Vietnamese Chinese
What Makes Chinese so Vietnamese?
An Introduction to Sinitic-Vietnamese Studies
(Ýthức mới về nguồngốc tiếngViệt)
DRAFT
Table of Contents
dchph
Chapter Two
Several issues will be addressed in this chapter. Firstly, to defuse the misconception about the Vietnamese language as being descended from common Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer (AA MK) languages, my new discoveries in both Sino-Tibetan and Sinitic etymologies for the Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabularies with my newfound proofs of over 400 basic and fundamental words that will revigorate the Sino-Tibetan theory. Seconly, for those that make up almost all of Vietnamese vocabularies I will elaborate on what was brought up in the introductory chapter by devoting a portion of this research on introducing two new approaches that I used in the process to unveil those hidden Sinitic-Vietnamese cognates that the AA MK specialists may not be aware that they even exist, and identify common linguistic characteristics of the Vietnamese and Chinese languages both share. Besides, this whole academic matter will also expose the disguise of "nationalism" that is politically motivated to the bias of linguistic classification.
II) Rainwash from the Austroasiatic sky
The usage "rainwash" herein, besides the contextual connotation of "brainwash", points to the fact that "torrential" precipitation will purge unwanted old imprinted marks on human long-term memory eventually. That is what happened to the Sino-Tibetan classification of the Vietnamese language in the early decades of the last century. The Sino-Tibetan theory has undergone constant rectifications from the Austroasiatic hypothesis that aimed to eliminate what was left missing at the Sino-Tibetan camp, that is, by then it still lacked cognates of basic words in Vietnamese to support the theory.
When readers start to read about the Chinese etymology of Sinitic-Vietnamese words in this research, they mostly have already formed their own answer regarding to the question of whether Vietnamese is either a Sino-Tibetan or Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer language. Every story has two sides of it and both likely overlap each other, of which they may not even know that they exist. In our specifics, be that of Mon-Khmer or Sinitic language family, even if issues of the side exist in theory only, the truth lies somewhere in between. What we do not know does mean they do not exist. As far as the Sino-Tibetan etyma are concerned, I am showing what I learn aboout it in the perspective that modern Vietnamese had roots from the China South region.
As a matter of fact the origin of all Southeast Asian languages originated from the same area as that of Vietnamese. Meritt Ruhlen in his book entitled The Origin of Language (1994. p. 143) points out that
"[t]he Austric family of Southeast Asia consists of four subfamilies: Austroasiatic, Miao-Yao, Daic, and Austronesian, the last two of which apprear to be the closest to each other. The Austroasiatic subfamily consists of two branches, Munda and Mon-Khmer. The small Munda branch is restricted to northern India while the Mon-Khmer branch, more numerous in both languages and speakers, is spread across much of Southeast Asia, often interpersed with languages of other families. Vietnamese and Khmer (or Cambodian) are the two best known Mon-Khmer languages."
[...] "The Daic languages, of which Thai and Laotian are the two best known and the only ones to achieve the status of national languages, are found in Southern China, nothern Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand. Austronesian languages are found on Taiwan, which is probably the original homeland of the family, but also on islands throughout the Pacific Ocean, and even on Madagascar in the Indian Ocean close to Africa. The present of Chinese domination of Taiwan is a consequence of a recent migration from the mainland that began in 1626. Over six millennia earlier a previous migration from the mainland, of people closely related to the Daic family, had led to the original Austronesian occupation of the island, which turned out to be the small step in what was one the longest — and most hazardous — migrations in human history. [...] Though there are approximately 1,000 Austronesian languages, the age of the family is thought to be comparable to that of Indo-European, and there is virtually no controversy over which languages do or do not belong to the family. The internal structure of the family is poorly understood."
Regarding to the Austronesian Expansion, Meritt Ruhlen (Ibid. 1994. p. 178) notes that
"The archaeological record of Southeast Asia indicates that the Neolithic revolution in this part of the world began in China around 8,000 years ago. Evidence of cultivation of millet in the Yellow River basin, and of rice, to the south, in the Yangzi basin, dates to about that time. By 5,000 B.P. [before present] farming had spread from this agricultural center southward to Vietnam, and Thailand and eastward to the coast of China. From this time period archeaologists uncovered villages with their accompanying pottery, stone and bone tools, boats and paddles, rice, and the bones of such domesticated animals as dogs, pigs, chicken, and cattle."
"About 6,000 years ago one or more of these agricultural groups crossed the Strait of Formosa (now the Taiwan Strait) and became the first inhibitants of Taiwan. And from Taiwan these ship building agriculturalists spread first southward to the Philippines and then eastward and westward throughout most of Oceania. The archaeological record indicates that the northern Philippines were reached by 5,000 B.P., and 500 years later these migrants had spread as far south as Java and Tinor, as far west as Malaysia, and eastward to the southern coast of New Guinea. By around 3,200 B.P. the expansion had reached Madagascar, far to the west, and had spread as far east as Samoa, in the central Pacific, and the Mariana Islands and Guam, in Micronesia.[...]"
In the Epilogue Section of the same book, Merritt Ruhlen (ibid. 1994. pp. 195-196) re-emphasizes that the first two stages to be started in order with the first step for the comparative method is classification, or taxonomy, which defines all language families at all levels. What is refferred to in textbooks as the "Comparative Method" is really the second stage in the historical linguistics, for it takes the existence of a language family (the first stage) as a given and then proceeds to ask specific questions about that family. It is only then that the issues of reconstruction, sound correspondences, and homelands will be postulated with question such as "What historical processes were responsible for transforming the words in the proto-language into the forms we see in the modern languages, the daughters and the granddaughters of the proto-language?" Those questions can be satisfactorily approached only when the inital stage of historical linguistics — the identification of a language family — is complete.
The attempt to reverse these two levels on the part of the twentieth-century Indo-Europeanists and their followers, pretending that family-specific problems like reconstruction and sound correspondences must be used in identifying families, has led to current theoretical impasse in which everything but the obvious is considered beyond the limits of the comparative method.
That, nevertherless, was what the Austroasiatic therorists did with the Mon-Khmer hypothesis of the Vietnamese languages.
That hypothesis of Vietnamese was first proposed by the Indo-Europeanists who used mainly comparative method to draw a number of basic words with similar meanings and regular sound change patterns within topological isoglosses to postulate their languages as being descended from common proto-languages. (I) Their methodology was based on mechanical paradigms drawn from Indo-European linguistic schools but lacking a historical base, specifically of the people, their language, and national history, hence, they failing to identify the language family first before getting into comparative analysis which is the second stage that they started with, reversing the order of the historical linguistic methology as Ruhlen pointed out above.
For all of the above, in this section the author will supplant the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis with history of Yue origin of Sinitic-Vietnamese (VS) under an anthropological view — in addition to basic cognates in Sino-Tibetan (ST) etymologies — of the whole language and its history only if Austroasiatic linguistic family is considered as that of the Yue people who originated from the habitat in the Yangtze, or Yangzi (揚子江), River basin. If they could make use of them, consider them as freebies from the opposite camp, Sino-Tibetan, to complement each other from a different point of view to help find etymologies of basic words in Vietnamese, currently many of them coming fron the Mon-Khmer stocks as accepted in the linguistic circle.
The term etymology used here is to mean the study of the origin of words or parts of their components, such as morphemes and syllables, and how they have evolved into the current forms. All the related words from different languages under investigation are called etymons or etyma. Specifically, it is related to those of Vietnamese and the Chinese counterparts, mostly about Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma of which scores of basic words could be traced back to those Sino-Tibetan etymologies. They are all results from the second stage as suggested by Ruhlen.
Before we get to the core of Sinitic-Vietnamese etymology, let us first position our stand starting from a geographical pivotal point much further in the north of where Vietnam is now located. Under the historical view, early ancestors of today's Vietnamese people who came from the present region of Phungnguyen Culture in Hoabinh Province, all had been descended from Dongtinghu Lake in Hunan (湖南) in China South (華南 Huánán), or 'Hoanam'. The largest wave of southward emigration must have been that of their ancestral forefathers as refugees who fled from the invasion of 500,000 troops of Qin Shihuang (秦始皇) moving en masse into the Red River Delta, resettled there, and mixed with the locals who were descendants of the earlier waves of Daic people from the southwest (Nguyễn Ngọc San, 1993, Ibid.) Scholars who study both histories of Vietnam and China know it best that racial composition of ancient Vietnamese populace within such historical timeframe after the loss of the last NamViet kingdom of the Yue people to the Han Empire, all being historical facts, is vital and relevant to the study of the Sinitic-Vietnam etymology. Languages spoken by the later immigrants from the China Southy made up the essence of ancient Vietnamese, or, to be exact, ancient Annamese, so to speak.
A) New battles in the Sino-Tibetan front
In search of the existence of the ancient Yue who lived there in ancient China, recent regional excavations by archaeologists have unveiled artifacts that match specific references to the Yue aboriginals (BáchViệt 百越 BăiYuè) as recorded in Chinese throughout China's 5000-year-old history, of which ancient Chinese records confirmed that China South region was the native habitat of the ancient Southern Yue (南越族) where other tribal branches had originated from. (See Zhang Zengqi. 1990. 中國西南民族考古 Archaeology of Ethnic Minorities in China's Southwestern Regions)
Geographically aligned with 'China South' is what is known as regions of 'China North' 華北 Huáběi, or 'Hoabắc'. That is the heartland of the northern region of the Middle Plain, an area that stretches beyond the northern plank of the Yellow River from Shaanxi in the west reaching out all the way past the peninsula of Shandong Province (山東省) in the northeast to Bohai of East China Sea. The place was where many northern Tartaric dynasties throughout China's history were founded and ruled by foreign powers of Altaic origin such as Khitan Empire (契丹) or Liao State (遼國 916-1125) and it was there that the Early Mandarin of the Yuan Dynasty (元朝) was formed. From the latter dynasty of the 12th century, we have the Mongolian's Ryme Book 蒙古字韻 Mengu Zi Yun which shows how northern vernacular Mandarin to pronounce words then and Annamese Translated Wordbook 安南譯語 Annam Dịchngữ which is a dictionary of the 12th centuried ancient Vietnamese vocabulary. A note to make here that a large quantity of northern words and peculiar idiomatic expressions, such as 'Sưtử Hàđông' 河東獅子 Hédōng Shīzǐ (tiger wife), found its way into the modern Vietnamese, and that it is not surprising to speculate that could probably be the result of the court's language as its vernacular form had been popularized throughout the Han colonial period in ancient Annam. So said, it is to explain the similarities between Vietnamese and Mandarin to counter rebukes by some scholars that Mandarin could not have influenced or have anything to do with the development of the Vietnamese language in such a late period, not to mention 25 years under the Chinese rule of imperial Ming Dynasty in the 15th century that all current Vietnamese literary works were destroyed and the whole nation had to use Chinese.
As far as the modern term "Việtnam" (越南) is con cerned, it was originally implicated the notion of "the Yue of the South", it also implicitly suggested that there also existed the "Việtbắc", or "the Yue of the North" (越北). Up until our contemporary era, those Sinicized Yue peope (漢化粵族) such as the Cantonese speakers have been living inside the borders of modern China but their ancestors might already scatter, not exactly where their ancestral native habitat used to be in China South That is to say, the Yue descendants have emigrated everywhere, so they could already become the Yue of the North. The same term also refers to 'the Yue of the North' (粵北). In a limited sense, it may refer to speakers of Mansheng 蠻聲 (tiếngMôn) of the Shaozhou Tuhua (韶州土話) sub-dialects spoken in the border region of the north of Guangdong 廣東, Hunan 湖南, and Guangxi 廣西 provinces, mutually unintelligible with Hunanese, Cantonese, and Mandarin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuebei_Tuhua). Ethnologically, their forefathers were descendants of those earlier Taic aboriginals who had made up the populaces of the Chu State (楚國) as their Yue descendants have done to the Han Chinese population in a later period (See Bình Nguyên Lộc, 1972). Those ancient Northern Yue could be found living in the in regions of today's China's areas where Hebei (河北), Anhui (安徽), Hubei , and Jiangsu (江蘇) provinces are now located.
Following trails of artifacts that their Yue descendants left along their emigratory routes out of their ancient heartland of the Yangtse Basin as the early Tibetan nomads of prowess moved in, approximately during the Xia Dynasty (夏朝, c. 2lst-17th century B.C.) or the Yin Dynasty 殷朝 (c. 16th-11th century B.C.), the proto-Yue tribes emigrated southward past the Indo-China's peninsula — postulated the Austroasiatic (AA) homeland — and all the way to those faraway islands of Indonesia. The discovery of Đôngsơn-styled bronze drums reaffirms southward migration past the islands of Java and the New Guinea, which would logically to explain the presence of such cultural relics being found there are similar to those of Dongson culture (700 B.C. - 100 A.D.) excavated in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam (See map.)
Bronze drums were produced by the Yue people from about 600 B.C. or earlier in China South and north of ancient Annam, or Han's Giaochi 交趾 Jiāozhǐ Prefecture, until the first century A.D. The 'Book of the Later Han' (後漢書) recorded that the Han's General Ma Yuan (馬援) melt all the bronze drums seized from the local rebels of LuóYuè (雒越 LạcViệt) for bronzes (14 B.C. – 49 A.D.). The ones being found are those of the finest examples of metalworking by the indigenous Yue artisans.
The precise dating of those bronze artifacts for comparison provides some solid evidences to support the historical records regarding the ancient Yue people spreading to different regions. The earliest big and heavy Yue bronze drums similar to those found in Vietnam's Dongson were also found in Wangjiaba in Yunnan Chuxiong Yi Autonomous Prefecture (萬家埧楚雄彝族自治州) China in 1976 that existed more than 2700 years ago. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90%C3%B4ng_S%C6%A1n_drums) Further work still needs to be done, though, to strengthen the archaeologically China South's Yue-based theory for the pre-historic period as opposed to that of Austroasiatic hypothesis of its Mon-Khmer linguistic subfamily, which makes the whole matter to look like both of them were of the same racial stock, but only in different timeframed settings.
We are here, however, not to talk about what happened 10 thousand or so years ago in China South and Southeast Asia's region, ethnologically and archaeologically. Such a timeframe is out of touch even with glottochronology which can probably postulate with some estimate of the genetic linguistic affiliation of daughter languages based on their 100 to 200 correctly-identified core basic words in active use within 5000 years or so (Roberts J. Jefers et al. Ibid. p. 133) This paper instead will focus on much of later historical periods that happened within a lesser timeframe approximately from 2000 to 3000 years B.P. surrounding the usage of fundamental words in some ancient aboriginal languages, their existence parrallel with one of the speech once spoken by the Chu (楚 Sở) population through the historical time that the Yue people were native inhabitants in China South prior to the birth of Middle Kingdom as recorded in Chinese classic literature. ( See APPENDIX J: Yueren Ge (越人歌)).
Linguistically, Chinese-wise, all aboriginal languages spoken by the descendant-Taic populace of the Chu State (楚國) had blended with other Yue languages by the early Sino-Tibetan speech in the forms of proto-Chinese, Archaic Chinese (ArC, 上古漢語) and other languages spoken by subjects of those ancient states to make up of the Old Chinese (OC, 上古先秦雅音) of which the diplomatic Yayu (雅語) were adapted by those states known to us as 吳 Wu, 越 Yue, 燕 Yan, 韓 Han, 趙 Zhao, 齊 Qi, 秦 Qin ... to have given rise to the Ancient Chinese (AC, 西漢古漢語) spoken by all later the Han-Chinese in the unified Middle Kingdom (中國 Zhongguo) as known to the world as 'China' irrespective of all the dynastic changes). Nearly all Sinicized Yue languages spoken inside the China's border now become Chinese dialects, e.g., Cantonese, Fukienese, Shanghainese, etc.
Historically, on the becoming of the ancient Vietic language, in brief, as China's territorial expansion to the south continuously brought in the Han Chinese to Giaochỉ (交趾 Jiaozhi), or the Annamese land, who strengthened more of their colonial rule by having put all indigenous Yue's customary way of tribal life all under the umbrella of the Han's institutions such as feuldal forms of governmental administration and Confucian education — a prolongation, anyway, of what all had been in place previously in the old NamVIet Kingdom (南越國 NanYue Guo) — and, for a good reason, sped up the process of Sinicization of the natives In Annam, the southwestern portion of NanYue Guo (Bo Yang, Sima Guang Zizhi Tongjian 資治通鑑, Vol. 2, 1983).
Anthropologically, primarily, populace with the racial admixture of the Han with the native Yue people living within the perimeter of today's China South all were enlised in the Han's army on the mission to invade the ancient Annam. The foot soldiers conquered and stationed there. The early Han colonists resettled, then followed by civil officials during occupying peace time under the benevolent rule by Viceroy Sĩ Nhiếp (士攝 Shì Shè), who spread the teachings of Chinese language and culture to the common mass and was very much revered by Annamese people. However, throughout the next 1009 years under the continuing harsh rule of Chinese colonialists, foot soldiers, refugees, officials, and immigrants, all continued to come, confiscate land, and resettle there. It was inevitably that social structure changes brought about the fusion of Ancient Chinese and languages spoken by different indigenous groups — Yue, Daic, Mon-Khmer, etc. — and that succeeding Sinitic layers evolved on top of the indigenous admixture substrata that grew the early forms of Annamese language. Like their predecessors, they were intermarried with the locals and gave birth to the new masters of the Kinh people in the habitat of ancient northern Vietnam at the expense of the native ones, such as the Muong and the Mon-Khmer groups who were driven or fled to the remote mountainous region becoming minorities in their own homeland.
All factors above were direct causes and effects on the becoming of the modern Vietnamese and their language in our time. To have full picture of it, imagine what would have become of a little vassal state like Vietnam, as compared to a small province of China, that had undergone its imperial colonialization 2200 years B.P.? That is exactly what will happen to today's Taiwan some 700 years later could possibly become, but remember, with modern hi-tech comunication media in our era, there would much changes in the Mandarin language being in official use in the islanf nation.
The history of the Vietnamese language appears straight forward from beginning as it was first initiated by Vietnamese scholars that it evolved from the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family but the whole linguistic world appeared to enjoy initiating a new theory of some sort, one after another, and once in a short while. With regard to the origin of Vietnamese, after the initial Sino-Tibetan theory in the late 19th century, then followed by the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypthesis. Institutionally, conspiracy or not, every specialist in a related field who happened to come up any discovery does so, such as the theoretical work by Paul Benedict (1975) who built anew the case of the Tai-Kadai linguistic branch with a newly established Austro-Thai linguistic family. Call it another "Austric" hypothesis in a gold rush for linguistic theories, i.e., every linguist rushed to come up a new linguistic theory, of the century then.
That was not a simple process, though. As opposed the prehistoric approach by the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory, the Vietnamese historical linguistics, to be specific, requires not only mastery of the Vietnamese language but also ancient Chinese philology — it was not as primitive as the first work by the pioneer Sinologist T.S. Bayer of the 18th century did (see Knud Lunbæk. T.S. Bayer (1694-1738), Pioneer Sinologist. 1986.) — So said, it is because not every Vietnamese specialist, especially Western linguists, is able to distinguish Sinitic-Vietnamese from SIno-Vietnamese words in Vietnamese vocabularies to identify Old Chinese remnants in modern Vietnamese, let alone Western leaners of Vietnamese. That appears to be a simple matter on the surface, but it is not, though. In the early 19th century the Chinese historical linguistics was something new for Western scholars to venture. The learning curve on Chinese historical linguistics, however, seems to be even much steeper for them to learn. Ancient Chinese rhyme books such as Guangyun 廣韻 or Huiyun 會韻 that required the strenuously mental labor to make sense of extracts from radical and phonological values from ancient Chinese linguistics to decipher connotation that each Chinese character conveys and suggestive sounds in such classical Chinese books, for instance, the intrinsic 口 radical as apposed to that the phonetic, or the intrigue "chongniu" (重紐) in divisions III, IV, etc. (音).
When getting their feet wet in the field Sinitic-Vietnamese historical phonology, Western linguists would even encounter different standards utilized by Chinese philologists in the ancient times that have caused enough confusions for Chinese historical linguists already because the methods of delivery in classic Chinese morphology were underwhelmed with Western "linguistic theorems" as employed in modern methodologies which made the former look like 'unscientific' primers. However, by choosing to ignore them once, Indo-European specialists of Austroasiatic have already missed important sound bits that had long been buried under hefty weight of classical Chinese dossiers.
For the moist parts, ancient Chinese classical and rhyme books have been underemployed, that is, not fully appreciated and acknowledged yet as they ought to be. In so far as into the first half of the 20th century, only a handful of contemporary Western Sinologists such as Bernhard Kargren's Étude Sur la Phonologie Chinoise (1915) and Grammata Serica Recensa (1957), of Sweden's Stockkholm Oriental Institute, who probably the first one ever academically understood, explored, and made use of them in term of historical phonology. The overall of his academic work benefits and contributes great deal to other researches meaningfully. However as he shifted his focus to Chinese loanwords in Japanese, he missed related Sino-Tibetan etyma that appear in the Vietnamese language. In any case, results of further studies like this one may help in re-classifying the Vietnamese language into the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family as well. (See Chapter 10 on the Sino-Tibetan etymologies.)
It is no need to say it is tough to make judgment on native Vietnamese scholars to study Vietnamese etymolgy of Chinese origin as well, not in scollastic aptitude, but this time because of political reasons that are always raised highly with anti-China flags. In order to be excused from executing the Sinitic subject matters in Vietnamese indiscriminately, they are disinclined with the issue of real Vietnamese linguistic affiliation by sublimating into the realm of nationalism, alternatively. End justifies the means, as the saying goes. That is, to be safe, many of them have chosen positions to keep distance from Chinese affiliation by avoiding the whole matter altogether and picking the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis instead. It appears, though, such runabout shortcuts would not make it in Vietnamese etymological studies. We will disscuss this politics matters in a separate chapter in detail because such a mentality held by Vietnamese linguists is commonplace and it has seriously interfered with supposed objectivity in neutral academic subjects. The core message to make here is that Western linguists will not see definite results from their research.
The so-called 'the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer rainwash', hence a convenient excuse, has been stemmed from the account that the initiators of the hypothesis of Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer origin of the Vietnamese language, so altogether, Vietnamese scholars team up with them just disregarded anything Chinese once and for all. As it appears presently, we have the right to suspect that Austroasiatic pioneers from the bygone era of the previous century, however strong their innovative initiative could be, all seemed to have conspired with one another in a scheme to start with Austroasiatic premise. They seemingly have done rather easily without the burden to exert too much effort on their parts, such as to investigate the history of respective country that has its language under discussion and to learn all related languages in the region.
The early 20th centuried historical linguistics saw the grouping the Vietnamese language into the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer linguistic family based on comparative data from the tabulation of some dozens of basic words cognate to those of Vietnamese that scatter sporadically among many Mon-Khmer languages. However, only a tiny portion of their selective loanwords fall into the range of 99 percent of Vietnamese vocabularies, though. They raise the stake as they fell into the range of what considered as core basic words. After they were done with analysis and postulation job, our Austroasiatic fellows went on blanketing identified Sinitic-Vietnamese fundamental items paired with the rest of Sino-Tibetan lexicons as Chinese loanwords. Moreover, they did not bother to offer good explanations for all other linguistic peculiarities of the Vietnamese language that share with the Chinese language, which never ever exists in Mon-Khmer languages. In their era, many of the Indo-European might have never heard of the "Yue". For example, not until lately, they had been unable to distinguish which one is from Yue, which one from Chinese, e.g, 戌 xū, 狗 gǒu, 犬 quán, etc. ~> 'chó' (dog) for which they are all assigned */kro/ as that of the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer subfamily. "
After all these years a few of Austroasiatic specialists have effectively made use of well-prepared works on Chinese and Vietnamese by others as a baseline in stepping up the process of theorizing their Austroasiatic hypothesis (A), including those notable papers by Tsu-lin Mei (1976), Jerry Norman (1988), Mark J. Alves (2001, 07, 09), etc. Howevever, surprisingly, certain of them failed to distinguish how Sino-Vietnamese class was different from that of Sinitic-Vietnamse in Vietnamese vocabularies. Sino-Vietnamese vacabularies in Vietnamese are analogous to those Latin words in English, plain and simple, but the matter was mixed up in the process. In addition, they have never stepped out of the constraints of common norms on traditional approaches and techniques, for example, repetition of citing those basic words of Mon-Khmer cognates over the last few decades since David D. Thomas (1966), no novel breakthrough in nature about them to counter evidences that show the Sino-Tibetan or Chinese origin of those related words being cited.
Results of their research, , on the one hand, definitely would hinder the progress of our overall efforts in trying to rekindle interests and recognition on a renewal of work attempting to reclassify the Vietnamese language into the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. The brandname of Western institutions associated with their work has successfully attracted many local followers inside Vietnam who readily showed their admiration for those Westerners that demonstrated some knowledge of Vietnamese. Following the crowd with the trendy fads puts up some vanity air in their own locally made products, as a result, but of disputable academic values.
Work of reinforcement on the Mon-Khmer theory built on the Austroasiatic foundation, as a result, have proliferated on the internet especially since the last two decades. the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists, hence, had undoubtedly gained an upper hand in competing for the total embracement of their theorization in addition to other technical gains after long decades of having continuously cultivating the belief that Western methodology is scientific and superior, implying assurance of the same quality for their newly built the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theories.
As the time goes by, continuing recognition of the Austroasiatic hypothesis overly domination further has consolidated the legitimacy of the overall Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis on the Vietnamese linguistic origin as it has gone uncontested for a long period of time. The whole matter in turn has posed an unfavorable environment that forced Sino-Tibetan theorists to go underdogs because their camp could not come up with something new and plausible on the whole matter. The sentiment will turn ugly into political rows under the disguse of nationalism, which would implicate even more on the issue of one's own national identity then because, collectively, the people of a nation will not accept what they are not.
On the opposite side of the scale which balances academic truthfulness and overshadowing China in our contemporary era, it is apparently weighed with more of a political issue than that of history, specifically, historical linguistics to be exact. The phenomenon just reflects a pattern of what their precedessors did in the past, i.e., waging resistance wars against the imperialist China. Ironically, the core matter still remains so Sinicized in many aspects of Vietnamese culture. With regard to the philosophical aspect of the historical linguistics, for the average educated Vietnamese person, national awareness of identity has replaced a Sinocentric Sino-Tibetan theory, as foresaid, they wholeheartedly welcome the late Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer entry, of which its groundwork has been elevated gradually over time and gained more local support.
While the matter started with a ready acceptance of novelty of the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis so as to walk around Sino-Tibetan hypothesis, the issue has outgrown into something of a sizable magnitude for any scholar to singly handle by now. National sentimentalism, however, will not simply go away by just denying the old Chinese affiliation because it still exists as an influential force that makes believers to turn back and reverse the tide of anti-China waves. Such a counter-development is unhealthy, though, because it is anti-academic on the other extreme. Such a new respective belief infers to recession in not only the field of Vietnamese historical linguistics but also natural scientific fields as well, e.g., bio-genetics that could be used in tagging the genome map of the targeted people. For instance, it is noted that as more and more new Confucius institutes — Chinese cultural centers fully subsidized by the Chinese government on a global scale — have popped up in larger numbers and hundreds of more China's teachers of the Chinese language are heading towards US schools in an overall effort to realize the so-called "China dream". As a result, the whole new shift in attitude towards linguistic matters will change sooner or later in the Sino-Tibetan field that we are focusing on. As the Chinese language increasingly attract more younger students, it is they who will shift the balance on their side of the scale as more of Chinese savvy, not the aging Austroasiatic, theorists will incline to the Sino-Tibetan theorization then. It is then the axiom that people tend to believe in what they have already believed in still hold fast.
How on earlth does an academic matter have anything to do with nationalism? National identity sublimated into nationalism. In terms of historical linguistics, the Yue core of the Vietnamese basic words were donned under the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer attire to avoid talking Sino-Tibetan in Sino-centric terms because that is certainly related to Chinese, so to speak metaphorically of politics. Non-Vietnamese Western-educated person would probably find it hard to grasp the implication of how Vietnamese politics got entangled with any Chinese-related academic subjects in the first place, and subsequently no exception for Vietnamese historical linguistics. Nobody understands that better than those locally groomed Vietnam's scholars, including her diasporas in exile in our time. The delicate Sino-Vietnamese relations are to be dealt with later separately to show that the truth of the matter could be either twisted to serve solely a political purpose which may be disguised behind a mask called nationalism.
Be reminded that history of Vietnam is chronology of continual resistance wars. Sense of an imminent Chinese invasion is always on the threshold in Vietnam's northern border at all times. The total years in Vietnam's history being at war are greater than what they have had for peace. Of the 2273 years of her written history — not orally from legends or folklores — recorded from Thục Dynasty (257–179 B.C.) the historical state of Vietnam had gone to war for 1474 years to fight against the Chinese aggressions that only officially ended in 1979; however, Chinese non-stop intermitent incursions on land and at seas keep going on with major clashes in 1984, 2013, 2015, etc., not to mention sparodic 262 years in total fighting against the Chams, Khmer, Siamese, French, Japanese, including the USSR- and China-backed forces with the US troops involved, and other factional civil wars, all more or less involving interventions by, again, China on either side. All in all Vietnam had a mere 898 years of peace time periods at intervals.
Undoubtedly, the war-hardened perseverance have molded strong will for survival which formed what the Vietnamese perceived as nationalism, something that is real and concrete as exemplified by current events in the early 10s of the 21st century where young patriots staged demonstrations against China. In doing so they even accepted jail time handed down by, ironically, their own government in their own country for raising their voice against China's aggression in land and on the high seas. Several of them have been sent in exile as their nationalism shines. Resentful sentiment towards the sole northern neighbor has continued on and passed down to the next generation at all times.
So it is of no surprise that nationalistic view becomes a degrading factor in establishing academic objectivity — again, not a product of imagination — in theorization on the core Vietnamese linguistic affiliation matter, either the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer or Sino-Tibetan camp. For example, in some other writings as the author argued that the Vietnamese people are of mixed race as a result of racial fusion of Chinese immigrants from the north who resettled down and married local women; it was fair enough to see that intellectual and patriotic netizens got enraged with fierce reactions (to follow the issue, google with my pen name "dchph" or see Some Thoughts on the Origin of the Vietnamese People in Vietnamese or in the APPENDICES section of this survey.) In this paper such uneasy racial profiling will be used to support the point that from 111 B.C. to 939 A.D. as the ancient Annam was a prefecture of the imperial China, like any provinces or prefecture within the Middle Kingdom, Chinese immigrants with different dialects kept coming in and, eventually, their linguistic fusion with those aboriginal speeches evolved and buried the Yue linguistic stratum out of sight deep down on the bottom layer. The whole chained events as such have given rise to the modern Vietnamese of which over 90 percent of linguistic elements are composed of Chinese linguistic components.
Thanks to political issues, the reader will see why the author has set aside a whole chapter solely to discuss influence of Sino-Vietnamese politics, which has pressed on academic arena because it matters so much in forging impartial judgment on whether or not the Sino-Tibetan theory would hold fast and flourish in its new stand. Those who know Vietnam's history published by the ruling government might appreciate a little the antithesis of the matter, so to speak. One virtually could not bring Western value standards to understand them.
To easily grasp the core issue of the matter, let us compare similar circumstances of the following 3 entities in the region that have absorbed largely a great number of immigrants from China in to their population. Like that of Vietnam since 939 thoughout her history, in addition to Chinese descendants as said,
(1) Singapore, having enjoyed its status of sovereignty since 1965, is a country of multi-ethnic citizens with a Chinese majority;
(2) Hong Kong is now going through its darkest days as of 2017 with most Cantonese speakers coming from Canton of which the status of the colony is like what the historical ancient Vietnam started with since 111 B.C. as a Chinese colony;
(3) Taiwan with its de facto independence has always been in an uneasy co-existence with the mainland China, having its sovereign status similar to that of Vietnam, seemingly to be shaken at intervals past and present.
Of all of the above, analogously, the Tainwanese are also experiencing an identity crisis in weighing choices either taking side with Sinicized Minnan (閩南) values brought over by their forefathers from the ancestral Fujian homeland of ancient MinYue Kingdom (閩越王國) to the Formosa island since the 17th century or relating themselves more with the Austronesian natives those who still chew betel nuts to stand up as genuine masters of the island to join in the fight for the Republic of Taiwan instead of Republic of China. On the sidenote, the native mimorities living in those places were at first not in equal footing with the massive Chinese mainlanders who followed the Kuomingtang troops seeking refuge in 1949. For what is considered analogous to the last case, the Vietnamese people still ask themselves the question whether they were descended from the majority of immmigrants from China South or minority of indigenous people, but their nationalism has transformed into national politics, so to speak.
On the other side of the coin, for the most parts history of the Middle Kingdom was full episodes of being conquered and ruled by other foreign elements from the north of China North (華北 Huabei) such as those of Tartaric, Altaic, Mongolian, and Manchurian rulers who each in succession had gained the control of the Middle Kingdom being known to the world as China and their subjects later made up the people collectively called 'Chinese'. That is to say, 'Chinese' consisted not only the southerners but also those of the north. For those who joined the colonial army to have gone south and conquered the Annamese land, they all mixed with the local people to have evolved into the 'Kinh' people.
For those Chinese refugees who later emigrated to Vietnam such as the Ming expatriates (明鄉人 'NgườiMinhhương') after the Manchurians brought down the Ming Dynasty, their last rounds of resettlement would make up another different racial component of the larger contemporary Hoa ethnicity (華橋) in Vietnam. Many of them were of Tchiewchow origin from Chaozhou region in Guangdong Province such as Foshan City (佛山市), their population made up a larger portion of the 'Kinh' people in six southernmost provinces of Vietnam today, as an old saying about the southwestern land goes, "Dướisông cáchốt, trênbờ Tiềuchâu" that means "in the river there are catfish, on land there are only Tchiewchow people."
To make the matter to become more complex, in contrast to the Yue minority status as in China South, subjects of the Southern State — or 南國 Namquốc (nướcNam), as Vietnam called herself in the past — are having obsessed with their pride of the Yue ancestral heritage as manifested in many ancestral sacrificial ceremonies performed annually. Ironically, the Vietnamese Kinh majority do not hide their haughty overbearing over minority people, who were supposedly the true masters of the land where the Vietnam's nationals are now residing on. Anthropologically, the early Yue natives of the ancient NamViet Kingdom (南越王國) had long met with similar racial discrimination under the rule of imperial China since 111 B.C. and emigrated out of the China's mainland pouring into its Annam Prefecture. History witnessed their having becoming the new masters of today's eastern part of North Vietnam (Bo Yang, Ibid., Vol. 69, p. 172. 1992).
Ethnologically, we could say that Vietnam is the only sovereignty still in existence that could be considered as a representive state of all of Yue descents and their cousins such as the Daic and Zhuang minorities who are still living in China South and their populace are so populous and strong the Chinese goverment granted autonomous status for those regions. Note that for the latter many of their ancestors fled to remote mountainous terrains across many southern provinces of China when their territories fell to the hands of the Qin's invaders. Current China's ethnic groups were descended from the common ancestral Yue people who made up the ancient Chu and Han subjects prior to 111 B.C. and thereafter. Of the Han's era, parts of the Han population were composed of the Sinicized Yue people having been descended from subjects in those annexed "ancient states". The "original Yue-Chu-Han Chinese" (C) later made up the troops that advanced to the south and conquered Giaochì (交趾), or the ancient Annam. Comparatively, in Annam, until its independence in 939 A.D., exclusive of those Han immigrants to the Annamese land throughout the 1060 year colonial period, racial components of the whole population would have remained virtually the same balance of the populace in the ancient Lingnan region (嶺南道) that consisted of today's provinces of Guangxi, Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian, etc.
As Vietnam's national identity matured after her complete separation from the imperial China, her nationalism have grown stronger out of several resistance wars against Chinese invaders of every dynasty that was suceedingly established in the land of Middle Kingdom, namely, the Song, the Yuan, the Ming, the Qing dynasties, and their successors who now rule the PRC (People's Republic of China). Everytime when each Chinese monarchy had reached the height of its power, each succeeding monarch never ceased trying to retake Vietnam, at least aiming to subdue her into a position of a vassal state. Is today's China militarily stronger than the Empire of Mongolia was in the 12th century on a comparative level? Beyond any wildest European imagination, the Annamese defeated the Mongols not once, but thrice. It is too bad that all of the emperors of China, past and present, have never learned the lessons of Vietnam's history. It is no matter how powerful each dynasty had become, though, each one was eventfully defeated by Vietnam, including the border war as recently as in 1979.
Of the same matter, for the most part of the Vietnam's history, sadly, the Vietnamese men were born just to go to fight in wars one after another and the last one just ended her 10-year war against the China-backed genocidal Khmer Rouge in Kampuchea in 1989. Thanks to constant invasion threats from her northern archenemy, Vietnam has been constantly in preparation for the next war with China, always. In a sense, no other nation on earth could ever get so high on nationalism that has become stronger overtime. Each of the Vietnamese segments, from the ruling parties to scholars to the common mass, all has their way to deal with nationalistic issues.
In the national arena, the ruling members of the country's current Poliburo altogether have made the whole people in Vietnam to pay dearly for their war debts owed to the communist China that had helped put them in power in return for fighting for China's expansionism of neo-feudalism, i.e., communism, in the Vietnam War against the US-supported South Vietnam's government (1954-1975). The rise of the Maoist feudal state again denied Vietnam a fair chance of peaceful restoration of national independence from the French colonialists (1858-1954) and free of tyrannical rules thereafter, politically, as being enjoyed many countries in the region such as India, Malaysia, or Singapore after the collapse of Western colonial rules in Asia after the WW II and the early 1960's. There is no need to say, economically, the costs of wars one after another for over the last 300 years have been emormous that have held the country at the bottom of an abyss of no chance for any progress on any valuable research if any. The point to make here is that readers should not rely on the current government's academic institutions for academic research because they are simply the organs that serve the regime, besides the naivety of Western scholars who have been hoorayed to the skies when being able to utter some Vietnamese words. (See Knud Lundbæk. 1986. p. 45)
Explicably, the local scholars tend to deny themselves of links to the past that had anything to do with the Chinese, e.g., share of 1000-year-plus history prior to 939 A.D., so they choose to go with the Western trend in accepting the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis that is likely that of the Yue. It is believed that nationalism inflamed by the national forefathers is still being funneled inside the hearts of the younger generation, though. Even though for the learned Vietnamese youngsters, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory of genetic affiliation is just an academic classification, when facing sensational issues about their ancestral origin, like the American youth in the USA who might lose traces of the ancestry originally, they do practice self-denial of true identity, mostly of Chinese descent based on their genetic line of paternal family's tree approximately three or many more generations ago, by accepting as a member of the "Kinh" majority which is a general ethnic-designated category implicating only ancient Vietnamese values, namely, those of the Yue genealogy. When the next generation takes over their current spot, they will share the same feeling by those of the older ones, who did the same in their time.
The selective choice of the Vietnamese intelligentsia shows that in their collective consciousness they are well aware that their ancestors have migrated from the north, or to be exact, the China South region. In other word, historical matters of the later acquired southern stretches of land, though having the Austric roots as proposed in the respective Austroasiatic and Austronesia theories, did belong to other different peoples, forefathers of the ancient kingdoms of Champa and Khmer, having nothing to do with the ancient Annamese.
Symbolistically, if we are to express all Yue entities in formulary terms to represent the proportion of racial transmutation which formulated the genetic affiliation for the ancient Annemese, we shall then assign some weight to their racial entity with componental properties as {2Y3Z4H}, loosely based on historical records such as census data of population increasing more than double from 400,000 to 980,000 people in three Han's prefectures of Jiaozhi 交趾 (Giaochỉ), Jiuzhen 九真 (Cửuchân), and Rinan 日南 (Nhậtnam), respectively, throughout the 100-year period from 111 B.C. to 11 B.C. Historical records show that NamViet's 15,000 to 30,000 unmarried women were forced to marry Qin foot soldiers during the short-lived Qin Dynasty (Lu Shih-Peng, 1964, Eng. p. 11, Chin. p. 47). How the post-Qin-Han Chinese further blended with the Yue, and the fusion of both racial entities gave rise to the present Vietnamese that in turn are results of racial admixture of the pre-existing natives in each locality where the Annamese resettled, the principal purport of the following enumeration of the Vietnamese racial mixed components is not pretended to be scientific, but to incite your imagination on the becoming of the ancient Vietnamese.(S)
The composition of the Vietnamese racial transmutation appears much more similar to those of Han-Chinese. In general, that was a result of evolutionary process during which the early proto-Chinese {X}, of Tibetan origin from the southwest of the mainland of China, intermingled with the proto-Yue aboriginals {YY} (assumedly the Taic people, main populace of the Chu 楚 State) — on the proportional ratio of 2 to 1, that is, 2Y/X — to have become parts of the ancient Yue indigenous populace represented by {ZZZ} in those ancient states of 屬 Shu, Wu 吳, Yue 越, etc., of which their subjects were later to be called 'the Han' symbolized as {HHHH} — that is, 3 x Z, 4 x H, repectively, where "x" means "times" — in a unified Middle Kingdom of the Han Dynasty, sort of a "united states of Qin", as Qin was later known as 'Chinese', analogously.
Composition of the later Han-Chinese as {X2Y3Z4H}, in effect, were results of mutated racial fusion of {(X)(YY)(ZZZ)(HHHH)}, so to speak, while racial composition of the Viets — nationals of Vietnam throughout different historical periods — was made of the proto-Yue {YY} and later Yue {ZZZ} to become the proto-Vietic {YYZZZ}, ancestors of the Vietic (Annamite), or the early Annamese {2Y3Z4H}, who later evolved into the modern Vietnamese {4Y6Z8H+CMK} where {C} is for the Cham and {MK} for the Mon-Khmer, a componental double (2x) of {2Y3Z4H} plus {CMK} taking place with a series of similar events that had brought about the same composition of the Fukienese or Cantonese, of which the populace had the same racial transmutation as that of the Vietic admixture during the same period under the rule of the Han Dynasty before and after 111 B.C. So it was, suggestively, only then the symbolistic formula for Austroasiatic could be assigned as {6YCMK} as apposted to the modern Vietnamese {4Y6Z8H+CMK}. (See Time maps of China
Source: http://www.timemaps.com/history/china-1500bc
Linguistically, the process of linguistic sound change took over and accelerated, including morphemic and morphological and lexical changes, from one sub-dialect to the other. Modern Vietnamese sub-dialects demonstrate how the sound changes vary lightly from north to south probably since Annam's independence. Currently, as the Viets continued on their journey further to the south, they brought with them their language to their new settlement from the time they lost contacts with Tang colloquial variants — as opposed to Cantonese — since 938 when the colonialists of NanHan Empire (南漢帝國) were defeated by Annam's General Ngô Quyền (吳權 Wu Quan as recorded in Chinese history) who became the first king of the independent Annam State in the following year (Bo Yang, Zizhi Tongjian, Vol. 69, 1992. pp. 209, 210). For vernacular changes in the Vietnamese language, all migratory movements from the north to the south have left tonal marks on a continuum which shows gradual stages from those of full 4 two-register tones of Hanoi to 4 single-register tones, that is, Hanoi ~> Nghean~> Hatinh~> Quangbinh~> Quangtri~> Hue become heavily-accented sub-dialects spoken in Danang ~> Quangngai~> Binhdinh~> Tuyhoa~> Ninhhoa~> Phanthiet, gradually turning into laxly-lighter 6 tones of Saigon~> Luctinh (6 southern provinces), namely, the free-styled southwestern accent in the Mekong Basin area. No matter how Vietnamese is classed into different sub-dialects, however, any of them is intelligible by all Vietnamese speakers. If someone has a difficulty in comprehension of one speech from another sub-dialect, it is only regional vocabularies to blame. For example, lexically, the semantic difference may lie in the fact that speakers of the northern Vietnamese sub-dialect tend to use complicated and heavy Sino-Vietnamese jargons than the relax mode of speech used by most Vietnamese southern speakers even though the latter version has started forming some 350 years ago.
The perception that their national language was on par with any Chinese dialects and once considered as a subfamily of Sino-Tibetan family language might have not been easily disturbed until the last century when Austroasiatic hypothesis sought to embrace all languages in the Southeast Asia in its umbrella. Vietnamese was one among them under the new Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer classification that did not take into account the historical factor that the massive immigrants from the north had overrun the indigenous people after they resettled in the ancient Annamese land over the last two millenia. Supposedly the French colonists had come to Annam and would have overstayed the local hospitality by the same length of time, there would be no suprise if the colonists picked up some indigenous basic words. That was how the ancient Annamese accommodated Mon-Khmer linguistic substratra which show on the Austroasiatic radar screen.
In the prelude to the coming of French colonialists into the country in the mid-19th century, European missionaries had arrived and stationed inside the country as mouthpieces of propaganda of the Catholic Church since the 17th century. Representatives of the Church had full support from the colonial government to spread Western values aggressively in form of passing Gospel to the illiterate mass and literati alike. After Annam fell under the French colonial umbrella in 1862 until 1954, Annam under the rule of the French colonialists was fully prepared to enter the new phase breaking away from haunting past with the China with the adoption of the Romanized orthography for the Vietnamese writing system and complete abandonment of the use of thousand-year old Chinese-character script. It was not long after the local nouveau literati were put in contact with French academics, the whole perspective shifted in favor of the Western academics. Since the 21st century Vietnamese scholars are mostly in opposite belief with the 19th and earlier ones.
As a series of historical events reeling thereafter — such as 'divide to rule' policy that of the division of Annam into 3 different administrative dominions, or colonized administrative regions, i.e., the Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, respectively, by the French colonial government for the next 92 years — did serve as the end of the monarchy of the Nguyen Dynasty from the Imperial Hue Capital City in the Central region that their monarchal system still in place was only acting puppetry that showwd the Vietnamese people the backwardness of their country for following the feudalist system of China. There occurred the most fierce attacks from the West launched against the two most backward and corrupt but resiliently repulsive citadels of confucianism by then, that is, assaults by the French force attacking the Annam's Hue Imperial Palace in 1883 and later by the Eight-Nation Alliance troops that swept the Qing's Peking's Forbidden City in 1900, respectively, both having been unmercifully ransacked one after another. Only through the light of Western Civilization shining in the southern region — overshadowed by the colonial oppressiveness, yet, with innovative minds of those Frenchmen that stood for the batallion of Western Civilization, though — were the occidental ideas that posed cultural threats to those who hold on to the traditional values, on the one hand. The Annamese were able to rise up on their feet and to see beyond China's horizon, on the one hand.
Successive historical events continued to unfold thereafter moved the French Annam away from Chinese umbrella, which signaled the collapse of the old monarchy systems in both China (1911) and Annam (1954). Western Austroasiatic theorists stepped into the threshold to fill in the linguistic void that the incomplete Sino-Tibetan hypothesis was left behind and they captivated the Western-educated Vietnamese scholars that allowed them to perceive their own national language, now, via its Western periscope in place of the old Chinese scholarship that would have expired by then.
In the process of colonialization of the highly Sinicized Annam's society, those overly enthusiastic colonialists, wasting no time, sprinted into action to propagate their Western values with multiple cultural prongs that include imposition of supposedly superior occidental values to those of the old Chinese ones. Western methodology was prominently one among them and proved its quasi effectiveness, though, in most of academic fields. Throughout the colonial period, however, French intellectuals were always in a position of authority to forge Western scholarship, which envied the old Confucius values they were anxious to replace. A French-educated Vietnamese of the early 20th century generation might recall that when the French colonists were there in Annam, they had even gone far enough in the field of history by boldly teaching their colonized Annamese native school-aged children that their ancestors had been of the Gallic race, for example.
Then came the last century that witnessed how efficient Western mechanisms at work through the showdown of forces between those new vanguards of the Western values represented by the US throughout the Vietnam War against the same old tyrannical system of the neo-feudalist China being dressed under the new attire of 'communism' that serve the pulitburo's monarchy, which started as earlier than 1949. By 1964 China would have already started funneling arms to their power-thristy Vietnamese communist comrades and the Chinese hands had yearned badly for its expansionism to South Vietnam thoughout the Cold War period. After North Vietnam finally won the war in April 1975, the Viet-commies built their totalitarian regime that suppressed all freedom of speech and that led to the distortion of academic truth as previously mentioned.
On the one hand, it is undeniable that the Western ideas make physical transformation in real world. Novel scientific methodology proved their superiority through effectiveness and advancement in many aspects of civil society. Ironically, the world has seen nothing yet with China's economic powerhouse that can roll out hi-tech gadgets from smart phones, hi-speed bullet trains, to electric cars with the same efficiency only after a little more than 30 years of economic reform policy in implementation of what the Chinese have learned from the West. In actuality, if China had become a free of communist centrally-controlled policing state, it would have advanced at much faster paces. But here they go with all the censorship and blockade of all information outside there network, from Yahoo emails, Google to Youtube, and all VPN, etc. all being kept outside the new Great Fire Wall. A team of social media troops guard and entice people into double-speaking traps.
On the other hand, the Vietnamese intellectuals are taking notes on personal rewarding incentives, e.g., recognition from the academic world, that go with proven benefits based on can't-go-wrong Western methodologies, in this case, the Western-initiated Austroasiatic theory, specifically. Despite controversiality on association of the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer with Viets, local academics are eager to take on the prestigious Western stand of the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis because it is easier to reconcile it theorization with archaeological excavations — for example, focus on the southeastern region of the Indo-Chinese peninsula as homeland of the Austroasiatic roots in order to explain finds of highly advanced Dongson-styled bronze drums found in both China South and Indonesia (see Paul Sidwell's The Austroasiatic Central Riverine — than elaborate on non-factual traditional Vietnamese legends, folktales, or folklores, etc., to depict one's national prehistory that all sounds more like fairytales. Such oral forms certainly earn negative marks and pose challenges on its credibility for interpretation of prehistoric events even though that is how one generation to another passed down tales of the founders of the nation long before they were recorded in Chinese history since their contact with the 'Tàu' (秦 Qin) people prior to 204 B.C.
However, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer camp could never be able to compile basic words across all Mon-Khmer languages to find certain cognates to match what exists in Vietnamese that could relate to Vietnamese legends to help identify sound change patterns as reliable as the Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma in Chinese records. For example, 董 dǒng in the legend of "Phùđổng Thiênvương" (扶董天王 Fúdǒng Tiānwáng — a mythical folk hero in Vietnam's history, who defeated the Ân (殷 Yin or 殷商 Yinshang) invaders from ancient China's Yin Dynasty, (Y) ) — is also called 董聖 Dǒng Shèng (Đổng Thánh) or normalized 'Thánh Gióng (Dóng)', that is, Saint 'Dóng' or 'Gióng' /Jong5/ and the phonology of both pronunciations are mapped well into the sound change pattern of { /t-/ ~ /j-/ } and { đ- ~ z-}.
Linguistically, a whole new contemporary episode theorized by the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer initiates has painted a picture quite different from the perspective the Vietnamese people used to visualize, look at, and see themselves through the mirror of legends and folklores. Those scientifically-minded Indo-European linguists have not cared much more about factual historical data, let alone spiritual values to that the Viets have devoted their conviction for certain of particular issues. For instance, the Austroasiatic camp would not buy into those interpretive numbers such as total years of the 18 reigns ruled by their ancestral King Hung I, II, III... of the Viets, which is illogical, leaving a large gap of hundreds of years in the speculative span of more than 4896 years since 2879 B.C., the birthyear of their nation as they believe, which is hard to prove, simply all numbers not adding up logically, and so on. (H) The irony of history of Vietnam is that her people could not be sure how to say with certainty the names of their legendarily-revered ancestral king, specifically, that is, King Hùng or King Lạc (?) Two of the important, but intriguing, names are those of the kings called King "Hùng" 雄 (Mand. Xióng) and King "Lạc" 雒 (Mand. Luó). "Hùng" is the Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation mainly based on Đại-Việt Sử-ký Toàn-thư (大越歷史全書 'Complete History of Dai-Viet') by Ngô Sĩ Liên in which "Lạc" 雒 might have been mistaken as "Hùng" 雄 as recorded in Chinese historical books. Recent research shows that "Vua Hùng" were derived from Daic language called "pòkhun" where "pò-" is "bố" ("vua" or 'king') (Nguyễn Ngọc San. 1993. p. 93).
The Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer followers hit on the weather-beaten trails pioneered by their predecessors which first had their stand underwritten by the French academics. After the French colonists physically withdrew from Indo-China in 1954, the colonial legacy they left behind was advanced intellectual tools and innovative methodologies with the largest treasure is the Vietnam's national Romanized orthography called 'Quốcngữ', not to mention the grammatical mechanics of the French language that render today solid and logical { Subject + Verb + Object } models for the modern Vietnamese language, which pushes today's Vietnamese further from their ancestral language. The phenomenon was exactly like what happened in the academic fields of the past after the return of the Ming's occupation of the country in the 15th century for another 25 years on top of the Han came to colonize the ancient Annamese land in the 2nd century B.C.
As time goes by, fallout from the rainwash under the Austroasiatic sky would become much more of the re-enforcement to the Western theory on related Vietnamese linguistic matters. Unlike the comparative analysis base employed in the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis, the Sino-Tibetan-classified Vietnamese theorization built its case on linguistic particularities and historical background. Its currency, however, has been on and off in the historical linguistic circle due to its lack of plausibly identified Sino-Tibetan ~ Vietnamese cognates. In fact, as it was built on premises of Sinitic-based vocabularies, its fundamentally etymological breakthrough ceased to cause stirrings for decades after its inception. The author of this research will change that attitude in the next chapters with elaboration on Sino-Tibetan ~ Vietnamese cognates based on Shafer's long recognized Sino-Tibetan etymology work (1972) that was somehow missed on the Sino-Tibetan ~ Vietnamese radar screen.
Everything comes with a price, though, like agony being endured by the Viets who have undergone through process of Austroasiatic 'colonization', spiritually. It is comparable, religiously, to the feeling of being coerced to make a compromise on one's own belief, or at least conviction in terms of oriental philosophy on 'the Way of life' ('Nhânsinhquan' 人生觀 or Dao 道), to be replaced by occidental values. Collective subconsciousness of conflicting values will make them suspicious of those foreign work with hidden ideological agenda under different guises coming from different sources, say, not only from China but also Russia or even the US as well, which would negatively affect social sciences or other humanity disciplines, including archaeology and historical linguistics.
Anthropologically, with those native ethnic minorities who have initially made up the main ethnic majority of Vietnam's population called the Kinh, they are actually of racial mixture of Sinicization. Specifically, in the ancient times in the Annamese land as a China's prefecture intermarriages of migrants from the mainland of China resulted in the emergence of the Vietnamese Kinh people who resettled in and around the Red River Delta and northeastern coastal area of today's North Vietnam, areas with better fertile paddy fields and coastal fishing villages. In effect, the aboriginal Yue people who made up the Han 'conquistadors' were originally rice planters in plain regions of cultivated paddy fields on both sides along the Yangtze River's banks and south of its basin such as Jiangxi (江西), Hubei (湖北), Hunan (湖南) provinces, and fishmen along the China South coasts, i.e., ancient states of WuYue (吳越), MinYue (閩越), NanYue (南越). In the back of their mind, nonetheless, they are well aware that their ancestors were of the Yue genealogical line, with linkage to the largest indigenous population as popularly known today as the Zhuang (壯族 'Nùng') and the Daic (傣族 'Tày') minority groups, both concentrating in the regions of today's Guangxi (廣西) and Yunnan (雲南) provinces, along with those who are living in Guangxi and Guizhou (桂州) provinces of China South as well as Vietnam's northwestern region of Laichâu, Hàgiang, Tuyênquang provinces. For those Muong ethnic groups they are inhabiting the region further in the south far away from the coastal paddy fields, metropolises, or townships such as those remote mountainous regions of Hoàbình and Ninhbình.
On a grand scale, all of the above are related to the other Sinicized Yue groups who had long become parts of the Han Chinese majority such as those Cantonese, the Fukienese, or the Wu speakers in Guangdong, Fujian, and Zhejiang provinces. Linguistically, on the one hand, nobody ever questioned their Yue languages, i.e., 粵語 Yueyu, 閩越語 Min-Yueyu, 吳粵語 Wu-Yueyu, respectively, for having been totally Sinicized within the Sinosphere at least 2500 years each; therefor, they have been classified into the Sino-Tibertan linguistic family. On the other hand, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists did that with the contemporary Vietnamese by crediting extant non-Austroasiatic-origin Vietnamese words as Chinese loans because the ancient Annamese land had been under the Chinese rule 1100 years before its separation from NanHan State in 939. Interestingly, the core words in Vietnamese were solidly recorded in Chinese scripts in ancient times ever since they had been first invented, e.g., 'ngày' 日 rì (day), 'suối' 川 chuāng (creek), 'rựa' 戉 yuè (axe), 'gạo' 稻 gào (rice), 'dê' 羊 yáng (goat), etc., all quite distinctively different from comparative analysis base by those of the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer groups, (See the chapter on the Mon-Khmer association) In comparison, the Mon-Khmer component in the Vietnamese linguistic map is really small in many aspects, mostly in substratum.
In a lesser extent, maeanwhile, intellectual drainage to the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer camp was a material loss per se. In Vietnam there are plenty of Mandarin (putonghua) learners nowadays but scholars in historical Chinese seem to belong to a bygone era. Sinitic-Vietnamese historical linguistics demands additional skill sets. Those locally groomed scholars from the second generation after 1975, who have been trained in the socialist educational system — read, 'political constraint academics' — surprisingly tend to admire anything Western, ironically. They belong to a novel class of Vietnamese scholarship that carries the 'Western air', but very senitive to critics for their academic weakness, all probably sublimated from their inferior complex. They are highly politically motivated to serve the socialist system, though, for personal gains. We will talk more about the role of politics in the academic arena in complete detail in the next chapter simply because that has influenced all Vietnamese academic disciplines so much in negative aspects.
B) New approaches in the Vietnamese etymology
The Austroasistic Mon-Khmer hypothesis was built on results of analysis of available lexical data derived from scattering Mon-Khmer languages based on the assumption that some of them, out of contact with other related languages, would still retain some original forms after all the diachronic sound changes. Throughout the process of theorization the existence of Yue elements was simply ignored by the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer camp, neither historically nor linguistically, in its own game with their newly coined terminology, namely, Austroasiatic instread of Yue that long existed in Chinese historical records. In creating a whole new linguistic family in their own terms, the Indo-Eauropean theorists hence would be able to avoid studying all what was said about the Yue as said from Chinese ancient clasics. In other word, they simply created new theory solely by manipulating available data from related living languages with no regards of related history, so to speak.
The Yue linguistic entities, in contrast, cover not only analytical methodology but also history, archaeology, and anthropology, and if applicable, coupled with a spiritual touch of national ideology as well. The main reason for doing so is that many Sinitic-Vietname etyma will constantly creep into our discussion that also fit in anthropological category. For instance, the Vietnamese concept of "thờ" (worship) may correspond to 侍 shì (SV thị), 祠 cí (SV từ), 祀奉 sìfèng (VS thờphụng) or 'thờphượng' 奉事 fèngshì (SV phụngsự) or 忠臣不事二君 Zhōngchén bù shì èr jūn. 'Tôitrung không thờ hai chúa.' (Loyal subordinates will not serve two kings.) The former category is spiritual while the latter one is ideological. Before the author goes on to discuss the actual approaches to explore the Yue realm as such, exclusion of Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer intrinsic values not in line with the spiritual belief held by the Vietnamese.
Let us bring into account all differentiation from other views with an abstract evidence of such spiritual aspect that underlines popular belief in the undeniable existence of the long-discussed ancestral Yue aborigine in the China South region whether or not Sinitic factors are accounted for. Just like the Vietnamese religion of 'ancestral worship" ("tụcthờcúngôngbà') the Vietnamese people's spiritual belief is so sacred in such a way that their perception of the afterlife governs most of their social conducts in their earthly life, regardless of their religions. On the one hand, they might not readily admit their worship is not a superstitious folk cult but an 'ancestral religion' when back in time speaking of any religion of 2500 or more years of age. One could not say whether or not his or hers is a true religion and the other is not. On the other hand, their belief could surpass that of 'Trời' (天 Tiān), the existence of 'the One and Only', or 'His Supremacy the Highness' and suchlike. He, however, apparently is not revered the same way by all people on earth. 'Trời' hereupon in general is comparable to the grand perception of 'God' in the West and elsewhere, the very same 'Supreme Master' that all religions share, namely, 'the Creator', so to speak.
Let us expand the matter above a little meticulous, philosophically. Religiously, for speakers of the Vietnamese as their mother tongue, however, 'Trời' exists mostly in their speech form. They, nevertheless, may place their belief of 'Trời' on equal footing with 'His Supremacy' of any other religions, either that being 'Buddha' or 'God'. The Vietnamese 'ancestral religion' was incorporated into each respective religion and even materialized their beir belief doen-to-earth with modern photographic images of their deceased ancestors to be placed sacredly side by side with other symbolic figurines of Buddha or Jesus. No matter what religion had been introduced to Vietnam in the late period of their history, whether it is Buddhism, Daoism, Catholic, Christianity, islam, or home-grown Caodaism and Hoahaoism, etc., all ending up being engulfed in fragrant smoke of incense sticks, as spiritual offerings, liberally burned on each sacrificially ceremonial occasion to pay their respect to their 'ancestors', a fusion of Buddhism and Daoism. The bottom line is this form of reverence shows authentically the existence of the ancient Yue as being highly respected as their ancestors, which is, besides the Viets, still commonly practiced by many ethnic groups of Yue origin who are still living in China South, for example, the Zhuang nationality in China and, of the same ancestry, the 'Nùng' minority in Vietnam.
All in all, to suplement historical facts that are totally absent from the Austroasiatic theory, in addition to the spiritual value as discussed above, we could now continue to juxtapose each theory that is accompanied with other social activities which would eventually lead to the formation of the language tha all people living within the same community shared, with rescpect to, at a much later period, the geopolitical side of it, to include both the economic system and the political form of government that runs a country. That is actually an important factor, believe it or not, that factorially determines the classification of related Sinitic languages, politically speaking, such as putting those of Cantonese and Minnan dialects under Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, for example, given denial of Yue origin of Han roots by the Chinese. So said, politics interferes with scholarly lingusitic field in such a way that it solemnly distorts the truth with the fact of natural academic delelopment. As mentioned previously, the phenomenon is commonplace in Vietnam, anti-Sinitic mindset, for example. So politics will be put in perspective and its role will be approached with an analytical mind.
Individuals with mentality in the low end of the academic ladder being opted for abatement of state-run disinformation are of another type of people who could not handle factual arguments as premises to start with. We never need them to agree on our theory which is inarguably used to be sticky issues to deal with. The author thinks that it is not worth the time to attend their opinion (See APPENDIX L ); therefore, that is one of the main reasons why this paper has been mainly crafted in English to avoid unruly crowd; the very type of people the author has never wanted to deal with. Readers will learn more in a separate chapter that deals with such political issue in humanities.
However, our approach is still Sinitic in essence where Chinese is the fundamental core — simply just because 'Sinitic' is the terminology and Chinese dialects have been group into the Sino-Tibetan lingusitic family — with regard to typology, i.e., not of history but cognateness of a Vietnamese word with other forms in extant Tibetan (TB, or B) languages, for instance, 'bò' (cow) [ Excluding any coincidences for cognacy in other etyma, according to Shafer, 'cow' in OB (Old Tibetan) ba, OB E. *bik. A W. Bod. Burig bā (p. 83), Groma, Śarpa bo (calf), Dangdźongskad, Lhoskad ba (p. 93), Central Bodish Lagate pa-, Spiti, Gtsang, Dbus, Ãba bʿa, Mnyamslad, Dźad pa (p. 98), other Bod. languages Rgyarong (ki)-bri, -bru (p. 120), modern Bod. dialects New Mantśati (bullock), Tśamba Lahuli (ox) bań, Rangloi bań-ƫa (bullock) (p. 130). Also in Chin. 牝 byi/ (Chin. cow, female of animal), OB ãbri-mo (tame female yak) (p. 59). According to dchph, for 牝 byi/, can can postulate that it with the VS "bê" form, a calf, perhaps. ] 'Cow' is a very important domestic animal in Vietnamese water paddy planting agriculture, that is the word is harly a loanword, which can not be interpreted otherwise by any other theories, especially the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis.
To find an etymon as suchlike, some tried brainstorming juxtaposition — an intuitive approach that had existed before the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory came into the Vietnamese linguistic arena — but did not reach a refining level yet as we have seen through their cited examples that show most of them could not distinguish lexicons of Sinitic-Vietnamese (VS) from Sino-Vietnamese (SV) class or only a few of superstrata of the VS layer of Chinese and Vietnamese etyma, which make their lists to appear all as Chinese loanwords. For example, besides the Sino-Vietnamese sound 'sư' for 師 shī (teacher) for someone s/he (SH) may already know that 'thầy' is another cognate, and while some even know 'thầymô' is a normalized variant of 巫師 wūshī (shaman) that is in reverse syllabic order, others may not know that both Sinitic-Vietnamese 'sải' 師 shī (monk) and 'phùthuỷ' 巫師 wūshī (shaman), respectively, are also of the same roots as that of 'thầycô' 老師 lăoshī (teachers), similarly, so are 婿 xū 'rể' (son-in-law) vs. 姑爺 gūyě 'conrể' (son-in-law), 'sống' 生 shēng (live) vs. 'đẻ' (give birth to), etc., of which each etymo was derived from different dialects and in diferent periods, diachonically and synchonically.
Besides, on the one hand, to be a Han-Nom specialist, on the other spectrum of the historical linguistic matter, a measurable level of knowledgement is possession of some language skills. This class of scholars becomes rarer these days now as in many supposedly good English papers the authors show lack of basic mastery level to distinguish, as said above, simple Sino-Vietnamese words from Sinitic Vietnamese ones. No finger pointing is intended here but that is the fact. On the other hand, those who can read Chinese literature are just everage language learners in the general populace, though. New students from the crowd who step into the field of Vietnamese historical linguistics still need to make a decision in taking side from the first moment. It is advisable for them to bear in mind that even though it is fashionable to embrace the new 'capitalist system' (as opposed to the Vietnam's state-controlled academics), i.e., Western methodology and objectivity free of governmental interference, their participation in this linguistic field could not just be simply regarded as to replace the core matter of hundreds of years old that has rooted in the agriculturally-based economy — similar to the case of Sino-Tibetan theory exemplified with aforementioned 'bò' — with those Western theories as in the case of the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis. The bottom line is those newcomers at their free choice are likely to follow the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer trend for the reason that the Austroasiatic theory offer some leverage for them to maneuver in the task of postulating Sinitic-Vietnamese etymology, e.g., scientific methodologies to collect and tabulate Mon-Khmer data systematically even though might not be truthful in essence for a fluid matter that exists in those Vietnamese and Chinese etyma that are cognates.(水)
Another reason for having multiple perspectives — ranging from religion to politics and the likes in the round on top of archaeology, anthropology, history, languages proficiency, etc. — is that for those Western-educated people with a practical mind, adoption of industrialism from the West at the turn of the 20th century, which has been proven to work rather efficiently with most of contemporary institutions, would likely result in the same scientific efficiency and accuracy to be extended to the field of historical linguistics as well. Vietnam's adoption of Western ideas has been through the first generation of those who were French-educated scholars in the periods that followed complete national independence from France in July 20th, 1954. With a firm and without-looking-back attitude, they set remarkable trend with the lately romanized Quốcngữ writing system which swept away Chinese quintessence of the thousand-year-old institution once and for all. In the transitional period toward modernization they acted quickly toward not only total replacement of the Chinese-based Nôm script but also the last use of French as primary language for the country's colonial educational system.
All in all, therefore, it is not surprising that advocates of Western methodologies prefer new measurable 'metric' tools to traditional 'soft' approaches, i.e., precision vs. approximation or precise measurement of data vs. fluid interpretation, respectively, on this etymological field of linguistics. In the late 19th into the succeeding century our local French-educated scholars had carried over good and last laughs on some remarks made by some French grammarians that the Annamese language did not have grammar of its own and it needed French grammar in order to write cohesive sentences. Probably that was the last resonance from what has been mistakenly conceived and classed as an "isolate language" — those that make sentences by putting words together, as apposed to inflectional ones that make senses out of sentences by cases such German, Russian, Latin, etc. — by Western linguists which they specifically assert both Vietnamese and Chinese languages were. Fortunately, they are not exactly what the Western theorists told them to be. We will return to this 'isolate' matter later in the chapter dealing with their dissyllabicity issues.
In our contemporary era in other unrelated areas flaws have come up in adopting Western values as compared to the traditional ones since they could not be simply judge right and wrong. Besides instances of culturally archaeological artifacts or religious belief as discussed earlier, they could be further found in other areas such as medications (for example, preference of Western medicines to the traditional herbs with the latter seen as the last resort), or changing customs such as holidays (e.g., Chrismas, additional Western New Year, Valentine days, etc.), birthday (e.g., more people enjoying celebration of their Western-styled birthday these days after their long adoption of Western calendar instead of the Lunar one), death or wedding customs (still using Lunar calendar though, e.g., choosing white wedding gowns, engaging rings of diamonds instead of gold, black attire to attend burial ceremonies instead of the white color and coarse fabric, and so on, but in many occasions they still use Chinese characters for ceremonial or festive inscriptions), etc. In other words, they are comparable adoptions having the same nature. So did the Western the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists with regard to the Vietnamese etymological matters that we are now discussing. That is fashionable in a sense, may I speak?
In actuality, discrepancies in new Sinitic Vietnamese etyma — Nôm words of Chinese origin — presented in this paper generally can complement what has come out from a Western-based the Austroasiastic Mon-Khmer camp. Ideally, etymological finds from both Sinitic Vietnamese and the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer approaches could co-exist in harmony instead of rejecting one another. For instance, dozens of core Vietnamese cognates found in Mon-Khmer do not necessarily negate their roots from a Chinese or Sino-Tibetan stock. Metaphorically, an Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer affair could end up to be like an arranged marriage in the Chinese way and camouflaged under a Western-style wedding gown — as opposed to traditional outfit as foresaid — that could still go with those customary rituals with 'Vietic' matters in the core. In other word, Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory on Vietnamese historical linguistics could be considered incomplete without Chinese elements and unavoidably their cultural entanglements, historically and anthropologically. Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer linguists may have a case but they really need a history to support it. The matter is explicable because that is a direct consequence of 1000 years under China's imperial rule and beyond periods with ealier prehistoric contacts. The issues seem to be sensual in minute details but they have not been properly dealt with in the related academic circle.
We welcome Western methodologies for an old matter that has been in existence hundreds of years ago and one must understand that the linguistic core had existed there long before Western scholars came into contact as late as in the 20th century (see 爾雅 Éryùn, 說文 Shuōwén, 唐韻 Guăngyùn, 廣韻 Guăngyùn, etc.). They need to learn and explore, not to invent a brand-new theory for a millenium-old field of study just for the sake of one's convenience. In so doing, obviously they simply just made a shotcut or detour in order to avoid a steep learning curves in learning not only modern Chinese but also ancient Chinese. In other words, aggressive assertions that came on from position of power would never be unappreciated. Note that up until the late 18th century, Western scholars still possessed a meager knowledge of the Chinese language (See Knud Lundbæk. 1986).
Supposition of some earlier contacts in ancient times is in line with the ancient Yue metallurgic know-hows with those Dongson-styled bronze drums might be related to similar artifacts unearthed in Indonesia dated in a much later period than those of older ages such as Ngoclu-styled bronze drums, of which similar objects were not yet discovered in Indonesia. All bronze drums excavated across regions of North Vietnam and China South, where agricultural activities of the ancient Yue people had left their traces such as cultivating water paddies. To visually view ancient Yue bronze drums readers can contemplate those real excavated relics with their own eyes as similar items are being in display in a Zhuang Cultural Village near Liuzhou City (柳州市) in China's Guangxi autonomous region, or in China's national museums in other cities including Nanjing, Yangzhou, Chongqing, Kunming, Nanning, or Vietnam's museums in Hanoi and Saigon.
As more archaeological evidences point to the fact that the ancient Yue people did exist further in the north, the academic circle would see that the rationization that archaic languages once spoken by those aboriginals in China South had been different from those of Mon-Khmer whose speakers were clumped around the Indo-Chinese peninsula. Etymologically, those fundamentally basic words shared with the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer roots were only of a subset of those of the Sino-Tibetan and Chinese languages. With many more of the latest finds of Vietnamese etyma cognate to those of Sino-Tibetan etynmologies of which the linguistic circle in the VS historical linguistic field might have never heard, newcomers in the field who are still undecided to take sides should feel encouraged to widen their mindscape and come to check out unlimited VS etyma on the Sino-Tibetan side that are being disposed in this paper.
In any case, the underlining purpose of all the passages above is a prologue to our new etymological approaches to be discussed. Readers should be on the lookout and not to be freaked in enticements of being prestigiously identified with great ancient cultures that ever existed on earth right in her neigboring countries with colossal vestiges such as temples and walled pallaces, of a much higher developed civilization such as those of Khmer, Champa, or Middle kingdom. Many local scholars have been drawn into the dreamscape trying to relate themselves especially with those people who built two of seven great wonders of the world, i.e., Great Walls of China and sites of the ancient ruins of Angkor Thom and Angkor Wat palaces. In fact, more than once in the past the Vietnamese archeaologists even claimed artifacts excavated in those lately acquired territories such as those of Sahuỳnh and Ốc-Eo cultures in the central and southern parts of Vietnam as vestiges left by their "ancestors", having unreservedly claimed national ownership on those excavated earthenware artifacts that were found thoughout the lately annexed southern territory which were actually acquired only after the 15th century, all to the effects that they were the masterpieces produced by ancestral Vietnamese artisans. Supporting evidences, however, to reach such impartial judgment on their ancestral linkage, anthropologically, to the other respects of the Sahuỳnh or Ốc-Eo culture are null. The same reasoning is applied to linguistic etymological field to be associated with the Mon-Khmer in the Austroasiatic hypothesis.
That was what happened in the past. When local scholars in the field were anxious to distance themselves from the 'China's camp', they would put even more effort in the Austroasiatic direction than a specialist normally would do, which, in return, could do injustice to the Sinitic or Sino-Tibetan related theorization of Vietic linguistic matter.
On the other scale of the matter, the Austroasiatic theorists might not not care much about all those acclamations. However, in the case of Dongsonian bronze drums that have been found not only in the region where 'Dongson' culture originated but also in some Indonesian islands as previously mentioned, both Austroasiatic and the Austronesian camps had come on in full force to embrace them so as they could prove the existence of the aboriginals of respective people and their hypothesis in the roll call. Should that be the case and truthful to what they had claimed, theorization on the Austroasiatic and the Yue hypotheses would be mutually inclusive then.
For practical purposes with regard to possible impartiality, the author could not cut loose into deeper argumentation for it is sentimentally too cumbersome. Practically readers of all sorts actually could grasp some core substances once they are ready to absorb new things, starting with little sidelines, say, those illustrated maps on historical facts.
Old-timers may even want try to break away from the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis in which they have admittedly had deep conviction prior to their encounter with the Sino-Tibetan theory. If you happen to be one among them, be prepared for debates on certain of controversial issues starting from fundermental groundwork of the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer origin of the Vietnamese language.The whole matter could be reasoned out with very simple logic as follows. If Vietnam were to return to the Chamic and the Khmer peoples all of her original annexed pieces of land that now are located in the country's central and southern parts, that is, stretches of coastlined land from north of Hue and all the way to the southern tip of her current territory looking out to the Gulf of Thailand, let us ask ourselves the question, "After some 700 years under the rule of Vietnam until now, what mixture of linguistic form would be expected that the local people living in both to-be-reborn Champa and Khmer states would speak?"
Process of 'Vietnamization' of the Chamic and Khmer peoples having started nearly 10 centuries in their own lands must have been undeniably a very similar scenario of Sinicization of the Annam State after the equivalent of 1000 years of under the colonial rule of the imperial China throughout different dynasties that ended with that of the Tang Dynasty. In short, the "Annamese people" would definitely no longer speak the 'indigenous' language of the period prior to 111 B.C. that the ancestral aboriginals had spoken hundreds of years given the fact that the ongoing influx of the racially-mixed Han troops from the north on constant conquering missions to the southern land, to have been followed by Chinese refugees fleeing wars and hunger in their homeland who had kept moving in and resettled down in the country. All of them outnumbered the natives and previous resettlers (compare the what happened in both North and South Americas only for the last 400 years.) Vietnamese nationals now could look around every corner of their country and will see how the like phenomenon kept happening incessantly since the ancient times. Proofs are evident with the presence of mainland's Chinese migrant laborers in many Chinatowns that have sprung up around Vietnam nowadays, e.g., in Hatinh, Phuyen, Daklak, etc., provinces, while Vietnam is considered as a sovereign nation, not to mention most of popular tourist spots such as Nhatrang Beach in Khanhhoa Province, all advertisement signs hung up being written in Chinese. Readers can take a note of what is being raised hereof to understand how influential the politics is to this linguistic subject matter, an inevitable topic that needs to be discussed in the next chapter.
Once readers appreciate such a raison d'être of the formation of the Vietnamese language, they will be able to steer their train of thoughts to focus on other matters such as those Sino-Tibetan evidences presented in this paper and expand it from there. They could entertain themselves by meditating on the topic, just like praticing that of Zen but with Vietic spirituality, to be enlightened with theorization on new findings. Only then could they appreciate the essence of Vietic, or Yue, core matter, primarily by means of reinstatement of Yue ethnological and geographical settings that come with solid historical records.
So it did not matter much even if the Austroasiatic camp could gather some historical records for the goodness of their theory to prove that the native locals had spoken some forms of Mon-Khmer language when they first met "the Han conquistadors" (compare the circumstance with the English langquage or Spanish spoken in Latin America.) In any cases, the state of the Vietnamese language in present day is absolutely no way near anything existing in the Mon-Khmer languages even if it were supposedly the true aboriginal language before the Chinese as theorized by the Austroasiatic camp.
C) The end of Austroasiatic approach
The Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory has never been sucessfully proved by means of history. History is the soul of our theory. The already well-publicized Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory on the origin of Vietnamese does not have a soul. It has never been known to start from a historical point of view or backed up with written records by any means, though, yet the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer advocates have been holding out on high ground in comparison with the Sino-Tibetan runners-up. In other word, there is no history to back it up. Their only links to the past, in fact, are of scores of basic words from some earliest layers of lexical substrata. Inerestingly those Vietnamese lexicons found cognate to the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer ones happen to overlap those etyma in the Sino-Tibetan languages as well. With new finds of basic words in the field of Vietnamese etymology that used to have made their days in the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer camp may be ending soon. There is a reason for much ado about my discoveries because they are results of new approaches that somewhat deviate from usual methodolodies.
The Austroasiatic terminology is at times homonymous to what is known as Mon-Khmer today even though its linguistic domain covers a larger geographic area. As conveyed in the name of Austroasiatic itself, its theorists postulated once existed some ancestral Austroasiatic people had migrated to adjacent land brigdes from Southeast Asia cross South Asia's regions to India and northward to China South. For those indigenous peoples in the southern land Paul Benedict (1975) did in a separate paper designating a branch call "Austro-Thai" (泰). As the Indo-China's pennisula had been once bridged by stretches of land to all present islands which are now lying deeply below the sea level, the Austroasiatic people emigrated southward as well. But the theory is still hypothetical because it is contrary to the evidences that those reached the Oceania's regions were voyaged by boats. Whether or not the same theorization could be further expanded to embrace that of Austronesian and Austric hypotheses and to blanket all other Polynesians and Malaysians across South Pacific regions as well is another matter. (M)
It is not only that as hypothesized above the Austroasiatic homeland eventually has been re-positioned as having radiated from the Mekong River (Paul Sidwell, The Austroasiatic central riverine hypothesis, in "Journal of Language Relationship" 4 (2010). pp. 117–134). From his postulation the Austroasiatic people could NOT be of the same racial stock of those Yue aforementioned. Prior to his theory, the Austroasiatic homeland was previously proposed to have been located in Yunnan Province where it is geographically known now as the actual homebase of the ancient Yue who had been fanning out to other areas in the south.
It is noted that cultural artifacts excavated from the ground in southern region of Vietnam had been buried there long before the late Viets migrated and resettled therein. The relics, of course, could not be claimed as that of Vietnamese ancestral heritage by the latecoming masters of the land. As readers will learn more that the Kinh majority actually emerged from racially-mixed stocks firstly from the Sinitic Vietnamese descents at the early stage of the Han colonialization; therefore, those ancient the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer aborgines in Indo-China could not be affiliated with the prehistoric Yue ancestry of the Vietnamese further in the north. It is only by the 16th century that the Annamese Kinh groups would have arrived and resettled in the Mekong River Delta region. Before that era, genetically, their ancestral Vietic race had been pre-transmutated, i.e., mixture of the Yue and Han, and then the racial fusion with the Mon-Khmer and the Cham peoples took place along their westward and southward movements. In their last destination to the southern tip of the Camau cape, they encountered the southern Khmer people. That is to say, the Mon-Khmer registry to the Vietnamese family have been just the latest added-on 'features' throughout the last ten centuries; therefore, the Viets could not be of the prehistoric the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer descents in anyway as one might have speculated. Things could be simpler if specialists talked only in terms of DNA from the start, which is out of our historical linguistic scope to discuss here.
Etymologically, counter to what was claimed by the opponent camp, recently discovered evidences in Vietnamese basic stock that shares with other non-Sinitic languages in the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family have shown some 400 fundamental words (see Chapter 4) having deep roots in a wide range of Sino-Tibetan etymologies, geographically, spreading across a vast terrain of southern Asia. Such a linguistic fact has laid a solid base to support the groundwork for the re-classification of the Vietnamese language.
In addition, thanks to its lack of supporting historical proofs, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypotheses in picturing pre-historic people from different backgrounds, i.e., Austroasiatic vs. Yue, gave rise to fallacies that subsequently caused linguistic misinformation. Its theory was maltreated as a premise for another succeeding hypothesis that then demanded an anti-thesis to prove otherwise. In contrast, the Sino-Tibetan theory has ancient Chinese records to support. The history of the land now called China also referred to the existence of the BaiYue tribes, among which certain of groups were identified with ancestral Vietic people, e.g, ÂuLạc (歐雒) and LạcViệt (雒越).
In fact, one of the shortcomings of the Austroasiatic hypothesis is that it would be impossible for the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists to prove by means of written records the interrelationship of those Vietnamese basic words with what were identified as the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer cognates in the same manner that we could meticulously elaborate on Sinitic roots of VS etyma. Unlike what we have seen in each forming stage for each Chinese character that is in turn cognate to a Sinitic-Vietnamese etymon — and other alternants in different Chinese dialects — that is, for each and every Chinese character, from the earliest days, archaic rudimentary Chinese written forms had been created initially with phonetic ideograms Sinologists could decipher both their sounds and meanings which evolved chronologically. In many cases the original forms speak for themselves not only with basic and simple ideograph such as 日 rì for bothe son and day, complex ideo-phonetic forms such as the later 麥 mài to have replaced 來 lái for its original meaning of 'millet' or 'wheat' when its early speakers had borrowed 來 lái for its sound to mean 'to come' (cf. VS 'lúa', 'lại', etc., along with other derived variants as the reader will learn later in the next chapters.)
So said, that is history, in a broader sense. The "history" for those related Sinitic-Vietnamese and Sino-Tibetan words appear to be framed within chains of historical events. For example, Sinitic-Vietnamese words that are found cognate to Sinitic words that are in tun to those Sino-Tibetan languages; hence, history of a Sino-Tibetan item is what is about Sinitic ones and applies to that of the Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabulary. In the context of "Sino-Tibetan" linguistic family that embraces other Sinitic languages, i.e., the so-called Chinese dialects, their history is also related to those of reconstruction of Old Chinese lexicons which are tentatively proved to be of the same roots as that of Bodic, or ancient Tibetan, languages, etymologically proved by means of their phonologically structured scripts regarded as another form of history being reserved in the Bodic recorded alphetical syllables.
Right from the beginning the term Austroasiatic was already a misnomer. The Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer initiators knew little about the ancient Vietnam or that of China's history and Sinology intrms of linguistic was just very primitive in the 17th centory. (See Knud Lundbæk. 1986). They simply ignored, hence denied, the existence of both Yue and an entity of its called 'LạcViệt' (雒越 LuòYuè) even though their history were recorded in Chinese annals and classics. It is speculative that it might have been either too cumbersome for those Austroasiatic pioneers to learn about the Yue peoples or simply they did not know how to relate ancient Vietnam's history with that of Mon-Khmer if there indeed existed anything at all that it could be related to what is known as the LacViet, that the LacViet was related with the AuViet and XiYue (西越) and MinYue (閩越) and the WuYue (吳越), etc., hence, the Hundred Yues (百越), the Chu State, the NanYue Kingdom, and so on. Where would the Austroasiatic and the Mon-Khmer fit into the picture? The fact that the ancestal Viets as LacViet did exist would lead to the need of theorization about some other dialectal forms of some Yue ancestor language which help set the core of a Vietic language. To solve the equation, the easiest way for Austroasiatic specialists was to simply equate 'proto-Vietic' forms with 'proto-Austroasiatic' ones by means of their cognate etyma found in modern Mon-Khmer languages. (Robert Parkin, A Guide to Austroasiatic Speakers and Their Languages, 1991)
Speaking of history, as a result, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists could not possibly posit ancient Mon-Khmer forms of an aboriginal language that could plausibly share with what the ancient LacViet people had in common with the Old Chinese through their contact that dated back to 3000 years ago, the most crucial period that has left basic words in the modern Vietnamese language. For instance, historically, etyma of the Vietnamese 'cầy' and 'chó' both are related to 狗 gǒu (SV cẩu) and 犬 quán (Western Mandarin Sichuan dialect /co1/), all meaning 'dog', and their derived dissyllabic words, perfectly matched cognates as well, e.g., 犬坐 quánzuò vs. 'chồmhỗm' (to squat), 犬牙 quányá vs. 'răngkhểnh' (canine), or 小狗 xiăogǒu vs. 'cầytơ' (pup, puppy-dog), etc., of which 'chồmhỗm' was dubiously postulated as of Khmer 'chorohom' origin (see Nguyen Ngoc San. 1993). As you will see in the next chapters, suchlike etyma which used to be emphatically grouped within Mon-Khmer realm by the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer specialists (see Mei Tsu-lin APPENDIX D - G) are also proved to be of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family.
In the linguistic perspective, there exists recorded history to back up the Yue theory on the ancestral Yue language and its descendant speakers. Ancient Chinese classics noted that the Yue people had been heard speaking some archaic Yue forms tha existed concurrently with assumingly some Taic language spoken by the subjects of the Chu State (楚國 Chuguo) such as "The Yueren Song" (越人歌) in the Yue language recorded in the 6th century B.C. by Erjun Zizhe 鄂君子皙 Ngạcquân Tửtích. This song has been studied by Chinese linguists for the few words of the Yue language left. <(See APPENDIX J). Jerry Norman (1979) called it a 'foreign extinct language'. As mentioned previously, King Liu Bang (劉邦), must have spoken a sub-dialect of the Chu language simply because he and his followers, as said, all had been subjects of the Chu State before they triumphantly established the Han Dynasty (漢朝). The Austroasiatic theorists would never be able to provide their theory with similar historical records to enumerate details of how the Mon-Khmer picture fits into the prehistory of the 'Viet' state, i.e., LacViet, given a Yue background in the same relative timeframe.
At the same time, however, we all could have conferred aboyut the same thing — a pre-Sinicized Yue speech — as what was theorized in the Austroasiatic hypothesis with the southern Mon-Khmer pivot as a geographical homebase as to what gave birth to the Viet-Muong group. As we suggest that ancestors of 'LacViet' speakers spoke some form of an ancient Yue language, it could be that of a proto-Vietic speech (of Taic ancestor language) that the Austroasiatic theorists were referring to. That is to say, some prehistoric Tai language was likely of the ancestor origin of the proto-Mon-Khmer form but they — the Mon-Khmer and the ancient proto-Vietic linguistic branches — already split in later historical period, of which the former no longer had anything to do with what of the former evolved from the ancient emigrants out of China South, who could only be considered as guest resettlers regardless their status even though they would later make up a majority group that was known as the Kinh people. As a result, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory would then become not much different from a material claim made by those jealous Vietnamese scholars exerting national ownership on all excavated artifacts under their country's annexed territories, i.e., claimation of the indegenous relics as of their own ancestors. In this case, the whole theory is based on the indigenous base of minority people. It is just like branding the true American citizens are natives of indigenous American Indian ancestry or that of Taiwanese descents of Austronesian roots, given both countries having less than 300 years of history which is known as the US or Republic of China, respectively.
Historical names play a significant role in determining what was from what and which one came first and where it belongs to. Of the naming convention in the acedemic world, just like the term "Sinitic" being applied to an ancient entity that had yet to emerge and the "Yue" being talked about was another entity that had been in existence long before northwestern resettlers moved in southern territories who mixed with the native Yue people to make up an entity that was later know as 'Sinitic'. Amusingly, the same process with those aboriginals further in the south in today's north Vietnam repeated and gave rise to those later known as 'Vietnamese'. Geopolitically, the historical name of 'Vietnam' has given rise to the word 'Vietnamese' in roll calling long after "Annamese", so to speak. Similarly, the Austroasiatic theorists have painted the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer picture that there had existed the Austroasiatic first in the pre-historic epoch, and followed next by the Mon-Khmer, and then came Viet-Muong, which then diverged into what is known today as 'Vietnamese' per their perspective, but sans history.
Confucius said, "名正言順", or, loosely, 'everything is just in the name'. The Austroasiatic camp may have never suspected that anything related to the name of 'Vietnam', the people and their language, their entities being blended together, actually cam into existence sometime after 939 A.D. By then it was called NhàNgô (the 'Ngo Dynasty' or 吳朝 Wuchao) and had nothing to do with the core of 'Vietnam' yet. The country was destined to have become an independent state with different name changes only centuries later. It is noted that in that period the NamHán (南漢 NánHàn) of the southern state — that covered the coastlined stretches of today's Guangdong and northwestern strip of today's north Vietnam (see maps) — interestingly, King Liu Yan (劉嚴) of the NanHan Kingdom had named his newly established state as 'ĐạiViệt', or 大越 DàYuè ('The Great Viet'), prior to the historical name 'NanHan' (南漢) as permanently adopted (Lu Shih-Peng, 1964, Chin. p. 147). Therefore, we can see that the true nature of "Việt" and "Hán" just reflected in the composition of the population. 'ĐạiViệt' would later also become the name of the ancient Vietnam starting with the Ly Dynasty (1009–1225), though. Interestingly, the state name of "大越 DàYuè" was used more than twice in China's history; the other was established in 895 during the mid of chaotic declining Tang Dyasty when 董昌 Dong Chang was enthroned and established his kingdom as 大越羅平國 whence it was known as 越州 Yuezhou, now in 紹興 Shaoxing City, located in Zhejiang Province (Bo Yang, Vol.63, p. 155). Today's Guangdong Province of China is still being called by its ancestral state name as NanYue Guo (南越國).
