their neighbors. In fact, the latter Muong groups were split from the Viet-Muong group who did not cooperate with the Han colonists and fled to remote mountainous regions and lived side by side with the Mon-Khmer speakers, as to be discussed in more details later in the next chapters.

In linguistic terms, as hosts and guests exchanged words, those originally native Yue elements would then become complementary to whatever already in the Sinitic domain, yet, those of the Sinitic entities did not replace the Yue linguistic characteristics of the native speech, which is analagous to the effect of whatever new concepts in Japanese that were created by utilizing Chinese material. Historical facts show that the early Chinese immigrants from the China South kept emigrating southward en masse to the Annamese land, especially not only during the 1000 years of Chinese colonial periods (111 B.C. to 939 A.D.) but also all the way through Vietnam's history of later period up past the 1949 mark until recently with all the Chinese laborers have resettled and worked in newly Chinatown-styled plant enclosure around the country at the very least. Nevertheless, while Chinese linguistic pecularities brought in by Chinese immigrants speaking different mainland's dialects had penetrated deeply into Vietnamese, e.g., tonality or phonology, of which their formation are similar to Cantonese, Tchewchow, Amoy, Hoikien, etc., they were intrinsic, not importing, e.g., values of tones or syllabic structure. Comparatively, that was how the whole process of linguistic changes had happened to Cantonese, specifically. After a long period of time, the Annamese language could only be able to retain a much smaller percentage of the Yue elements, though. So mentioned in such detail, the author would like to point out their Yue distinct commonalities, which is in total contrast with those of Mon-Khmer features against those of Vietnamese as their existing similarities in certain area simply a result in linguistic contact. It is suggested that the Mon-Khmer groups moved into the Red River Delta about 6000 years ago. (Nguyễn Ngọc San. 1993. p. 43)

Along with those either passing-on or added-on inheritance that cannot be excluded as sole Chinese factors, anthropologically, early immigrants from both the southwestern and northern neighbors of ancient Annam — located in Vietnam's today's northwest region, by then the northwestern and western stretches of land did not belong to Annam's geo-political map — had been actually of racially mixed of the Taic descents, i.e., supposedly descendants of the ancient Daic people. The same process kept recurring with other Mon-Khmer latecomers. The integration process of such immigrant aliens into the ethnicially mixed minorities would not have changed much of ethnicity balance of the Vietnam's nationals in the later period when the Annam nation had become a sovereignty, expanded its territory much deeper in the far west and further down to the south. It was not until the late 16th century, the western planks of the old Khmer Kingdom's territory were annexed to Vietnam with their populace counted as a minority group of Vietnam's nationals as of now. The same fate had fallen beforehand as previously mentioned for the Chamic natives along the Vietnam's Central coast below the 16th latitude that started since the 12th century and ended in the 18th century.

Anthropologically, those cultural artifacts excavated from their ancestral land were neither created by nor possessed by the forefathers who founded Annam, let alone the modern Vietnamese, so should their linguistic items be treated the same way. That is to say, the early Annamese language then basically could probably not changed much after long exposure to local speeches, assumedly, of Austronesian Chamic or Austroasitic Mon-Khmer origin except for having picked a few of local items, including basic lexicons along the southward migratory routes the early Annamese frequented and finally resettled. That was the becoming of the contemporary Vietnamese communities living along the Central coastline cities. For those new Vietnam's nationals of the late Ming citizens such as the Tchewchow refugees — who might be the group that gave us the derogatory term 'Tàu' (< 'Tiều' < Triều < 朝 Cháo < 潮州 Tchewchow) as we know of in the modern Vietnamese language — as facing the advancement of the Qing's Manchurians to take over the mainland of China in the 17th century thousands of them fled south to the seas and finally having been resettled in southernmost part of the Vietnam. In other words, prior to the 12th to 17th centuries what happened in the region south of the 16th latitude had nothing do with ancient Vietnamese, anthropologically and linguistically, not matter what the Indo-Europeans, i.e., the Austroasiatic camp, said.

To understand argumentation above within a chronological scope of history, we hence need to crack the nutshell of both the prehistoric and historical period in both China and Vietnam of which the Austroasiatic theory missed the mark. The Yue entities should be examined from a historical perspective in order to see the whole linguistic picture that the modern Vietnamese has been a very late product, and getting out of the Mon-Khmer realm will reveal many Vietnamese fundamental words in the Sino-Tibetan etymologies and help revive the former Sino-Tibetan theory, which had never come to full term or out of age yet in late 19th century, into full swing in this 21st century.

Let us first try to put altogether a historical picture of the prehistoric thing that the period of approximately 5000 years ago in which the indigenous Yue — i.e, the Taic, or the proto-Yue, as either term being used for their prehistoric existence prior to its later being given the name Yue (越, 粵, 戉, 鉞, etc.) in Chinese history — had inhabited in the China South region prior to some speculated time that witnessed the arrivals of itinerant proto-Tibetan normads in search of good earth. The late proto-Chinese resettlers were warriors who conquered on horseback; they colonized, appropriated, ruled ancient vassals established in the flowery mainland by the indigenes which historically once evolved into powerful states. The latter crushed down all of them one after another over the rather long period of time by the subsequent dynasties of the Xia 夏, Yin 殷 (SV Ân), Shang 商, Zhou 周, and their vassal states of Qin 秦, Chu 楚, Yue 越, Wu 吳, Yan 燕, Qi 齊, etc., all of which were subjugated to the successive the Zhou kings (1045 B.C. to 256 B.C.). By the end of the late Eastern Zhou era in 221 B.C., the Qin conquered all other 6 remaning opponent states, and for the first time in history what was later known as China, a unified 'Middle Kingdom'. 'China', etymologically, emerged from the entities of the Cin, Chine, etc., a variant from 'Qin' (秦), so to speak.

The Qin Dynasty (秦朝, 221 B.C.-207 B.C.), however, with a short fleeting period of history, was later succeeded by the Han Dynasty (漢朝) with King Liu Bang (劉邦) as its first Han monarch (漢高祖 Han Gaozu) who had come out as a victor in the final contenton with the resuscitated Chu State in 206 B.C. for the imperial crown of the newly emerged Flowery Empire. In the meanwhile, further in the southern region, during the period of war-ravaged turmoils, Triệu Đà (趙佗 Zhào Tuó), formerly a Qin's general and viceroy, and his heirs, gathered those breakaway Yue colonies in China South under his rule and founded the NamViet Kingdom (南越王國 — or closely 'Nam-Việt Vươngquốc', loosely 'Nàm-Jyệt Woòngkwók') in 204 B.C. that lasted for the next 93 years. (See Keith Weller Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam (1983) as quoted by Bùi Khánh-Thế in APPENDIX I)

Source: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hg/hg_d_qind_d1map.jpg
Figure 1.4: Map of the Qin State

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As parts of historical events that led to the emergence of the Middle Kingdom in 111 B.C. after the Han Dynasty eventually conquered the NamViet Kingdom, what would be later called Annam was annexed into the the Chinese empire and subsequently ruled by different succeeding dynasties for the next millenium. Annam, its name derived from what was meant as the Protectorate of the Pacified South (安南 都護府), fell under subsequent rules of the imperialist China. It was not until the beginning of the 10th century the people of Annam seized the opportunity on wage-raging turmoils that had put an end to the Tang Dynasty in 906 A.D. and chopped off the ols empire into nine piecemeal states to be ruled by different wardlords and kings. The Annamese land was able to break loose from the collapsing NamHán Kingdom (南漢帝國) right in the period and emerged as an independent state starting in 939 A.D. (Bo Yang, Si Maguang Zizhi Tongjian 資治通鑑, Vol. 69, p. 209, 1993)

Since then Annam In its history was also named as ĐạiViệt (大越) in 1054 and Việtnam (越南) in 1804. It could be said that Vietnam was the only state founded by the early descents of the Southern Yue origin who were also ancestors of the Southern Chinese anyway, all of them who as the later Sinicized Yue. As opposed to what Guangdong and Guangxi provinces have turned out to be now, Vietnam has still remained as a sovereignty having survived the long proccess of Chinese colonization. In other word, all other Yue groups who lived in China South — descendants of those who had been Sinicized are now called the Cantonese of Guangdong, the Wu of Jiangsu, the Minnan of Fujian, the Zhuang of Guangxi, the Gang of the Jiangxi, and others from ancient states in other parts that stretch from Yunnan, Guizhou, provinces of today's China all were subjugated by successive Chinese dynasties that ruled the Middle Kingdom.

Specifically, those ancestral subjects of the ancient NamViet Kingdom who had settled in ancient Annam had joined in the fight for independence from China to have survived a full millenium from Chinese domination and all subsequent invasions one war after another brought by successive monarchs of the imperialist China, the long-lived and most oppressive country having ever existed on earth that continued on in our contemporay time with Chairman Mao Zedong, Chairman Deng Xiaoping, General Secretary Jiang Zemin, and unlimited-term General Secretary -President Xi Jinping, all having been emperors of China to date. It is so mentioned so to see that how influential politics of China has had on Vietnam to the south of its border. On the one hand, while rulers of the Middle Kingdom (中國) have been notoriously successful in squelching internal uprisings, they had an infamous habit of repeatedly losing wars to virtually any foreign invasions in their long history, on the other hand. Those foreign invaders who established their own monarchs and ruled China for hundreds of years included the Jurchens (女真), Mongols, and the Manchurians, i.e., the Kim (Jin 金), the Yuan, and the Qing (青) dynasties, respectively.

Changes of dynasties in the Middle Kingdom are all known to the outside world under one common country's name called 'China'. When speaking of "Sinicization", Chinese heritage, as collectively known as the Chinese culture, could not be ignored for its thrusting force in making foreign elements to become Chinese in its own capacity. For example, the official Chinese language, "Mandarin" (官話), were adopted as the official language of the imperial court by variant rulers of northern origin, such as Liao State (寮國 Liáoguó), Jin, Yuan, or Qing dynasties, etc., all of Tartar of Turkish origin. Linguistically, the legacy of Mandarin carried on as it absorbed foreign influences in its tonal and phonological changes, for instance, its solid 8 tones being reduced to a mere 4 tones due to non-tonal Altaic languages along with and the dispearances of the endings /-p/, /-t/, /-k/, etc., as opposed to its ancestral Middle Chinese linguistic characteristics. Mandarin still emerged as Putonghua in today's China's as it was adopted from northern Mandarin to become the national language by the ruling monarchs dominated mostly by northerners.

Culturally, on top of what is customary for the northerners such as the Moon Festival as claimed as from Korea by the Altaic Korean ethnicity within their norteastern border. Meanwhile, In the remote past, for ancestral Yue elements had already been set and "adopted", they become a part of the Chinese culture. For example, names of the duodenary cycle of the twelve animals are notably being used as signs for the year. Say, if the 'Year of the Horse' (馬年) in 2014 is also called 'Jiawu Year' for 甲午年 Jiăwǔ Nián — 'Năm GiápNgọ' in Vietnamese where 'Ngọ' 午 being of the ancient Yue loanword vestige in Chinese for the concept of 'horse', i.e., VS 'ngựa', — it may sound foreign to the Chinese ears in modern time simply because it is intrinsically non-native in Chinese. It is noted that, nevertheless, that was the way names of the year had been called as such until early 20th century, for instance, in 辛亥 革命 (The Xinhai Revolution in 1911 that the Chinese insurgents threw off the yokes of the Manchurian rule) where 亥 hài is in fact an ancient Yue loanword in Chinese as denoted in Sino-Vietnamese as 'hợi' and Sinitic-Vietnamese as 'heo' to call the 'pig', and 'Xinhai Year' in modern Chinese is 'Year of the Boar'. (Boltz, William G. 1991. “Old Chinese Terresterial Rames in Saek” )

It is safe to say once and for all, Chinese is a culture, not a race. There exists no such thing called "the Han's race" but "the Han people", just like the way some old Pekingese called themselves "Qiren" 旗人 (people of Manchurian or the Jurchen 女真 origin) or the Cantonese old-timers called themselves as "Tongjajn" 唐人, namely, subjects of the Great Tang Empire 大唐帝國 that were carried across the seven seas from Southeast Asian countries to North America. In other words, the Chinese are in effect people of mixed races in terms of ethnicity makeup, all being called as 'Chinese' by the Chinese for their national identity, or "China's national" to such effect. For instance, the overseas Chinese like to regard themselves as 'Chinese' even though they are originally citizens of Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, or even US.

Comparatively, for the Vietnamese, their national identity is not only about who they are as heirs to their national heritage of tangibles such as treasures acquired from the extinct Champa and Khmer kingdoms, i.e., their land, people, languages, cultural artifacts, but also that of nationalism and valor that the nation's forefathers possessed to fight against mostly the Chinese aggressors in all wars. Anybody who finished reading 72 volumes of the Bo Yang's version of Sima Guang's Zizhi Tongjian 資治通鑑 (1983-93) — that is, "Universal Mirror of Governent", chronological history of China covering events from the ancient times to the Song Dynasty (宋朝), at the same time, they expose the ugly face of all dynasties that governed the Middle Kingdom. The details come down the realization of how miserable the lives of its common people were treated by their own rulers, let alone subjects of those colonized vassal state of ancient Annam — will understand why the existence of the nation now called 'Vietnam' has subsisted on the 'national spirit' that lives in the collective mind of her people, their courage to fight against constant China's aggressions and invasions, and their will for survival in the face of threats of racial eradication, so to speak. For example, historically, Vietnam was the only country that had triumphantly scucced in warding off 3 attempts of invasion by the Mongols led by Genghis Khan and his heirs who were the ones who had brought down the Song Dynasty of China to its knees and founded the Yuan Dynasty (元朝) on China's soil in the 12th century that lasted for nearly 100 years.

The 'nationalism' mentioned above is the national spirit of the Vietnamese people along with their hard-earned independence, so fighting for its survival is their raison d'être by itself. Their strong nationalism has played an important role in anthropological domains that extended to their national language. That will explain why the Vietnamese people like deny their genetic affiliation with the Chinese, hence, and Austroasiatic theory help them easily relate to the Yue, or anything non-Chinese, especially stubbornly asserted by "patriotic' Vietnamese scholars.

WIth ethnically diversed population, what has been absorbed into the Vietnamese melting pot — not salad bowl, to be exact — would come out Vietnamese, be it a person of Chinese, Chamic, or Khmer descents. History of the nation called 'Vietnam' is all about children of those sojourners either on their conquering mission or fleeing hunger and oppression, theirs long southern journey finally made it to the very tip of the Indo-Chinese peninsula now facing the sea, which has been completed in ten centuries while fighting all wars against external enemies from the north and south of her borders for their national sovereignty having started since 939 A.D.

History of Vietnam, nonetheless, is not completely all about resistance wars but also, like that of China, that of immigrants and emigrants as well. Look at the same scenario that repeats in Taiwan with those who call themselves Taiwanese, firstly including Chinese from the mainland of China only after a few of generations the latest, and then secondly, from hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese girls married off to the island nation, which appears to be similar an immigration pattern that was too familiar in Vietnam more than a thousand years ago. Chinese immigrants keep coming to the country. That is to say, history of the Vietnamese people has been not only the story of descendants of the racially mixed immigrants from the souththern region in China and their full integration into new resettlements further in the south, from refugees escaping from war-ravaged China to outcast proletariats from nouveau-rich China. In fact, it has been not too long ago the Ming's fresh-off-the-boat refugees fleeing executions in China following the collapse of the Ming Empire after the invasion by the Manchurians who founded the Qing Dynasty (1644–1912). Also, there is no denial that up until now in the 21st century, Vietnam still continues receiving immigrants from her northern borders, i.e., China, e.g., economic migrants of poor non-skilled laborers, those under the guise of 'technical' workers, etc., many of them of the 'Chinese fifth column' who have overstayed their already expired labor visas. Regardless of their ethnic origin, like their predecessors from the farther China's coastal region, the late Chinese emigrants have been likely from in-land provinces across the Vietnam's northern border. Down the way, however, similar to those children of the third or the fourth generation of their forefathers who had resettled in Vietnam, they would eventually consider themselves 'Vietnamese'. Chinese family surnames of the Kinh population tell us their stories, to say the least. The story of the becoming of the Vietnamese Kinh majority, nationwide internally, is also about stories of Vietnamese emigrants who would like to get out of the country, which have created new vacancies to accommodate new migrant workers, that is, the current residents were from the villages, moving to the big cities to fill in the vacuum as the old residents left their old homstead and moved overseas. The whole picture looks so familiar to scrutiny eyes in this case. Look at residents of Hanoi, like its counterpart city of Shanghai, for example, all the original residents yester-year had gone living somehere else, besides those who settled in the southern parts of the country during the great migration 1953-54, others mostly going abroad after the wartime 1975. All of the above to paint a overall picture of how the Vietnamese metropolitans have become to prove that modern Vietnamese, hence along with their language, could not possibly be descended from the Mon-Khmer stock. To be exact, contemporary Vietnam's nationals are unlikely of all biologically racial mixture from the ancestral Yue people — like the way people used to perceive when looking at the geno-map, say, that of the Japanese or Koreans — from the late subjects of all vassal states in the Zhou Dynasty to the Yue-mixed Han of the Chu makeup of more than 2100 years ago, that is, they are of racially mixed Chinese of the last millennium, and, as said, from the 12th century onward, the local Chamic, the Mon, the Khmer of the much later period of the 18th century, and latest, Euro-Asian children of the American servicemen in a not lesser extent from the left-over of short 10-year peiod (1965-1975) in the previous 20th century that had given birth to more than 50,000 individuals. For the latter detail, it is emphasized to amplify the magnitude of racial mutation, if we can say so.

Linguistically, the Austroasiatic theorists had not let go the opportunity to keep the momentum to build up their own theory, hypothetically, when it comes to deal with the presence of those Mon-Khmer words in the Vietnamese vocabulary, scores of them, though. The Austroasiatic basic words are their quite a coup, though. Actually as with any other languages besides Chinese, one could have come up with a similar theory because over the course of its development the Vietnamese language had acquired scores of other loanwords from different regional languages as well, such as those of Daic, Thai, Malay, etc., as well as English and French, not only exclusively from Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer languages in terms of basic words. There was a truly laughing stock that some French 'institutions' had even awarded grants sponsoring local Vietnamese 'scholars' to write books about the French influence in Vietnamese and one of them even came up with a 'research' on the French origin of Vietnamese words! (See Cao Xuân-Hạo. 2001) As a matter of fact, if the French colonialists had styed long enough in Annam, some 400 loanwords from French maight have become the mainstream words if one could argue with parallel development with all the latest mordern Chinese loans are quite popular in Vietnamese, such as 'bảotrọng' (take care), 'đảmbảo' (guarantee), 'thịphạm' (demonstrate), 'đạocụ' (prop set)...

Proportionally, French words — as remnants of the colonial legacy of 96 years under the French rule that ended in Vietnam in July 20, 1954 — appear in Vietnamese could amount to well over several hundred items (see APPENDIX A (5)). Even though that amount totals to many times more than all identified Mon-Khmer lexicons combined, and in the same manner, their frequency of usage is pretty low and, of course, have no genetic relationship whatsoever, and no mistakes should be made on certain common words fairly become intimate within some Vietnamese cirles, such as 'moi' (I), 'toi' (you), 'monsieur' (mister), 'madame' (madam), etc., along with notably grammatical mechanics for composé with modern styles. It is so menitioned so as to compare it with the existence of the Chinese pronuunciations in Vietnamese, such as 'anh' 兄 huynh (brother), ‘em' 俺 am, 'chị' 姊 tỷ (sister), 'cô' 故 cô (miss), 'mợ' 母 mẫu (mother), etc., as addressing pronouns. Statistically, the rate of foreign lexical infiltration in Vietnamese is low and scanty, to be exact. As a matter of fact, ten years of active American presence in Vietnam during the Vietnam's War (1965-1975) were not long enough to assist the then English learners of the author's generation to know what really a 'hamburger' actually was, and American-English left a very small amount of words in Vietnamese such as 'hello', 'okay', 'bye-bye, 'number-one', 'one-two-three', 'snack-bar', 'cowboy', '(bus)boy', 'hippy', 'jeep', etc., in Vietnamese. And of course, that is not the case with Sinitic-Vietnamese, as you will see.

In this paper, conventionally, when we discuss about the etymology of those Sinitic-Vietnamese words in the Vietnamese language, their locally influential references will be limited minimally within the 'Sinitic' aspect for the purpose of comparative analysis, i.e., only those cited etyma concurrently existing in both Chinese and Vietnamese to be elaborated, including those foreign words that had entered Vietnamese via the Chinese medium. For example, "mắt" (eye) 目 mù (SV mục) may be related to Malay 'mata', or "gạo" (rice) 稻 dào vs. Thai /gaw/, etc., plus some other words of 'foreign' origin such as SV 'kỹsư' 技師 jìshī ('engineer,' from Japanese "gishi" as opposed to modern Chinese usage to mean 'techinician'), 'bệnhviện' 病院 bìngyuàn ('hospital', also from Japanese usage), 'ưumặc' 幽默 yōumò (English 'humor'), 'câulạcbộ' 俱樂部 jùlèbù ('club'), or 'Anh' (英 Yīn <~ 'England'), 'Pháp' (法 Fă <~ 'France'), 'Mỹ' (美 Měi <~ 'Amerrica'), Đức (德 Dé <~ 'Deutschland'), etc.

The whole matter appeared explicable then until the Austroasiatic linguistic circus came to town with its new distracing hypnosis. Its supporters and advocates approached the issues from the point of view taken from the southern geo-sphere where the Austroasiatic borderline overlaps those of Austronesian racial stock in Indo-Chinese peninsula to south of the archipelagoes of Malaysia and Indonesia and to the west islands of the Philippines as well as Taiwan, formerly Formosa. We could, nevertheless, fit the whole picture into one shot by merging the two views of the Yue and Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer and speculating that the Indo-European theorists might have consciously replaced the term "Yue" with Austroasiatic for their new invention on the aboriginal "Yue" entities that appear to fit into spots along a straight generic line with what had been depicted by historical linguists (See Terrien De Lacouperie.1887 and R. A. D. Forrest, 1948).

Geographically the author is tracking steps taken by early emigrants from north Vietnam of vast areas of China South — the indigenous Yue tribes, namely, LuoYue (雒越), OuYue (歐越) or Xi'ou (西甌), MinYue (閩越) or Dong'Ou (東甌), etc., and other racially mixed people such as the Qin-mutated Shu (BaThục 巴蜀 BaShǔ (秦)), Yue-mutated Chu 楚 Chǔ 'Sở', Yue-mutated Han 漢, and Hakka 'Hẹ' 客家 Kèjiā or 'Cácchú'), etc. — had further advanced southward, resettled and and mixed with those native inhabitants all along the way, including the Chamic and Mon-Khmer peoples. In a sense, that is what Việtnam 越南 as the official name of the country as first appeared only in 1802 (another way to write 南越, or NamViệt, in a naturally reverse order by the Vietnamese to mean the Việt of the South, sometimes being taken with the meaning of 'to surpass to the south' or 'advance to the south', of which the connotation implies the southern migratory pattern of the ancestral Yue whose emigration had become more active starting from China South about 300 B.C. in the face of advancement of the Qin invaders. (Lu Shih Peng, 1964)

Figure 1.5: Map of the historical ancient proto-Chinese migratory routes
Source: Multiple sources on the internet

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In other word, the author's viewpoint of southwardly geo-spherical emigration of the Yue pinned from a northern pivot fanning out all the way to the southern hemisphere could be expanded without the need to take into consideration of other theories on the origin of the Austronesian people that embrace the bisectionay half of eastern hemisphere to the east within our focus on the time span of 3,000 to 4,000 years or so given the historical records available at our disposal. (A) The whole theory will then ease its way to reconcile to the fact that the Yue people were the creators of the bronze drums to account for all those that have been found also in Indonesia where the Austronesian viewpoint has been a focus in other hypotheses, say, Austro-Thai, etc. That is to say, all the southern people have migratory routes were southward from the north.

For all the practical matters the Austroasiatic hypothesis also alienates other views of the proto-Yue having been in existence in the further northeastern side of the Yangtze River all the way up to the Yellow River in the Northeast, i.e., in ancient Lu State (魯國) in Shandong (山東) Province, based on the overall ethnological picture of the Taic-Yue stock of the Chu State (楚國) in the vicinity of today's Hubei (湖北) and Anhui (安徽) provinces. Recall that Vietnamese legends had it that their earliest ancestors emerged from Dongtinghu Lake area (洞庭湖 in Hunan 湖南 Province, south of Hubei). All other areas above constitute the whole contiguous region of racial principality of Taic stock.

Different tribes of the ancient Taic-Yue people also spread in the direction the east and west, which account for the racial composition of the pre-Qin (先秦) era as early human fossils found in ancient Sichuan Province where the Bashu (巴蜀) State once was located. They collectively injected other elements into the pre-Han (前漢) populace, and their difference was lying in the name change. Recall that the first monarch of the Han Dynasty, Liu Bang (劉邦), his generals and followers under arms were all Chu subjects whence it could have been called Chu (楚) — that is, not Han if the last King of Chu, Xiang Yu (項羽), had won the battle against his own previously appointed Viceroy Liu Bang of Hanzhong (漢中) Prefecture. As previously mentioned, after the Han defeated the Chu, all of its subjects inside the Han Empire's periphery would later call themselves Han people (漢人 Hànrén), that appened only after a long pocess though. That is how the Chinese Han had stepped out in spotlight from a racially mixed bag with other pre-Han Chinese who made up the already diversed populace mixed with the Taic-Yue people coming from six former ancient states that were initially conquered and unified by the Qin in 221 B.C. By then, the racial composition of the subjects of the Chu were mainly descendants of the Taic-Yue people who also had given birth to all the Southern Yue tribes (BáchViệt 百越) in different historical settings of the Zhou, Qin, or Han. Meanwhile, the becoming of the ancient Annamese was same as that of the Cantonese (粵), Fukienese (閩越), or the WuYue (吳越) people, etc., but the similarity stopped there because that would go against the history of the earlier entities of what is known as the modern Vietnamese who had gone under the rule of different Chinese dynasties throughout the period from 235 B.C. until 939 A.D. with really few and brief intervals of independence in between. After the 12th centtury the young Annam state expanded further to the south crossing the 16th latitude the first firm along the way over the next 1080 years until 1989 when the country had to withdraw from her occupation of Kampuchea in the western plank and returned to the previous 1979 borderline. In summary, the originally descended from the ancient Yue ancestry up north in China South were mixed with the Han settlers in the south in northern Vietnam for 1000 years after 111 B.C., and as the Annamese people advanced further to the south, now the central part of Vietnam, they mixed with Austronesian Chamic and more of Autroasiatic Mon-Khmer people in their own territory. In other word, it is now that is what becomes of those racially-mixed people called Vietnamese.

The Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists, however, postulated that the Sinicization of the indigenous Mon-Khmer people in the ancient Annam had made the Vietnamese. Such argumentation did not take into consideration recorded history of Yue people considered as the ancestors of the earlier Annamese people, who actually still had advanced further to the south to ill in the anthropological gap to come up with modern Vietnamese fusion. For the Austroasiatic camp, that the Mon-Khmer people mixed the Chinese resettlers throughout the colonial period gave birth to the Vietnamese. They stated that the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer people from the Indo-Chinese peninsula were actually the ancestors of the modern Vietnamese. The "Vietnamization of the Mon-Khmer" factors seemed to have slipped out of the picture such that they might not know when the Mon-Khmer people supposedly moved in the Red River Basin where the Daic people had been already living there. Historically, early Vietnamese emigrants moved into the southern part of the Indo-Chinese peninsula only after the 12th century where they first mixed the Chamic people with concesssion of 2 prefectures of Chamic land as gift to the Tran Dynasty through royal interracial marriage of the King of Champa with the Vietnamese princess. Those who had been there before their arrivals were of no Vietnamese ancestry, so to speak, as archaeological excavations in Central Vietnam showed.

What made the Austroasiatic theorists to group the Vietnamese language into the Mon-Khmer branch of it then? The Austroasiatic hypothesis had so existed because the Mon-Khmer populace appeared to have permeated deeply into the local population living in the Indo-Chinese peninsula and been dominant occupants of the land. The answer could also lie in the fact that during the "gold rush" era of flourishing era of historical linguistics with schools that blossomed in the late 19th century. By then many Western linguists might yet hear of the "Yue" people and their languages while Mon-Khmer speakers in Southeast Asia were then commanding an earful of linguistic voice of the country's glorious past, at least coming alive from the ruins of the ancient Khmer Empire credited for their magnificience, past and present, that made them envious. To fit everything in the overall picture, they even come up with the Vietmuong subdivision in the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer linguistic sub-family and started to initiate the connection among them. Interestingly, their Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis happened to fit nicely in the place of what actually belonged to the Yue domain as that was recorded in ancient China's historical annals hundreds of years ago — that could be just a coincidenece at first — that the Yue and Austroasiatic entities overlapped in several aspects. The Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists, discreetly took the notion and they even enjoyed avoiding steep learning curves in what would become the field of what is known as Sinitic-Vietnamese linguistics in this paper. It must be easier to associate a score of basic words that exist in both Mon-Khmer and Vietnamese languages to draw conclusions about their common roots than otherwise.

In effect, it must be formidable and challenging for many Western-educated scholars in their linguistic career to dig deeply into ancient Chinese classics for explication of mystic etymological roots. They could in effect did well with hypothesis of proto-Chinese, Old Chinese, Middle Chinese with linguistic sound rules, but that was not the case with Vietnamese, past and present. For what appears today, nevertheless, it was of no surprise that not until the early 20th century there had not been so many Sinologists, among whom barely a few that could confidently be named without reservation such as those renown linguists De Lacouprie, Maspero, Haudricourt, Shafer, Forrest, or Kargren, etc., who would substantiate that Sinology was the key to explore the Vietic root by then. That is to say, nobody could reliably offer a comprehensive view of Vietnamese etymology without the knowledge of Chinese.

Table 2. The distribution of indigenous languages before the Vietnamese

Map of the Austroasiatic languages per the Austroasiatic view
Source: Multiple sources on the internet

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Etymologically, firstly, to explain the commonalities in certain basic words, linguistic contact from one Mon-Khmer language resulted in a few of basic words that spilled over to the Muong subdialects and in turn they did the same to the Vietnamese language. It is all possible because of their geographical proximity, usually in mountainous regions further to the south where the aboriginals had fled in the face of the Chinese occupation and Sinicization. Even though they could no longer be communicable to each other as a result long after the Viet-Muong split, the Muong speakers still remained as the Vietnamese Kinh's kin as neighbors in many ways, anthropologically. Secondly, their shared basic words spread to the Mon-Khmer languages, and vice versa, in simple activities such as trading and bartering, exchanges of agricultral produce and handicrafts, and cultivating experiences. In other word, while having collaborated with the Chinese occupiers, the Kinh still maintained relationship with other diasporas in their own land, and their interaction bridged the gap that divides the Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer languages. Since prehistoric times, the Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer encounter had happened at the start of the first wave of the Mon-Khmer speakers when they moved into the Red River Delta from the southwestern Lower Laos. (Nguyễn Ngọc-San. 1993. p. 43).

Methodologically, when it comes to linguistic affiliation, topologically, from the start it was easier for Austroasiatic initiatives to group all those related basic etyma that span across many Mon-Khmer languages together into a large lingual spectrum of mixed elements. As it turns out some of the Mon-Khmer basic words found in Vietnamese, nevertheless, also have cognates in some Chinese and Sino-Tibetan languages, which are known in this paper as the Sinitic-Vietnamese words. In such cases, expectedly, many of their fundamental etyma have found their roots both in other Yue-related languages, i.e., Cantonese, Fukienese, Hainanese, Hokkienese, etc., and, interestingly, in Sino-Tibetan etymologies as well, as you will see in this survey. The point to make here is what the Austroasiatic theorists lumped together under the Mon-Khmer umbrella having originated from elsewhere, though. It is only that the Khmer shadow was too colossal to rebuke.

The Austroasiatic theory, on the one hand, thereupon emerged with its Mon-Khmer linguistic subfamily branch, but it has been engageg in nullification of the Sino-Tibetan theory of the root of the Vietnamese language that had existed beforehand, on the other hand. Postulation with its respective affiliation, therefore, would involve not only in the issue of Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer versus that of Yue but also that of Sinitic-Vietnamese vs. Sino-Tibetan but also their peculiar linguistic traits shared by both Vietnamese and Chinese languages, given vast majority of Sino-Tibetan cognates existing in the Sinitic-Vietnamese. While it might be simpler to acknowledge that ancient Annamese evolved from the Yue linguistic foundation on top of the Taic base, the postulation that any basic lexicons posited in its Vietmuong subdialect that could possbly be loanwords from their neighboring Mon-Khmer languages that had belonged to the same family of several languages spoken across China South hundreds of years ago.

In any case, whether it is of Sino-Tibetan linguistic family or not, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists would focus on the work of genetic classification, i.e., the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer as the mother language that gave birth to the Vietnamese language, as their theory goes. Meanwhile, in the Sino-Tibetan camp, with the Sinitic affinity of Vietnamese set forth in this paper the timeframe around 3000 years or so based on history, which has been absent in the prehistoric Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer realm.

Regarding the timeframe in historical linguistics and their affiliation, Merritt Ruhlen in The Origin of Language (1994 [1944]) quoted Hans Henrich Hock that

"We can never prove that two given languages are not related. It is always conceivable that they are in fact related, but that the relationship is of such an ancient date that millennia of divergent linguistic changes have completely obscured the original relationship.

Ultimately, this issue is tied up with the question of whether there was a single or a multiple origin of Language (writ large). And this question can be answered only in terms of unverifiable speculations, given the fact that even the added time depth provided by reconstruction, our knowledge of the history of human languages does not extend beyond ca. 5,000 B.C, a small 'slice' indeed out of the long prehistory of language. (Hock 1986:566).

B) The background

Technical arrangement for this paper is suitable for both novices in Vietnamese historical linguistics and specialists in Chinese and Vietnamese philologies alike. Yet those Vietnamese learners with a good command in Mandarin (M, Vietnamese called Quanthoại 官話 Guanhua (QT), officially known as "Putonghua" 普通話) and some knowledge of historical linguistics will benefit greatly from this study. So said please bear with me should I explain too much of anything, repeat certain points to emphasize some already-known facts, which is so obvious to specialists, or too little of everything, which may be difficult for general readers to follow (普). (See "Bibliography" in the end of this paper for some primers on historical linguistics.)

The purpose of this section is to build up a rapport on the author's points of view as to be discussed in this writing to establish an academic connection of some sorts but not to pretend this type of research is a serious scientific one, paper perfect, because it is not. You may want to treat this as a story of the Vietnamese language as best conveyed by the Vietnamese sub-subtitle Ýthức mới về nguồngốc tiếngViệt. (New recognition on the origin of Vietnamese)

Alternatively, should readers still be skeptical but curiously want to learn more about the Vietnamese etymology of Chinese origin, they would better wait to read a book of this research in print for a good reason: people are more open-minded or trying to get the most for their money, given the fact that nobody will have the patience of the author's having gone through writing this paper to read it online. That said, only then would they have an impartial judgment about what is written specifically herein with quotable facts (all this will not happen until a prestigious publisher contact the author, so to speak!)

People tend to like to hear what they want to believe, though. They naturally put their trust only in what they had been initialy prepared with as a second nature they were born with. In order to appreciate my writing it is imperative that the readers possess certain knowledge of history of Vietnam and China. Novices are invited, too, as long as they are interested in the subject matter since this research is just like that of history, the story of the past that many people may want to hear.

It would be great if we all are interested in the same thing and this will build our trust and belief, just like believers in the same religion. As a new theory usually starts from some premises — facts, quotes, supports, rules, paradigms, analogy, logics, etc. — and that we pick a stand in the same camp, generally accept them and build our discussion thereupon as we come along. For instance, when we posit 雞 jī and 'gà' (hen) and 蛋 dàn 'trứng' 9egg) are cognates and undisputable of the same root, both likely of Yue origin, there is no need to elaborate more on their proof. As we all eccept it as a premise, we only need to discuss whether the bird was of the south or the north origin, or even eggs come first or chickens first. Besides, logically, for a historical linguist, it is obvious that the domineering language that would take over on the others as resulted from language contacts between the two groups. In detail it would depend much on their prowess, their numbers, their level of cultural development, etc., of which the dominant language of the more powerful invaders who conquered the land of indigenous population, after the long period of bilingualism, would be adopted by the conquered people. (Roberts J. Jeffers, et al. 1979, p. 142)

Novices of historical linguistics may find it a bit hard to accept such random reasoning but that is the fact of history. In our specific Sinitic-Vietnamese case, that was all about the process of Sinicization on the Annnamese land that lasted hundreds of years. I promise not to argue with all those who have voiced against my argumentation in the past and days to come. I seriously do not want to recruit any more Sinitic-Vietnamese followers from that group because there is not such thing is abolute truth about historical linguistics. We cannot change what people have already believed in. I know darned too well that what is exactly on their mind, "Chinazi's propagandist!", "Wikipedia sources are unreliable and unquotable!", or "What a bullshit view!", "Bogus!", etc. Feel free to leave our forum now If you do not share what I have discussed so far. (差)

How have I gone about this etymological affair that got me this far? Admittedly I am no Vietnamese historical linguist by training except for having, fortunately enough, taken a few introductory linguistics courses taught by internationally renown historical linguistics Profs. Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, Hoàng Tuệ, and Bùi Khánh Thế, all being best respectable linguists at the old Saigon University back in the late 1970's. In my spare time, but more than a hobby, I have devoted wholeheartedly my energy in the field of research ever since. I still remember my first project assigned by Professor Hoàng Tuệ was about the concept of "tiếng" (sound) in Vietnamese, of which the meanings embrace all the concepts of sound, morpheme, syllable, word, and language, which had taken me to research on the Chinese equivalent character 聲 shēng and beyond, a happenstance of enlightenment that changed my life. Interestingly, for the concept 聲 shēng as "language", it is not only used in Vietnamese but in Chinese as well, for example, 蠻聲 Mansheng (tiếngMôn) of the Shaozhou Tuhua (韶州土話), subdialects spoken in the border region of the north of Guangdong, Hunan, and Guangxi provinces.

For me, 聲 Shēng (VS 'Tiếng') becomes the Đạo (道 Dào), or the Way, that opens up many hidden vaults that contain stacks of the Sinitic-Vietnamese etymological files. Since then as I have kept exploring other possibilities of other Chinese characters with diversed meanings beyond the original semantic boundary of what the original Chinese concepts convey. That is the magic of language. I also hope that some pieces of revelation in this work will enable someone to walk beyond the threshold of language learning level to see what I appreciate about historical linguistics that could tell us all about the origin of the Vietnamese language.

How could I be so confident with my Sinitic hypothesis but disrespectful for the Austroasiatic views? This is a muddy Chinese and Vietnamese affair that I approach with a tongue-in-cheek attitude in linguistic circles. No one likes to be fully engaged in the game for there being no ending. Theory on any linguistic affiliation may not work in the Indo-European framework that the Austroasiatic camp has done. Conventionalists will shout "ignorant!" at those who veer off the wisdom of the well-defined traditional path. Yet, linguistics is both science and humanity and history all in one domain. History has shown that only those who dared would pick the less traveled path and were the best and the brightest dare to follow suit.

For more than three decades by now since I have been exposed to the Chinese language in some scholarly settings, I possess a mastery command of the modern Mandarin — Putonghua by official name — by daily consersation with my Chinese-native wife, reading Chinese books, listening to the news, and watching Chinese soap operas from satelite in the old days and on Youtube nowadays, etc., all for the purpose of looking for Vietnamese etyma of Chinese origin, which has put me in an authoritive position to state something with expertise regarding the Chinese and Vietnamese etymology matters. I guess the message I want to get accross is that I have been always amazed at how close, on top of common vocabularies, many modern Mandarin expressions are to those of Vietnamese in practical circumstances as I have often observed from a series of Chinese sitcoms, the way Mandarin speakers talk daily, which strengthens further my conviction of the Chinese connection with Vietnamese beyond what is recorded in Chinese historical linguistics. In a larger picture, I found the same common ahre between the two languages so much that all contain in major classical Chinese novels written since the 12th century. Any Vietnamese scholar of historical linguistics, with fluency in modern Mandarin with a keen etymological mindset will not probably agree less with me in this respect. At the same time, I would like to emphasize that the Vietnamese language is more than the confinement of another variant of descendant Yue languages, e.g., Cantonese, Fukienese, Zhuang, Daic, etc., because of the latter ones, they, after long, long period under Chinese rule, all become highly Sinicized to an extensive degree that those Chinese dialects were positively classified as of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family by Chinese linguists.

With a tremendous fascination in this subject I have spent enormous time teaching myself respective Vietnamese and Chinese historical linguistics and devoted a larger part of energy committed to the work of looking for etymological proofs, one at a time for many, to build an on-line dictionary of Nôm words of Chinese origin, i.e., Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma.

Boredom is the name of the game in many instances, however. I, more than once, sometimes asks myself why I got involved so deeply into this affair. There will be virtually no material gain awaiting me after all. Who cares if a Chinese etymon found of Yue origin, and vice versa, or not. The Vietnamese linguistic affiliation will be still probably called either Austroasiatic or Sino-Tibetan linguistic family anyway. While I am still full in energy in this matter, let us go for it and follow me until I drop somehow some day.

With newfound discoveries unfurled everyday, I, just like a pilgrim, spiritually and metaphorically, who is in constant search for sacred revelation in his or her life, have set out on this etymological journey. Although I have unexpectedly stumbled upon hitches and hits in the world of Chinese linguistic ancient sound bits, they do enlighten my soul, though, in the end with a new insight into the Vietnamese etymology world, which is the end result of the encounter with the Chinese historical linguistics over the years that has aroused curiosity inside me for the Chinese linguistic past. That experience — analogically with the same intrigue feeling that English learners want to know more of the Greek, Latin, and other Roman languages — has widened my knowlege of the Chinese language as well while looking for Vietnamese etyma of Chinese origin.

Prior to all this affair I used to believe in what specialists of Vietnamese said about Vietnamese and its Mon-Khmer connection. That was then but this is now. I am no longer a student and I have learned my way around. As I have submerged deeply into the subject matter I notice that there exist commonalities among Vietnamese and Sinitic languages more than the Sino-Tibetan languages have among themselves, not only limited to the realm of basic words but also beyond those fundamental ones that historical linguists like to cite quite often to draw affiliation among common languages. I can see that the Austroasiatic camp does focus on the shared portions of both languages, i.e, Mon-Khmer Vietnamese cognates, but they had missed what I found in the Sino-Tibetan etymologies, including those basic words that concurrently appear in both Chinese and Vietnamese diachronically that the Austroasiatic theorists believe they originated from the Mon-Khmer linguistic subfamily. Based on the fact that so many Vietnamese words appear to be cognate to those of Sino-Tibetan languages, what exists in any other Mon-Khmer languages as they have been suggested so far does not have even the minimal features, such as commonly cited dissyllabicity and tonality, that Vietnamese is having all in common with Chinese in every linguistic aspects that overrun whatever the Mon-Khmer entities availed in the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer camp in support of the hypothesis of the origin of Vietnamese.

If all the Vietnamese linguistic characteristics are to be tabulated systematically in detail comparatively side by side with those of the Chinese historical linguistics, one cannot help but reckon that it is simply a modified version of the other. It is from this conviction that I have begun sorting things out, putting in this paper for more than 18 years by now. This Sinitic-Vietnamese theory is based on not only comparative list of more than 400 fundamental cognates with Sino-Tibetan etymologies, that will appear in the chapter on Sino-Tibetan, but also a wide range of supporting evidences from anthropology, archaeology, and history. For the lack of records in the field of history, Austroasiatic specialists could barely speculate on them so they turn to focus mainly on comparative analyses on scores of Mon-Khmer basic words, that are gradually found to belong to other linguistic families as well. With respects to the history, they might shift their focus to a neighboring language for the lack of linguistic proof, which has, in effect, nullified the validity of the argument about both historical and etymological connections between the Vietnamese and Chinese. Let us examine the case VS "vịt" (duck), there exist no cognates to the Mon-Khmer languages, so they posited the Vietnamese word of "vịt" to Thai เป็ด /pĕd/ even though they know that Thai is decended from the Daic language and it came from the Taic family language that also gave rise to the Yue language, the ancestral of the ancient Vietmuong language. If we postulate the etymological connection that makes the VS "vịt" as cognacy of Chinese 鴨 yā (SV áp) under the scope history, we could dig into the Chinese annals and might find supports for the word. Dong Zuobin (董作賓. 1933) in "譠 《譠》” or Discussing about 'Tan', p. 162), points out for a placename in Tan State (Shang Dynasty, now located in Shangdong Province) called 武原城 Wǔyuánchéng (=VS 'Thành Vũnguyên') , the local residents called 鵝鴨城 Éyāchéng (=VS 'Thành Ngỗngvịt'; literally "Citadel of Ducks and Geese"), simply because the two ancient names sounded similar in their dialect then. In short, that is the history aspect of the Sinitic etymology that I have been talking about, which the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer camp is totally lacking.

Methodologically, in the process of working on this project, for all new discoveries back in the pre-internet era I have jotted them down the old-fashioned way in those index cards with notes extracted form a few hundred books. starting more than 30 years ago that numbered up to 20,000 plus that are supposedly to support my theory. So far up until now I have not even touched them yet! Literally out of those handwritten cards, I have mentally put all things together in perspective with a whole new picture of the Vietnamese etymological structure and essence, having opened up a full view of a lingual past that has long gone by. With plenty of recorded substantial evidences at hand I am still in the process of gathering supporting data into place in order to explicate my theory that most of the cited Sinitic-Vietnamese words have at least a minimum cognate in Chinese. Now here we are in the midst of the blossomed internet era, I will gradually post my new edits on my website as I am progressing. Besides I will try to make this research to be readable on a mobile device, ideally as time permits, one chunk at a time, perhaps, as far as I can imagine.

All of the above is my lifelong goal that I am determined to pursue at least until it will be publised in the mainstream print format. Hopefully my work will set forth a new linguistic expedition following the Sino-Tibetan direction where modern Sinitic languages are simply linguistic branches as the results of the fusion of the Taic-Yue languages mainly with proto-Tibetan that gave rise to proto-Chinese and the pre-Qin-Han languages across the ancient mainland of China. As their fusion of the Yue language throughout the Qin and Han periods in the ancient Annamese land that gave birth to the ancient Vietnamese starting sometime in the 10th century. Whether that was exactly the case or not, with the conviction that languages ought to be viewed as a holistic living thing as it actually appears to us with all its intrinsic characteristics rather than what originally had started from the beginning, say, five or three thousand years ago. The overview is similar to the perspective of wholeness with which we usually treat the English language that come with the final form with all the Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, Norman, Roman, Latin, Greek, etc., elements combined that make it up as a living language other than a mere judgment based on only the very first factor; they are all from the Indo-European linguistic family, anyway.

With the results found and its genetic affinity proven in the Sino-Tibetan chapter of this research, given the common linguistic peculiarities existing among both Vietnamese and Chinese in addition to their shared cognates in other Sino-Tibetan etymologies, Vietnamese could be likely once again reconsidered and officially reclassified as of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. Such academic reclassification is plausibly possible as new methodologies in Vietnamese historical linguistics are presented in this research that can be approached from a much more different and broader scopes. The new methodologies can be used concurrently with other research tools already made available to us via late studies in the Chinese historical linguistics. They can be utilized in the work of Vietnamese etymology as well as historical linguistics in various fields of Vietnamese studies as well, such as anthropology, archaeology, and history with respect to the origin and biological composition of Vietnamese people and their state. The whole idea behind it is people of the same racial background should speak a variant language of the same origin.

In effect, the associated benefits of Sinitic-Vietnamese studies are tangible and benificial. As we all know, most larger linguistic institutions on earth all have invested tremendous resources and devoted talents with expertise in the field of studying the Chinese historical linguistics in our era. Any progress in any fields of Chinese linguistics can be equally applied to study Vietnamese etymology without much reservation because characteristics of Chinese and Vietnamese languages are virtually the same. For example, Chinese is now treated as a polysyllabic language and that linguistic feature faithfully reflects in its popular official "pinyin" — romanized Chinese transcription system — so that should be an applicable case for the Vietnamese orthography in the context of reform of its current inefficient monosyllabic writing system which had been created on the ad hoc basis to serve an instant need of spreading religious propaganda by European missionaries long way back in the 18th century. Furthermore, final work on Sinitic-Vietnamese in this paper will give the Vietnamese etymology another application with concrete results for expectant lexicographers to make use of and incorporate them into a Vietnamese dictionary with plausible etymology for each word, a peculiar feathure that a Vietnamese dictionary has never had before.

For all of the historical introduction above as to be expanded in each respective chapters next, you will grasp fairly full depiction on how the modern Vietnamese language has come about, diachronically and synchonically, and how it relates to those other 'Sinitic' segments within the Sinitic linguistic sub-family in the Sino-Tibatan linguistic family.

Again, be reminded that "Sinitic" ('x') is actually so called simply out of convenience, or by convention, to refer to something related to Chinese and Chinese was something that only came into existence long after the Taic-Yue entities, historically. The Chinese language has its own history that goes with that of the Middle Kingdom. The term "Chinese" is the product of history since the unification of all ancient states into the Qin Empire — analogous to the formation of the Europe Union (EU) nowadays — in which vestiges of indigenous Taic-Yue elements have shined throughout with or without acknowledgement or awarness by any Chinese linguists or Sinologists who have grouped all southern Yue languages such as Cantonese, Fukienese, or Wu languages into the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, in this case by institutionally official decrees. So, lexicograpically, it is used to cover also all other Chinese dialects (See Tang Lan. 1965. p. 184). As previously stated, if the Chu had defeated both the Qin and Han in their final battle, China — hence comes the term 'Chinese' — would have been called "Chu". Ancient records indicated that Chu was a Daic-Yue state, postulated as of Taic stock (ancestors of both Daic and Zhuang people now), and its subjects could have spoken some version of ancient "Chu-nese" language in place of the so-called "Chinese" then. For the same rationalization, if the NamViet Kingdom could have ever taken over the Han Empire, 'x' could arbitrarily have been called 'Viet', or /jyet8/ or 'Yue' as alled in Mandarin. (Lu Shih-Peng, 1964, and Bo Yang, 1983-93). Here we go, everything is in the name and the substance would virtually remain the same, just like what the Manchurians called China 'Qing' from 1644 to 1911. Let us further assume if the Japanese Imperial armies had won the war in occupying China in the World War II, they might have renamed the Middle Kingdom into 'Dai DongA' (Great East Asia) of some sort. We could have called 'Sinitic' by other name then — 'not-x', with regards to what came first, chicken or egg — it is a matter of convenience and out of necessity, which could cause confusion in opposition to either Taic-Yue or Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorization.

Regarding the integrity of this survey, with repects to the matter of electronic format of in-progress research, many people express their critical mistrusting academic paper in general that is published only on the internet, calling them 'bogus'. Even though the electronic forms have proven their superior advantages, the issue of reliabilty and durability lies in the fact that they are in constant changes as their authors see fit and their availablity is dubious over the next 20 years, who knows how many of them will still be around and available as they are in existence today on the internet, all currently existing only in the virtual world of Cyber Space. Specificall, Google will drop off from their search results after a long period of inactivity of some websites ("out-of-business") and webservers will closed all unpaid accounts, etc. Consider this as a spoiler for the upcoming publication in paper then; nothing is final in the linguistic world, so is this research whether or not it would be published in print format. The author seriously believes that nobody likes to spend time to read this document back to back the way they would if they have to spend a good sum of money to own the book. (H) That is how I have done with most of the listed referential books in the bibliography, not a complete list yet for a couple of hundred titles that I own being shelved on my book cases.

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C) Symbols and conventions

In this paper I will use common conventions utilized in the fields of historical linguistics in addition to their alternate usages and some made-up signs and other symbols of my own. The reader should already be familiar with most of commonly used linguistic symbols, the International Phonetic Symbol (IPA), and Vietnamese (V) orthography (Quốcngữ) (Q).

In the end of this research paper you will find a long list of the bibliography for references.For books in print most of libraries of the acedemic US universities may still have them. While many related linguistic websites are resourceful, some of which will nolonger exist, readers may need to look for any URL address of those quoted sources that may be saved at https://archive.org/.

Abbreviations and acronyms will be noted once they have first appeared. Cited examples within a paragraph will be wrapped to the next separate line and numbered or bulleted (•) for better illustration. Also, in most of the cases, there may be lengthy comments about patterns of sound changes and evolution of those Vietnamese words under scrutiny, to be put in between square brackets like [ xxx yyy zzz ], as how they have come about as postulated in order to support arguments about those listed etymologies. After all, that is the purpose of this research.

English meanings of cited vocabularies will be noted once or more times as needed after each one and they are by no means exhaustive. Sometimes they will be omitted if deemed irrelevant.

The commonly used symbols include

• “>” denoting “evolves into” (diachronically),
• “<” sign “derived from” (diachronically),
• “=>” “giving rise to” (by a phonetic rule),
• “~>” “giving rise to” (by analogy),
• “<=” "built with",
• “~” "alternating with", "correspondent to", or "is cognate to" (synchronically),
• “$” for literary use only, as opposed to a vernacular or colloquial form,
• “#” metathesis or in reverse order ("iro"),
• “@” associated with, assimilated with, sandhi process of assimilation, or assimilative association, identified with ("liêntưởng", "đồnghoá"),
• “©” archaic, old usage, obsolete ("cổ"),
• “®” contraction, sound dropped, fallen, or deleted ("rụng"),
• “§”, cf., confer, compare ("sosánh"),
• “¶", |P, pattern of sound change,
• “%” possible alternate,
• “&” in combination with
• “/” under the condition of, being conditioned by, e.g., x > y /_V#
• x/y alternation, alternant, alternate,
• “\” alternatively, under the influence of, or singly the same as "/"
• “[xxxx]” exact phonetic value, else, indicating an insertion to further explain the case under discussion,
• “/xxxx/” approximate phonetic value within the double slashes "/",
• /ã/, /ẽ/, /õ/, etc., nasalized vowels,
• Vh = "Vietnamized", i.e., localization,
• “X- , -Y-, Z-” capital letters arbitrarily signify similar class of articulation of initial consonants in phonetic transcriptions, etc., /P-/ for close labial sounds...
• “=” equal to, equivalent of,
• “(?)” unidentifiable or unknown element or source,
• /-ʔ/ conventional gutteral ending or breakaway od syllabic vowels in dipthongs or tripthongs,
• /Ø-/ for gutteral initial such as ŋ-, ʔ-..,
• “|”: “syllabic divider” or “hononymous or parallel elements”, "as opposed to", "versus"; also, the same as || a separator
• “{x- ~ y-}” and/or "~” sound change patterns, interchanges, also, being conditioned by,
• “*” and “**” hypothetically reconstructed (* ancient — denoting the AD period to the Middle Age — and ** archaic, Proto- form — B.C. and maybe dated as far back as to the pre-historic age) sound”.

Most images, maps, and illustrations are either created by the author or taken from the World Wide Web in public domain or Wikipedia's dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

The unconventional protocol taken in this paper is that there will not be a whole section fully set aside to list all the rules of sound changes, natural or unnatural, between Sinitic-Vietnamese and Chinese for those supposed loanwords as one usually would expect in the research of this magnitude, such as what has been quite well documented by Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1979, 2000, 2001) in the case of the Sino-Vietnamese sound system. Instead, readers will see a synopsis on phonological patterns under the form of samples and short discussions. I will focus more on irregular or distinct sound interchanges, such as the pattern /y- ~ b-/, etc., 由 bởi (because) 油 béo (greasy), 邮 bưu (post), 柚 bưởi, 游 bơi (swim), etc. with all their Mandarin sound pronounced /yóu/ or 公母 gōngmǔ ~ 'trốngmái' (male and female), 'sốngmái' (life of death struggle), or 'vợchồng' (husband and wife), etc.

Should my work later prove to be of any value, specialists in a particular field, such lexical data tabulation or categorization, will do the job of establishing possible sound change patterns and draw their rules accordingly. That kind of work is tantamount to a minutely detailed, if not complicated, task since the frequency-dependent sound changes have occurred in synchrony, somewhat rather irregular, not in uniform batches and shifts and drifts as expected as in Germanic languages, for example. That phenomenon is common, though, only that the issues occur frequently in our particular Sinitic-Vietnamese field.

For those readers who want to skim information on the internet looking for a quick example, they may want to jump here and there, or just bore deeply only to an area of interests. While doing so, they may catch a glimpse of related examples. At the same time, to my fellow scholars, please do not quote any passage herein out of the context or just pull out some erroneous data — which are unavoidable while this paper is being edited constantly, with many typos being spotted here and there — and jump into some conclusion about the whole matter before the whole book is published in print format. I have seen such many a case, for example, in an attempt to prove that 將 jiāng to become 'sẽ' (will) in Vietnamese, I have earned the label "unreliable" and "bogus" from a linguistic forum in which a critic points to a mismatch of 'nướctương' 醬油 jiāngyóu (soysauce) instead of 'xìdầu' 豉油 chǐyóu (bean sauce) that I have imprudently messed up with. In many cases like this specific example, either implicitly or explicitly, it is no brainer for readers to draw exceptional rules on their own in a cohesive manner in line with underlined context, that is, 將 jiāng ~ 'sẽ' \ ¶ /j- ~ s-/ | ¶/-iang ~ -Ø/. That does not mean rules for sound change will be shunned altogether because an error.

When there exists a need for an explanation of a high-profiled case in order to understand how the alternate sound change has actually occurred, deliberation of the etymon involved will therefore unavoidably take some real estate. For such a peculiar or similar case — that is the reason while enumeration of sound change rules are seen so cumbersome that they themselves require a book of its own — the whole process could be only applicable and limited to irregularities because they did not occur to other sounds of the same nature. The important thing is to let readers either to grasp subtleties to draw their own conclusion the process of sound change in a conventional way by linguistic rules or snap the rule in an unconventional way. For the same matter, it also implies the whole business is only a matter of speculation.

It would become a long and boring paper as I have seen in some work if we just cite long list of mechanical rules of sound changes, that may likely go unchecked or unread. Let us instead focus on exploring interesting case studies by examples and discussing about certain processes of how a conclusion has been drawn about a particular case of sound changes that happened to a certain peculiar Sinitic-Vietnamese etymon. By taking the detour road off sound changes that are well-trodden as routinely taken with certain of patterns, readers can grasp the wheel of a vehicle to negotiate their own way after learning how to extract the rules by themselves.

Patterns of sound changes are regular in most cases, though, as seen in the examples cited in this research with Chinese words in all shapes and sounds that have incessantly infiltrated the Vietnamese vocabulary, including variants of Chinese dialects colloquially, since the ancient times throughout different periods of linguistic development, especially during the 1000 year period since 111 B.C. after the ancient Annamese land had fallen under the Chinese rule until it threw off the colonial yoke in 939. Since then, it had been until the 15th century Vietnam of the Middle Agewas invaded by the Ming Dynasty again in 1410, Mandarin was revived for a short period during which it has prominently taken a specially renewed role as the official language, at least, to communicate with the imperial court of China. (囯)

Phonetically, to a certain degree, there are cases that sound changes that have given rise to multiple Vietnamese variants. Comparatively, readers could find similar cases in Japanese Kanji and Go-on readings for each of Chinese word. Let's take 道 dào (way) as an example. We could identify several different "readings" in Vietnamese which convey different concepts, interestingly, that mostly match all the meanings in those Chinese equivalents, e.g.,

• 'đạo' (way, religion, sect, morals, skill, line),
• 'dạo' (time),
• 'đường' (road, line),
• 'nẽo' (path),
• 'nói' (speak),
• 'bảo' (tell),
• 'tưởng' (suppose), etc.,

Underlining rules of phonological changes illustrated here, nevertheless, by no means are complete for reference. This paper, in effect, is still constantly being edited and modified concurrently as of now until at least its first edition in print hits US university campuses where most historical linguists stationed. That said, methodologies utilized here are more experimentally suggestive than conclusive, but in principality they are the same, unless stated otherwise. Meanwhile, they, with the on-going status of this research for the time being, should be treated only as a demonstration of how I have applied at least two new etymological approaches of mine in order to reach preliminary results. Readers will see how the whole process in investigating those Vietnamese words of Chinese origin, or Sinitic-Vietnamese, will be conducted and they they will learn to do the same with ease and confidence.

Those are the new methodologies being utilized extensively hereof, proved to be valuable as innovatively useful tools to look for the etymology of a Sinitic-Vietnamese word and, at the same time, come up with tentative rules of sound changes from one word to another, that is, what changes into 'whats'. This how the author builds the case of 道 dào as illustrated above. Readers can learn to do so with the same tools themselves in the next chapters, especially with the provoded worksheets in in Chaper XIII. They can also expect to see some exciting Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma, a very small portion of what the author has found. Be on alert for those loanwords among them, though. The rule of the thumb is that if both the Vietnamese and Chinese forms appear to be so close, the chance is that the Vietnamese word under investigation is likely a Chinese loan.

Regarding the resemblance of both Vietnamese and Chinese in terms of linguistic traits, while their details will be discussed later throughout this research, such characteristics of both languages are even closer than a great number of Sino-Tibetan languages as they appear to Chinese, the term Sinitic-Vietnamese (VS) — or the HánNôm 漢喃, that includes both Hán and Nôm — is used to signify either Sinitic-Vietnamese words as of Chinese origin or both languages with specific cognates having descended from the same roots such as sông 江 jiāng (river), ngà 牙 yá (tusk), dừa 椰 yé (coconut). Of all their share of linguistic peculiarities, on top of morphonological and semantic similarities, any linguistic attributes that Chinese have, there clearly exist those Sinitic-Vietnamese equilents. Their usages, however, are so frequently common and intimate that they are oftentimes thought to be indigenous Vietic, or regarded as "pure" Vietnamese words, and some being variation of quasi-Sino-Vietnamese, not to mention those Nôm characters written with Chinese components. For those Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma under investigation that are considered as having Chinese roots, it is because they are holistically conformable to all Chinese linguistic attributes and traits, namely, all linguistic peculiar properties in phonetic, morphemic, phonological, semantic, syntactic, lexical, and other features such as the tonal system, the CVC [ Consonant + Vowel + Consonant ] syllabic structures as well as grammatical arrangements in building sentences.

The closer they resemble, however, chances are that they are loaned, on the one hand, and at the same time our task may also be able to determine whether or not that is the case, on the other hand. For example, "tếu" (funny) might be postulated to be 'loaned' from xiào 笑 SV 'tiếu' (laugh) that is cognate to VS 'cười', but it is plausible that the word is cognate to 逗 dòu /tow4/ (tease), SV 'đậu' /ɗɐw6/ with a voiced /ɗ-/, but the unvoiced /t-/ was more ancient and it could be re-introduced into Middle Vietnamese not in a distant past with spoken 'Mandarin', probably of the Ming Dynasty. Readers can compare contemporary usage of 逗 with that in Chinese classics such as Dreams of the Red Chamber 紅樓夢.

In contrast with Sinitic-Vietnamese (VS) terminology, per convention, the term Sino-Vietnamese (SV), or Hán-Việt 漢越, is commonly used mostly to refer to the systematic "Vietnamese pronunciation" of massive Chinese vocabulary essentially used in modern Vietnamese. Analogically Sino-Vietnamese words are just like those of Latin or Greek origin in English. "Vietnamese pronunciation" emphasized here is to infer the consensus that Hán-Việt (SV) words are those pronounced by the Vietnamese with modern characteristics. In fact they are actually a slight variation of Middle Chinese (MC) sounds, which were also postulated that they had been used in the spoken language of the imperial court from the early days during the colonial period of 1000 years, similar to the development of Cantonese of the same timeframe.

Sometimes the whole class of Sino-Vietnamese loosely embraces some other variants of Sino-Vietnamese lexicons found in the Old Chinese (OC) (also called Archaic Chinese (ArC)), the Ancient Chinese (AC), sometimes called the Early Middle Chinese (EMC) loanwords, or Tiền-HánViệt (“the pre-Sino-Vietnamese”), and their variants in Vietnamese that are found dated as far back probably to the proto-Chinese source, for instance,

• (1) bụt, (2) Phật, (3) vãi: 佛 Fó (SV Phật) [ M 佛 fó < Middle Chinese but, phut < OC *bjət, *phjət | Note: from 'Buddha' (Sanskrit), cf. VS 'Bụt' > SV 'Phật' | Cant.: fat42, Wenzhou 溫州 : vai42,. In Vietnamese the concept of 'Bụt' had been antecent of the later equivalent of Buddha. ]: Buddha, buddhist, buddhist monk.
• (1) bụa, (2) phụ, (3) vợ: 婦 fù (SV phụ) [ M 婦 fù < MC bjəw < *OC bjəʔ | cf. 'goábụa' 寡婦 guăfù (widow)，'vợchồng' 公母 gōngmǔ (wife and husband) ] : wife, lady, woman.
• (1) chài, (2) lưới, (3) chàilưới, (4) là: 羅 luó (SV la) [ @& '羅 luó (SV la)' + '羅 luó (VS lưới)' | M 羅 luó < MC lɑ < OC *jraih ]: net-fishing, Also:, bird-net, net.
• (1) cộ, (2) xe, (3) xecộ, (4) cỗ, (5) cỗxe: 車 chē (SV xa) [ @& 'xe' @ 車 chē (SV xa)' + 'cộ' @ 檋 jù (SV cục)' | M 車 chē, jū < MC kʊ < OC *kla | Note: that "cỗxe" could be cognate to Cantonese 架車 /kache/. (車) ]: carriage, car, hence, the modern 'automobile' in general.
• (1) ông, (2) trống, (3) cồ: 公 gōng (SV công) [ Vh @ M 公 gōng < MC kuŋ < OC *klo:ŋ || According to Starostin: clan head, Gong; palace, court. Later also used for 'the whole clan' < 'public'. || ex. 雞公 jīgōng 'gàcồ' ~ 'gàtrống' (rooster), 主公 zhǔgōng 'ôngchủ' (master); cf. 公母 gōngmǔ (vợchồng) ]: duke, public, senior male person, man of authority, grandfather, father, husband’s father, rooster, male.

and other compound words not found in a Chinese or Sino-Vietnamese dictionary, such as "côngcuộc" (incorrectly assumed as 公 gōng + 局 jú) 'task' (see elaboration below).

In this paper, except where the term Sino-Vietnamese clearly applies to words as best exhibited in a "Hán-Việt từđiển", i.e., a Sino-Vietnamese dictionary, the VS lexicons will include all mono- and dissyllabic words of Chinese origin, including those that appear and sound like a Sino-Vietnamese term. For example,

• cuộc in côngcuộc (< 工作 gōngzuò ‘task’)

is not a Sino-Vietnamese word, but it is an innovation of the sound change, by the association with 局 jú (SV cục) for 'cuộc', from

• 作 zuò [tswɔ4] ‘task’ to cuộc [kwok8] [ M 作 zuō, zuó, zuò < MC cʌk < OC *ɕa:k ],

which is merely a local development in Vietnamese. In all probability it, of which its characteristic similarity will be extended to other words of the same semantic nature, was originally derived either from a vernacular form of Northern Chinese dialects (represented by Mandarin by changing [tsw-] to [kw-] and by keeping the old final labiovelar [-ɔk] as demonstrated by the Cantonese /dzwɔk/. Another scenario is that it could be a result of association of the sound and meaning of cục [kʊkʷ] (局 jú), as in 世局 shìjú (SV 'thếcục', VS 'thếcuộc', # 'cuộcthế') or # 'cuộcđời' \ @ 世 shì ~ 'đời', which the author calls the 'sandhi process of assimilation', or assimilative association. This phenomenon has commonly taken place in the Vietnamese etymology of Chinese origin, to be discussed in detail later.

As illustrated in the examples above and throughout this paper, the author will provide each of them with related Chinese characters and accompanied pinyin (拼音) for the purpose of identifying the related sounds even though in many circumstances the pinyin transcription is enough and actually less distracting than those illustrated Chinese characters constructed with jiăjiē 假借 (SV giảtá, being also a mechanism used in creating Chinese-based Nôm characters), or loangraphs, with which the reader has to decipher the embedded-phonetic code. A loangraph in Chinese means a character was borrowed for its phonetic value only and use it for another sound-concept, e.g., 'lại' 來 lái (come) from 'lúa' (paddy, millet, grain). If a loangraph is to be transcribed only in pinyin, it would appear something simlar to homophones having different meanings such as what is found in English ‘yard’, ‘glass’, ‘page’, ‘lie’, and the like. Pinyin is the People's Republic of China’s (PRC) official romanization system utilized to transcribe Mandarin or “pŭtōnghuà” 普通話 (national language) and it now has been widely adapted thoughout the world, including Taiwan, starting adotion of it in the last few years.

For exact sound transcriptions, International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) symbols are mostly used to transcribe dialectal, ancient sounds, as well as precise phonetic value (to be put in square brackets “[xxx]”, as opposed to the two slashes "/xxx/" indicating only an approximate sound value) in certain circumstances to emphasize the true phonetic values of cited lexicons, such as the case of Vietnamese dung , that is [juŋʷ1], [jowŋʷ1], [zʊŋʷ1] /zowng1/, but not [duŋ1], or thìn [t'ɨjn2], /tʰɤjn2/, /tʰɨn2/, /tʰejn2/, but not [thin2], or thu [t'ʊ1] /thow1/, /tʰʊ1/, but not exactly [thu:1] /thu:1/ for "thu", etc., for the sake of clarity where subtle phonemic values need to be identified as dipthongs for a comparative analysis, { cf. tin [tin1] /tin1/, /tɪn1/, not [tɤjn1] /tein1/) }. (音) To be easier for typography, the cited symbols above are also alternatively transcribed as [-ow-] and [-ejn] or /-ou-/ and /-ein/, respectively, whenever true sound values could not be mistaken for something else. This way of transcriptions will be applied to other sound values, too, which will be noted and illustrated as needs arise.

With regard to the IPA transcriptions, in many cases it will be easier to see the relationship of those exact Vietnamese phonetic values with those of Chinese characters than with conventionalized 'pinyin' transcriptions. For example, pinyin d is for [t], t for [t'] or /th/, or r for /j/, or "gu" and "ku" are actually pronounced [ku] and [k'u], not [gu] and [ku], respectively, etc.

The same phonetic mechanism was also utilized by Pulleyblank (1984) in his reconstruction work of Old Chinese (OC) with his discussion of the possibility of certain phonetic values of Old Chinese which were seen as vaguely described in the ancient Chinese annals. Also, to avoid typographical complications and inadvertent confusion with IPA diacritical symbols, just as illustrated in the above examples, different tonal indications of numbers 1 to 9 to follow after each sound transcription, may be deployed to specifically designate each of respective Chinese dialects, such as Cantonese (Guangzhou), Fukienese (Fuzhou, Amoy), Tchewchow (Chaozhou), Hainanese, or other languages, i.e., Daic, Thai, Vietnamese, etc. Per convention, these tonal numeral symbols are commonly used in transcribing Cantonese, Fukienese, and other Chinese dialects and even in Vietnamese, of which tones specifically are marked with designated number according to the old traditional 8-toned, or to be exact, 4 tones in 2 registers, classification as described in Guăngyùn 廣韻, Jerry Norman (1988. p.55) Chinese, and other historical linguistic books including modern Nguồn gốc và Quá trình Hình thành Cách đọc Âm Hán-Việt ('The Origin and Transformational Process of the Sino-Vietnamese Pronunciation') by Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1979, 2001). Specifically, they are:

However, the tonal numerical system will be used sparingly only when essentially needed, mainly to avoid confusion with the exact tonal values that are commonly used with other specific Chinese dialects, each of which may carry a slightly different tonal value even with the same numbering denotation, e.g., Mandarin tonal marks 1, 2, 3, 4 are not the same as those of Cantonese 1, 2, 3, 4... (See Wang Li, et al. 1953)

As a result, in transcribing Vietnamese sound and tonal values, its modern diacritics will be the first choice to be used in combination with the IPA system, e.g., [à], [ả], [ã], etc., if they are not to be confused with other phonetic IPA values such as a nasalized /ã/. Therefore, for a precise tone value of Vietnamese or Mandarin the reader can always refer to Quốcngữ diacritics or Pinyin tonal marks, respectively, e.g., ā, á, ă, à, a, etc., which certainly take on different tonal values than those of Vietnamese diacritical lookalikes.

However, there will be cases of tonal omissions. The reason for that is the tonal indication is their irrelevancy which the author believes that the tones of many Sino-Vietnamese and Sinitic-Vietnamese words, like the Chinese dialectal counterparts, must have been changed completely after having gone through several cycles of inevitable tonal deviations over the span of the past hundreds of years. There is not a tonal change rule that shows regular interchange patterns with fair accuracy. In many cases they might have changed back to the exact values of the initial tones when they first crept into the Vietnamese language. Intrinsically, this phenomenon is found common in Chinese historical linguistics in par with other phonological aspects such as initials or syllabic finals per se. (See Chao Yuen-Ren. 1933Tone and Intonation in Chinese. pp. 119--134

Phonemically, like their initial and medial counterparts in Vietnamese, such as b- [ɓ], d [ɗ], ch- [ʨ], kh- [kʰ] , ph- [pf], r- [ʐ], th- [tʰ], tr- [ʈ], and nh -[ɲ], sometimes to be transcribed herein as b-, d-, c-, kh-, f-, r-, th-, tr-, and ɲ-, jn-, or nh-, respectively, and -uy - [wej] or -iê - [iə], which are transcribed in IPA, respectively, as [wej] and [iə], not [wi] and [ie], because several ending consonants in Vietnamese orthography do not always represent exact phonetic values, especially those ending with unaspirated p [-p], -t [-t], -ch [-jt], -c [-k], and -nh [-jŋ], which will be assigned with the IPA symbols -p, -t, -jt, -k, -jŋ, respectively. Variant labiovelars preceded by a rounded vowel, e.g., o- or ɔ-, or a glide medial -w-, will be transcribed in IPA either as -kw, or -wk or -kʷ for [-kʷ], either -wŋ, or -ŋw, or -ŋʷ for [-ŋʷ ], respectively. Similarly ng of the velar [ŋ] will also be transcribed as eith [ŋ] or [ng]. This convention applies equally to Cantonese or any other Chinese dialects that share the same articulation.

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Ø ā ē ě ī ǐ ă ō ǒ ū ǔ ǖ ǘ ǚ ǜ ü û ɔ ɑ ɪ ɛ ɤ ə¯ ŋ ɯ ɪ ʔ ʃ ö ä ü ɐ ɒ æ χ ɓ ɗ ɖ ɱ ʿ ʾ θ ñ ŕ ţ ť tś ı ć ¢ ď Ā ź dź ƫ ć ń ç ď ş ŗ ż ſ ņ ʷ ɲ ʈ ɫ ɬ ʈ ƫ ʐ ɣ Ś ¯¯ ¯ ˉ ¶

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