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Hypothesis of Chinese origin of Vietnamese

Core matter of Vietnamese etymology

Commonality in Chinese and Vietnamese

Chinese and the Vietnamese basic vocabulary stock

MAP OF...

the ancient Kingdom of Champa
Vietnam geo-historical expansion

Timeline of Vietnam's history

King Zhao Tuo's Mausoleum of NamViet Kingdom

Vietnamese       Chinese
What Makes Chinese so Vietnamese?

An Introduction to Sinitic-Vietnamese Studies

(Ýthức mới về nguồngốc tiếngViệt)

DRAFT
Table of Contents

dchph

 

Chapter Seven

VII) Hypothesis of common Yue origin of Vietnamese and Chinese

All in all Sino-concentric factors serve as backbones of the hypothesis of Chinese origin of identified Sinitic-Vietnamese words in the Vietnamese language, hence, Sintic-Vietnamese (VS). Throughout Vietnam's history, with its ups and downs cyclically as a common cold, spells of an imminent China's invasion come and go, which serves as the backdrop for antagonism between the two countries past and present. Each and every Vietnamese generation treat its threats as real and prominent especially whenever the northern empire outgrows its own bearing. Being always confined in such circumstantial Chinese sphere, Vietnam has been tiptoeing the role of a vassal of China while struggling to keep her sovereignty. It is too bad that Vietnam had never been as a Japan or South Korea to get out of China's shadow.

In this chapter we will analyze those historical and cultural factors that help shape the becoming of the Vietnamese language.

A) Historical background

Historically, long before and after China's domination of Annam, Chinese immigrants definitely brought with them the Confucian culture to the Vietnamese society. In Vietnam, many aspects of life such as customs, traditions, family names, placenames, etc., are simply copycats of the Chinese counterparts. Chinese culture is revered greatly and observed so rigidly that any changes, bad and good, have taken place rather slowly, not in a finite way that the Japanese and Koreans bluntly did away with those Chinese festivals and holidays. For example, Lunar New Year Festival (Tết) and the Moon Festival (TếtTrungthu) have long been virtually phased out in Korea or Japan while, in contrast, they are still whole-heartedly celebrated in Vietnam, not to mention ancestral Tomb clearing practices, in Spring and Winter Solstice ceremonial days. In reality, some Chinese festivals such as TếtNguyêntiêu (元宵節 Lantern Festival) and TếtĐoanngọ (端午節 Dragon Boats Festival) have lost their steam in Vietnam, though, due to raging wars, the latest one in the last decades of the 20th centutury; however, it appears that they are gradually staging a comback in the early 21st century.

With respect to the so-called nationalism in our contemporary era that followed a period after the bitter border war with China in 1979, the then Vietnam's authority tried to change the national Lunar New Year Festival by mapping it into the Vietnamese lunar calendar in such a way that it would occur one month ahead of that of China. You guess what? Laugh out loud then, for it ended up that the Vietnamese people had joyously celebrated 2 times of Tết (春節 Chūnjié – Spring Festival) in a row with the second one a month later even more ceremoniously than the previously preceded one in February 1985. Note that the magnitude and time length their Tết Festival equal to all Western Thanksgivings, Christmas, and New Year celebrations combined.

In the meanwhile those Vietnamese factors, in return, have dominantly overtaken all other local Chamic and Khmer cultural characteristics in the central territories from the now lost ancient Champa and Khmer kingdoms that Vietnam annexed in the not-so-distant past. For example, many of their placenames are simply duplicates from those already existing in the old Middle Kingdom, interestingly. Except for the Vietnam's northwestern provinces where native names adhere to indigenous minorty groups with their populace being of the majority in the region, the late resettlers from the northern part of the country, including southern regions of China, arrived and replaced local placenames from north to south – those stretches of land are located from Vietnam's current northern central territory at the 16th latitude all the way to the tip of the southernmost stretch of Càmau Province looking out into the Thailand Gulf with more than 2,000 kilometers of Vietnam's coastline – with what could have been those of their hometowns, for example,

• Tháinguyên 'Tàiyuán' 太原,
• Sơntây 'Shānxī' 山西 ,
• Hànội 'Hénèi' 河內,
• Hànam 'Hénán' 河南,
• Hàbắc 'Héběi' 河北,
• Hàđông 'Hédōng' 河東,
• Hàtây 'Héxī' 河西,
• Trùngkhánh 'Chóngqìng' 重慶,
• Tràngan 'Cháng'ān' 長安 [ or 'Trườngyên', both applied to the 10th century's ancient Capital of Vietnam in Lý Dynasty and her today's capital of 'Hànội' as still being called in the early 20th century. ],
• Bắcninh and Tâyninh ( 'Běiníng' 北寧 'Pacified North' and 'Xīníng' 西寧 'Pacified West' – parallel to Xīníng in Xīnjiāng Province and as opposed to 'Nánníng' 南寧 'Pacified South' in Guăngxī Province),
• Thuậnhoá 'Shùnhuá' 順化,
• Quảngnam (or 'Guăngnán' 廣南 'Greater South' as opposed to Guăngdōng 廣東 'Greater East' and Guăngxī 廣西 'Greater West'),

and even with those supposedly 'pure' Vietnamese words, such as


• Kẻchợ ' Jīngchéng' 京城 (SV 'kinhđô') [ Eng. 'Capital', cf. Japanese /Keijo/. Note that today Vietnam's 'Đànẵng' (name of a city in Central Vietnam) is transcrided as 峴港 M. Xiàngăng (SV Hiệncảng), he pronunciation the Fukienese and Hainanese called 'Kẻon' (ancient name of Danang) since the 18th century. ],

and so on, not to mention the fact that most of Vietnamese local placenames from townships to villages were named with Sino-Vietnamese elements such as Hoàihương 'Huáixiāng' 懷鄉, Bồngsơn 'Péngshān' 蓬山, Bìnhtân 'Píngxīn' 平津, Longan 'Lóng'ān' 隆安, Gianghĩa 'Jiāyì' 嘉義, Longxuyên 'Lóngchuān' 龍川 and the like, the traditional convention similar to those of the England's placenames adopted in the US East Coast, such as New England, New York, New Hampshire, etc.

China's placenames used in Vietnam are inmumerable, virtually everywhere, in addition to other new ones having been made up with Sino-Vietnamese elements, equally applied to all any other placenames from lately acquired territories from the Champa and Khmer kingdoms as recently as the 18th century, popular with the overused Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies, striking a nostalgic note of the familiar HanViet (Sino-Vietnamese) but still retain the aboriginal core, e.g., Quynhơn, Nhatrang, Phanrang, Sóctrăng, etc. (refer to the illustrative map figure), which reflects recent events of much later southward movement that the early Vietnamese migrants had advanced in the last few centuries.

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Archaeologically, excavated artifacts found lying buried deeply beneath thick layers under the earth belong to a highly refined metallurgical technology thatproduce the Dongsonian and Ngoclu bronze drums. The Vietnamese nationals, who were residing on top of the earth layers of the sites, actually have no knowledge about them. They claimed to be descendants of the masters who created them anyway. Decorative cultural motifs carved on the rounded surface and rim of those large bronze drums that depict wooden boats and long feather birds described as of the LạcViệt 鵅越 (LuóYuè) people are similar to what appears on those bronze drums posssseed by the Zhuang nationality, called 'Nùng' in Vietnamese. The Zhuang minority is the largest ethnic group with the population of over 18 million people in China's southern Guangxi Autonomous Administrative Region, not counting those living in the northern mountainous areas of Vietnam. Uunlike the fate of the forgotten ones found underneath the Vietnam's soil, those large bronze drums are still being in use by the Zhuang people as culturally and ritually sacrifcial and ceremonial objects as they have been since ancient times well into the present time, which makes them to appear to be undoubtedly descendants of those original creators of those drums. In contrast to such a continuity observable in the Zhuang's culture, the self-claimed Yue descendants, namely, the Vietnamese, are completely ignorant of all those spiritual values and techincal know-hows.

The ignorance could probably have been due to ravaging wars that had wreaked havoc on the integrity of all aboriginal linkages. In the context that only physical bronze drums that were purportedly buried underneath layers of earth would survive the indiscriminate melt-down policy by the iron-handed Han rulers. Despite of the existence of bronze drum subculture in the Zhuang Autonomous region in China South at present time as evidences of the Yue culture that also had deep roots in the ancient Anamese land, hundreds of years of the Chinese rule was to blame for the cause of total extinction of the metallurgical technology mastered by the Yue people in making bronze drums. After the Han domination, momentum of Chinese immigrants moving to the new settlement in the south accelerated the overall effort of Chinese colonization of the ancient Annam.

For those culturally advanced bronze relics that were unearthed by local Vietnamese archaeologists, the Vietnamese claim the ownership for they belong to those "native Yue ancestors", or indigenous people who had inhabited there such as those in the northern area in Vietnam despite of the fact that the bronze age had existed long before the emergence of the ancient Annamese, that is, racial admixture of Yue and Han. In a sense, the concept of either "Annamese" or "Vietnamese" is to denote all indigenous entities, whose racial make-ups were then still in the process of becoming only after continuous arrivals of the Han colonists and their foot soldiers and 'Chinese' immigrants, which is similar to what makes "Sinitic" to convey the concept of "Chinese".

Any other claims similar to statements above made by several overzealously Vietnamese nationalist scholars are not incredulous with respect to their relevancy of inheritance in every aspect of the matter under examination should the readers still remember the case of their acclamation on those artifact findings excavated in the Indo-Chinese peninsula of today's Vietnams southern parts were created by the "Vietnamese ancestors", which turned out to be phon. No "Vietnamese ancestors" were known to have ever existed in those stretches of land that were only annexed to the entity of "Vietnam" as recently as in the late 18th century. Whatever cultural relics were found in those newly acquired territories used to be parts of the now extinct Champa and Khmer kingdoms. That is to say, they were created and belonged to the ancient Chamic and Khmer peoples, not the "Vietnamese ancestors". As lately as five centuries ago the borderline of nation of ĐạiViệt stopped at Vietnam's Thanhhoá Province today. The powerful Chamic neighbors to the south had indeed inhabited the same locality for more than 1,000 years under heirs of the same family monarchy. Only after the two kingdoms had been set in for the era of decline from the 13th century onward Annamese monarches started expanding their territories aggressively. As a matter of historical fact, it was only from that period the Kinh emigrants began moving en masse to have crossed far beyond today's Vietnam's Thuậnhoá Province, where the ancient Capital Huế was established in the early 19th century. By then Vietnam would have completed her expansion all the way reaching the southern tip of Càmau Province into the Gulf of Thailand.

Anthropologically, within the last six decades influx of archaeological finding lends support to the hypothesis that the Taic aboriginals, or ancestors of the ancient Yue people who evolved into today's Dai, Dong, Zhuang minorities, etc., in China South, had long been mixed with the nomadic people of Tibetan origin coming in from the southwest to have made up the "proto-Chinese" racial composition. Those early pre-Sinitic people scouted beyond the northwestern harsh infertile regions toward the fertile northeastern and southern regions for means of self subsistence in their quest for survival as lately as 4,000 years ago (see Shifan Peng, 1987). Note that terminologically the term Dai and Tai interchanges and are mixed in their usage, where early in the 1960 Taiwan's scholars used 臺 Tai (Ding Bangxin. Ibid. 1977. pp. 36-45) for 'Dai' (傣).

Over the span of time of some thousand years BP, in the face of aggressive advancement made by those Tartarian warriors on horsebacks came from the north, docile southerners of different Yue tribes (the BaiYue 百越) fled further to the southern region of China South and continued on southwards to the contemporary Indo-Chinese peninsula all the way to the southernmost tip of today's Vietnam's Cape Càmau, crossing Cambodia in the west to Thailand to the northeastern Myanmar (Burma) and the southeastern planks of the India's continent. The hypothetical Yue migratory movement could have been affiliated with ancestors of those identified as Austroasiatic people in a later time frame that fits into the Austroasiatic perspective on linguistic linkage that formed the Austroasiatic variant sub-linguistic families including those of Munda and Mon-Khmer and even Chamic of Austronesian languages. That would explain the cognateness of certain basic words among them, such as highly-proposed Khmer numbers 1-5 or Chamic demonstrative pronouns.

In the Indo-Chinese peninsula, historically, the Khmer and Chamic peoples founded the two most powerful ancient Khmer and Champa kingdoms ever in Southeast Asia. Note that, interestingly, the ancient Chamic people were also genetically identified with those aboriginals of the now called Li nationality currently living in today's China's Hainan Province island. Those Li people might have not ever suspected that their cousins across the sea in the southern land had built one of the most powerful kingdom ever in the region that lasted for more than 1,600 years from the 2nd century, which is recorded in Chinese history with different names including Linyi 林邑 and Zhanboguo 占婆國 or Champa Kingdom (192 A.D.–1832 A.D.) located in the present Central Vietnam.

So for whatever influence assumingly those Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer languages having exerted on Vietnamese, their original root long tucked under those aboriginal substrata would have presumably remained similar forms in different regional languages, and dialects in between, of which etymologically basic lexical remnants still appear uniformly on the linguistic superstrata across the vast multinational geography, such as the cases of 'cá' (fish) OC /*nga/ or 'mắt' (eye) OC /*mukw8/ that appear as 'Khmer /ka:-'/, or /*ka/ in Proto-Austro-Asiatic and 'mata' in Malay, an Austronesian language, respectively. So, it is doubtless that one could find quite significant numbers of Khmer or Chamic basic lexicons in the Vietnamese linguistic strata of which many are classed as of Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer family. Such fundamental etymological phenomenon, nevertheless, probably is merely an end result, rather than the causal origin, of boomerang effects of geographical contacts having come across isoglosses among aboriginals and later spread to new settlers with old lexicons that were re-packaged in new lexical shells. For example, names of those animals in the Chinese zodiac had been first borrowed by the pre-Qin-Han people and were later in turn adopted in Vietnamese under new forms, "tý" 子 zǐ (chuột) 'rat', "sửu" 丑 chǒu (trâu) 'buffallo', "dần" 寅 yín (cọp) [ = VS 'chằn' ] 'tiger', "mão" 卯 máo (mẹo) [ VS 'mèo'] 'cat', etc., as discussed previously (See An Chi, Rong chơi Miền Chữ nghĩa. 2016. Vol.1. pp. 80-86, 159-183).

Ethnically, on the one hand, it is of no surprise that while the Vietnam's population of the 21st century is comprised of official 54 minor nationalities, any person of Vietnam citizens could claim one's ancestry as of either one of those ethnic minorities, which is equally true for anyone with regrad to certain of historical and spatial factors. For example, native archaeologists born in Sahuỳnh locality – a stretch of land of Champa's territory occupied by the ancient Vietnam's Trần Dynasty since the 13th century – could proudly claim that unearthed cultural objects of Sahỳnh Civilization on location were created by their ancestors whether or not they were originally native indigenous. In a strict national sense, on the other hand, it is untruthful to say that creators of those cultural artifacts were truly ancestors of the Vietnamese people because the Kinh majority – as opposed to those ethnic minorities – happened to relocate near the location of the archaeological site anytime throughtout the length of nearly 900 years until now, given their southward migratory route from today's Thanhhoá Province.

The core matter as substantiated above pertains to only those Vietnamese nationals to be identified as of the Kinh ethnicity in the last census count – including those who find their own ancestral line in the family tree affiliated with the natives whose ancestors who were born and raised in locales where aforementioned archaeological artifacts were found – in a justifiable timeline relative to the complete annexation of land after the fall of the Champa Kingdom or Khmer Empire that any of Chamic or Khmer descents could so claim. The author was born in that Champa region in the central part of Vietnam, so were his parents; however, any cultural relics are excavated from there do not belong to long deceased native artisans. In any case, taking the age of such unearthed cultural relics being taken into account, the honor to claim as the great-grandchild of the original creators of such objects of course should not be credited to his ancestral paternal line whose descents were from China as recently as in the 19th century.

As a matter of fact, as previously emphasized several times, the Kinh people whose early ancestors made up the whole lots of majority have prominently come out of a bag containing mutated 'seedlings' {4Y6Z8H} from grafted Yue-Han branches of trees having Yue roots of Taic origin. Anthropologically the Chinese in Han Dynasty who were subjects of the ancient Chu and other Yue states invaded the ancient Annam and fused with the locals in the Red River Basin who in turn could trace their roots back from the China South region. For the last 900 years, as a matter of fact, the Vietnamese forefathers repeated the same migratory process made by earlier resettlers as they advanced further to the south. Based on the last journey of the Kinh majority – to the Càmau cape in the Indochina's peninsula – that were having the bearings {4Y6Z8H+CMK}; therefore, the true owners {CMK} of cultural artifacts excavated in those central and southern regions depend much on the time frame when found relics were actually made, so to speak.

Speaking of "roots" we are back to the square one where we started with genomes that reflect in our biological traits apparently through physical appearance and complexion. For untrained and naked eyes, only a few of Westerners could make out for certainty who are actually Vietnamese ones among a group of mixed Chinese and Vietnamese, for example, students of the second generation in an institution in the US. For the same analogy, under the etymological perspective set in the historical linguistic field, while Westeners could easily spot distinctions of between the Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer languages, hearing those Cantonese and Vietnamese speakers talk with their mother's tongue could not help an outsider make a good guess who is who, given the fact that the Vietnamese language is much more like a Sino-xenic language, i.e., a Yue-based language spoken with all existing Sinitic elements, than the Mon-Khmer one.

There is no secrets that Vietnamese shares its linguistic characteristics in its large stock of vocabulary items with those of Chinese than any other sources because they have left larger imprints in many linguistic marks evolved from either Chinese ancient forms or their dialectal variants. Why do their speeches appear so closely as such? Evidences show that they all are related biologically. In terms of genetic affiliation with neighboring people from China South, new DNA bio-technology would certainly help anthropologists discover more scientific genetic specimens about the Vietnamese people's biological composition formulated herein as {4Y6Z8H+CMK}.

As a matter of fact, genetically, on the DNA side, at present time there appear new scientific studies made available on the internet at our finger tips, for example, the quoted abstract from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9442802 cited in the textbox below is one among them.

From the first chapter the author has gone a great length to substantiate a hypothesis that today's Vietnamese Kinh racial stock come out of a mixed stock, so is their language as a result of the proto-Chinese moving in into China South from the southwest hundreds of years prior to the Western Han period (206 B.C.). After hundreds of years the new racially-mixed populace then continued to emigrate southward on a lager scale to today's Vietnam's northern region, and after that, part of land had been annexed to the Han's map. For the prehistoric evidences, archaeologically,

Abstract

The excavation of the Man Bac site (c. 3800–3500 years BP) in Ninh Binh Province, Northern Vietnam, yielded a large mortuary assemblage. A total of 31 inhumations were recovered during the 2004–2005 excavation. Multivariate comparisons using cranial and dental metrics demonstrated close affinities of the Man Bac people to later early Metal Age Dong Son Vietnamese and early and modern samples from southern China including the Neolithic to Western Han period samples from the Yangtze Basin. In contrast, large morphological gaps were found between the Man Bac people, except for a single individual, and the other earlier prehistoric Vietnamese samples represented by Hoabinhian and early Neolithic Bac Son and Da But cultural contexts. These findings suggest the initial appearance of immigrants in northern Vietnam, who were biologically related to pre- or early historic population stocks in northern or eastern peripheral areas, including Southern China. The Man Bac skeletons support the ‘two-layer’ hypothesis in discussions pertaining to the population history of Southeast Asia. (See Morphometric affinity of the late Neolithic human remains from Man Bac, Ninh Binh Province, Vietnam: key skeletons with which to debate the ‘two layer’ hypothesis, co-authored by Hirofumi MATSUMURA, Marc F. OXENHAM, Yukio DODO, Kate DOMETT, Nguyen Kim THUY, Nguyen Lan CUONG, Nguyen Kim DUNG, Damien HUFFER, Mariko YAMAGATA (2007) at http://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/ase/116/2/135/_pdf

The above findings fit well into not only theory of the formation of Vietnam's major Kinh populace, but also ethnology of the China South and Southeast Asia. Waves after waves of Chinese immigrants moved from nothern parts of China, including the Chinese of Altaic origin, i.e., northern Chinese, that might include the Hakka 客家 grous to the east, which had always been a continual southward movement that in turn had uprooted and dislodged the natives in the Manbac region of Ninhbinh Province.

The whole process could have taken place in any given period for the last past 3,800 years given the hypothesis that today's racial composition of the Vietnamese Kinh people is of a mixture of such displaced Chinese migrants from their native places in both China North and China South with the latter now regarded as being descents of the BaiYue 百越, or BáchViệt, collectively being known as the Yue 粵 (越, 鉞... in ancient Chinese records), including the Dai 傣 (V "Tày"), Zhuāng 莊 (or Bouxcueng people, Vietnamese "Nùng"), Tóng 垌, Shuǐ 水, Máonán 毛南 (Môn), Miáo 苗 (Mèo, Hmong), and many other southern ethnicities.

Recall that the ancestors of the Yue people were presumably decended from the Taic people (原始傣族) throughout a period prior to 3 millennia B.C, and, as the designated name suggested, they were not only the ancestors of the contemporary Dai (傣) people - ) – Yunnan, Guangxi, Thailand, Laos, Northern Vietnam,... ) – but also made up the populations of the states of the Zhou (周朝), the Chu (楚國), the pre-Qin-Han (先秦漢時期), and other ethnic stocks within the warring states as well as the Qin (秦) and the Western Han (西漢) whose descendants for generations later further mixed with the Yue people to have made up the Han populace and the later Chinese nationals, among them many native minorities are still living there nowadays (see Xu Liting, 1981). The Taic people, supposedly before the Yue and the Altaic Turk, had been the masters of those vast territories, embracing many of today's China's southern provinces, stretching from those pieces of land running along both sides of the banks of the Yangtze River going all the way from the west and east to the East China Sea and south to the provinces of Yunnan, Sichuan, Guangxi, Guizhou, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangdong, Fujian, and Jiangsu, including north Vietnam.

Populations of the former states during Eastern Zhou period (東周 770 B.C. – 221 B.C.) are postulated to be of racial mixture of the aforesaid Taic people with those earlier subjects from the Shang Dynasty (商朝 1600 B.C. – 1050 B.C.) and the Western Zhou period (西周 1046 B.C. – 771 B.C.) – which were hypothetically formed after the immersion of the Tibetan normads into the Xia Dynasty (夏朝), probably with the proto-Taic in the ancient pre-China – in addition to the people of the Qin State (秦國), the most powerful one among six other ancient states (778 B.C. – 222 B.C.) In the meanwhile, continuous wars with the Yin invaders (殷朝) and succeeding states deprived all other diversed paddy planting minor groups of the Yue in the southern bank of the Yangtze Basin of the means to cultivate their ancestral land. Ravaging wars among those warring states constantly pushed displaced refugees southward involuntarily to escape wars and hunger from the end of the Eastern Zhou period.

Regarding the Taic origin of the Chu people and their language, Terrien de Lacouperie (1887) in his The Languages of China Before the Chinese, his research on the languages spoken by the pre-Chinese races of China proper prior to the Chinese occupation, the author noted throughout his work (especially in pp. 19, 20, 23, 24), Philosopher Mencius (孟子 Mengzi, the 4th century B.C.) noted the differences of the shriek-tongued Chu language with the Qi (齊 of Shandong) one. In the chronicle of Zuozhuan (左傳) in 663 B.C., 2 words from the name of a Chu child named 'Tou-wutu' ('Thou' or 'nou' to mean 'suckling' and 'wutu' 'wutu' 於虎兔 'tiger') as such called by the act of a tigress that not only saved him from drowing but also suckled him, and he became subsequently Tze-wen, the chief minister of Chu. The story is popular one in Chinese legends. 'Tou-wutu' were the Taic-Shan vocabularies where 'suckle or suckling' is called dut in Siamese, and a 'tiger' is 'htso, tso, su'. For the same matter, to relate the 'Tou-wutu' to some forms in an original Yue language, such as Vietnamese, there already exists something very close like 'cọp đút', 'hùm đút', or 'hổ đút'. De Lacouperie noted that the ancient words were apparently decayed forms, though. The vocables are still in existence with Tchungkia dialects in Jiangxi (江西), of the ancient Chu proper. This Tchungkia dialect is a Taic-Shang speech that "to such an extent that Siamese-speaking travellers could without much difficulty understand it." The Erya (爾雅) dictionary contains one-fifh of the general stock with 928 regional loanwords, that could only be expressed in Chinese by the use of homonyms as phonetic exponents, that is, transribed words of the Taic-Chu language. We will return to remnants of the Taic-Chu linguistic elements later in this paper to prove that there first existed the Taic and the Yue and only then the Chinese.

Throughout the rise and the fall of the Qin Empire (221 B.C.-206 B.C.) that had conquered, unified, and established solid rule on all factions of previous states, many of the Yue natives who had stayed behind the frontline either had submissively immerged into the newly rising subjects of the unified empire. That is to say, populace of new entity – now called Qin, Chin, Chine, or Chinese – by then would have once again comprised of all other already racially-mixed people, as mentioned above, living within perimeters of those conquered states in the northeastern and southeastern propers that had approximately the size of the eastern half of today's China's territory.

Again, recall that in the contention for the short-lived Qin Empire after its collapse, the resurrected Chu State (楚國) was defeated again by its own crowned Viceroy of Hanzhong (漢中王) – Liu Bang (劉邦) and his subordinates, all of it subjects, i.e., of Taic-Yue origin, who later established the long-lasting Han Empire (大漢王朝) – the word 'Han' (漢) was derived from it. The point is the Chinese actually are known as the Han Chinese after 208 B.C., yet, they have been referred restropectively hundreds of years before the pre-Qin-Han era.

After the Han Empire conquered and annexed the NanYue Kingdom (南越王國) in 111 B.C., the colonization of Annam (安南), or 'Giaochau' (Jiaozhou Prefecture) went beyond the fall the Han Dynasty in 220 A.D. through successive Chinese dynasties until 939 A.D. The Sinicization process picked up speed on all of its new colony with the native Yue who were ancestors of the current inhabitants of the present China's Guangxi and Guangdong provinces, including people of Giaochỉ (交趾) prefect. The formation of the Middle Kingdom could be viewed as the birth of 'the United States of China', or the 'Chinese Union' for the same matter,

By now, you have certainly learned that after Annam was established as a prefecture of China and treated as that of Fujian and Guangdong provinces, which continued on until its independence in 939, officially known to the world as 'Vietnam' only from 1920 onward. The ancient Annamese entity evolved from the influx of immigrants from China South regions under the umbrella of the Middle Kingdom. Generally, newcomers to the Annamese land had intially been exhaustive long-march soldiers on endlessly conquering and pacifying missions, and then followed by émigrés, a great number of disgraced political exiles along with their accompanied family after having been mercilessly purged and punished by temperamental dynasties that they had served (Bo Yang. 1983-1993. Ibid.) (南) The majority of other new resettlers who followed the footsteps of the Han infantrymen were mixture of poor peasants fleeing from ravaging wars, hunger, and oppression back home in the Middle Kingdom and would unlikely return to their homeland again. As previously mentioned, the reason they chose to resettle in today's Vietnam's northern territory for good could stem from their intuitive love to migration. Most of the men married or were married into indigenous families of native wives (cf. similar cases of the Taiwanese in our modern time). Anyone who studies Chinese history all knows Chinese immigrants never return their old birth villages. The melting pot rationalization can also purport the claim that all Vietnamese carry Chinese surnames and, geographically, for the same reason, virtually most of the placenames where those earlier settlers and the Kinh had ever lived bear all the names of those places in China, for instance, Sơntây 山西 Shānxī, Hànội 河內 Hénèi, Hàđông 河東 Hédōng, Hànam 額南 Hénán, Thuậnhoá 順化 Shùnhuà, Quảngnam 廣南 Guăngnán, Tâyninh 西寧 Xīníng, Bìnhtân 平津 Píngjìn, Longan 隆安 Lóng'ān, Gianghĩa 嘉義 Jiāyì, etc.

Over the years and many generations later those early immigrants who either had long resettled there from regions further in the north or immigrated after the Han Chinese expansion to the south were totally assimilated into the highly Sinicized Annamese society, especially, with those southern Chinese such as Hakka (客家 Hẹ), Cantonese (廣東 Quảngđông), Hainanese (海南 Hảinam), Fukienese (福州 Phúckiến), and Tchiewchow (潮州 Triềuchâu). Their assimilation process might take place rather slowly but steadily, one generation at a time, each eventually having submerged into the melting pot of racially mixed people who were indentified as "the Kinh" ethnicity in official census. To be exact, they altogether make up the Vietnamese nationals along with some other 50 major ethnic groups, such as the Miao (苗 Hmong, or Mèo), Zhuang (壯 Nùng), Dai (傣 Tày), Tai Noir (黑傣 Tháiđen), Tai Blanc (白傣 Tháitrắng), Chamic (占婆 Chămpa), Khmer (高棉 Caomiên), etc.

Chinese immigrants brought to their new resettlement the Chinese culture along with their own dialects that injected fresh colloquial elements into the early Vietic language on top of the much more prestigious Mandarin lingua-franca spoken by ruling officials. The whole process gave rise to both Sinitic-Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese. There are works that analyze the transformation of Middle Chinese phonology into that of Sino-Vietnamese and reconstruct its possible sound system (Nguyễn Tài Cẩn, 1979), but it still lacks of a formal research on what and how both the official Mandarin and its vernacular thatpenetrated into ancient Annamese languages to have given rise to the development of their variantsin the Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabulary stock after a millennium of the Han domination. So said, the whole process shaped both semantic and phonological aspects of Sinitic-Vietnamese words of Chinese origin. For example, in modern Vietnamese, there currently exist dissyllabic forms and common expressions that are so peculiar that we could related them to early Mandarin, e.g.,

• 'bậnviệc' = 忙活 mánghuó (busy),
• 'bưngbít' = 蒙蔽 méngbì (hoodwink),
• 'mắcbịnh' = 犯病 fànbìng (get sick),
• 'ănmày' = 要飯 yàofàn (beggar), etc.

While the implication of those newly found etyma might give us some hints of how influentially ancient Chinese had effect on the Vietnamese language by the end of the Tang Dynasty (907 A.D.), etymologically, Sinitic-Vietnamese cognateness with those basic words that exist in the languages spoken by the Amoy (廈門 Xiàmén) and Cantonese speeches demonstrates the fact that they all might originally shared the aboriginal linguistic substrata that comprised of some vernacular elements of basic words, supposedly of the Taic stratum, for example, Amoy /bat7/ 'biết' (know), /kẽ/ 'con' (child), /suã/ 'soài' (mango), and Cant. /t'aj3/ for 'thấy' (see), /lei2/ 'lưỡi' (tongue), /o5/ 'ỉa' (poo), etc..

Besides, Vietnamese grammar shows clearly and above all that its outstanding local word order, probably of the aboriginal Yue language, a prominent and dominant grammatical feature of its is placing adjectives (the modifier) after nouns (the modified), for example, 'gàcồ' 雞公 (rooster). This peculiar characteristic of syntax, i.e., reverse word order, similar to those of the Zhuang (Nùng) and Dai (Tày), certainly inherited from the original Taic speech, of which the later Old Chinese grammatical forms still can be found in some southern Chinese dialects, e.g., Cantonese, Amoy, and Hai. /kaj1kong1/. For the speeches of the two latter linguistic groups, China's academic institutes officially classify them as Chinese dialects based on the existence of larger Sinitic vocabularies and other linguistic characteristics, such as grammar, tonality, vocabulary items, etc., mostly on par semantically and phonologically with those of Chinese. (門)

While Cantonese and Fukienese speakers inside their domains continued to be Sinicized increasingly under the heavy Sino-sphere throughout different Chinese dynasties from the ancient times until now, the Annamese people and their independent country, on the contrary, for the last 1,200 years, have gone their own way and created their own new identity by having been fortunately able to steer away destiny of becoming of another Chinese entity that fell on their ancient Fukienese or Cantonese neighbors who had been totally Sinicized northern rulers without realizing it. As a result, even though their share of similar historical development in ancient days, the Chinese language could not completely replace the basic core syntax in the Vietnamese language. That is why the Vietnamese language did not become a Chinese dialect despite of the fact the integration of 'northern Chinese diasporas', e.g., colonial officers and their accompanied combat arm, into the Annamese majority had been going on over a long period of time.

It is undoubtedly that the cultural factors, such as sharing the same Confucian values, have eased the integration of Chinese immigrants into the Annamese melting pot that readily accepts those new resettlers. In addition, linguistic similarity in their host country which even quickens paces of their assimilation into the new homeland. Failing to grasp the meaning of anthropological accelerative vehicle in the process on becoming a member of the Kinh majority by children of Chinese immigrants, we shall never be able to fully know the true nature of both the origin of the Vietnamese language and its speakers.

On the contrary, Chinese immigrants emigrated to many different Asian countries but the process of their adoption to the new country appears to be not the same because their acceptance much depends on generosity and tolerance of the host nation. We shall then see how they have been faring in terms of full assimilation into the host culture, language, and societal acceptance as compared to much more favorable conditions and treatments socially reserved for those linguistically distinctive Chinese speakers living in Vietnam. That is to say, we could hardly see a similar process in place anywhere in other countries where Austroasiatic or Austronesian languages are dominant. For example, one could poke into situations that those Chinese minorities, descendants of earlier immigrants of so many generations that have long passed, have endured discrimination in Malaysia, Indonesia, and even in Confucian society such as that of Japan and Korea.

As a matter of fact, statistics of the so-called overseas Chinese in those Southeast Asia's countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia showed that percentages of Chinese minority population are significantly higher than the 1% in Vietnam's census as of 2009. Such an odd but simple fact supports firmly the rationalization above about the complete assimilation of Chinese immigrants in Vietnam. Let us ask ourselves the question: "What has actually happened to so many of those earlier Chinese immigrants in Vietnam now that they simply disappeared in the census data?" The evident answer is that they have already become an integrated part of the Kinh populace.

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Of a much recent development in the 21st century, that a troubling trend that has led to both the growth and ethnical segregation of non-immigrant Chinese workers in Vietnam serves a strong reminder of familar things of the past. For the last 2 decades there has arisen a phenomenon of new contemporary Chinese resettlements that will accomodate those newly arrived, mostly poor laborers from remote villages in China who would likely overstay their work visas. Places like new 'Chinatowns' scattering throughout Vietnam rise up around those China's invested overseas economic zones nearby, many sites with 50-year or 90-year lease of mines, forests, and land. In the anti-China riots with burns and 26 deaths that spread simultaneously in hundreds of Chinese factories across Vietnam in mid May 2014 were speculated to be staged events being directed by China's agents to order to raise stakes and pave way for its aggressive action in Vietnam. That was a prelude similar to the Hoa ethnic expulsion events that led to the Sino-Vietnam border war in 1979. The locale of the integration of earlier Chinese immigrants followed after the event of the Qin's invading troops marching to the south. Then came the Han colonialists and their infantrymen, to be followed by waves of the new Chinese immigrants atttracted by Annam's fertile and luxuriant vegetation who were merged with their existing kinsmen into the Kinh majority in the ancient Vietnamese land. At the same time the new colonialists brought in Mandarin as lingua franca and it evolved hand in hand with the local speech, and eventually they all were mixed together to become a hybrid language as shown in the existence of the vast majority of both Sinitic-Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies in the language. History of the formation of the Vietnam's Kinh people is about the process of integration of the Chinese immigrants into the Vietnamese society, past and present. The theory is rather factual though, starting on stretches land in today's Vietnam's northern part where there had existed already racially mixed tribes of different branches of the ancient Yue. The same process repeated as the country expanded southward and it shows in the appearance of the people in each regions. The northern Vietnamese look much more like the southern Chinese than those earlier Annamese who resettled further in the south since the 13th century because they mixed with the indigenous inhabitants of much theorized Polynesian and Malay of the Austronesian stock, or the Mon-Khmer descents of the Austroasiatic stock.

Historically, annals of the China's Annam Prefecture had been meager and scanty. Chinese history might record rebellions had occurred or been suppressed in Annam, but nothing else about details of local uprisings and decisive battles that led to the independence of Annam (see Bo Yang, 1992-93, volumes 52 - 67). In the meanwhile, Annam lacks of its own historical records as a sovereignty prior to the 10th century; private chronological records of notable family's geneological trees in general virtually did not exist or were vague to be of any historical value. Any anthrologists who wish to study the origin of the Vietnamese must therefore dig into ancient Chinese records to find out, usually by chance when unexpectedly coming across citations revealed and utilized by other authors researching on different subjects. For example, some notable facts about local chronologies were dismissed as trivialities even though Annam was also the birthplace of many literary figures, etc., all never mentioned elsewhere. In fact, Annam had been a prosperous region during the Tang Dynasty as it saw off some of its best people to Chang'an to serve in the Tang's Imperial Court holding high official posts.

Linguistically, the Sino-Tibetan theory of the Vietnamese language is much more credible than those of Austroasiatic or Austronesian ones thanks to historical records that support the Sinitic hypothesis. Virtually almost any word could be traced down with its root. If Chinese philologists could reconstruct Old Chinese, they could do the same with both Ancient Vietic (AV) and Middle Vienamese (MV) because prior to the 10th century Vietnams history had been a part of China's. For example, An Chi (2016. Vol 1. pp 177-180) posited 'monkey' as 'vượn' <~ 申 shēn = 猿 yuán and 'khỉ' <~ 狐 hú = 猴 hóu, etc. Vietnam prior to the year 939 had been locales of the early Annamese people and, hence, their language, which could be seen in Sino-Tibetan etymologies as proofs (upcoming in Chapter 10) in addition to Sinitic-Vietnamese words of the Sintic origin, i.e., official and vernacular Mandarin as well as variant Chinese dialects.

Analogically, we can exaggerate a little bit more about the development of each linguistic entity that is parallel to historical events occurring in the contemporary Vietnam, but in much smaller scale, though, through the 3 following episodes. Firstly, that is when Annam became a colony of France in Indo-China from 1861 to 1954. The French colonization had produced a nouveau class of intelligentsia, including the last monarch of Vietnam, King Bao Dai, who could barely converse in their mother's tongue but French. Secondly, in term of racial mix, it was obervable that only within the short 10-year period from 1965 to 1975, the presence of the US soldiers on South Vietnam's soil having the population of less than 20 million people produced nearly 50 thousand Amerasians mothered by Vietnamese women, a ratio of 1/400. Thirdly, for the fact that the contemporary Vietnam had married off more than 150,000 Vietnamese women to Taiwanese husbands for over the last 30 years, let's ask those smart Vietnamese mathematicans, "How many have mixed race children been born into the intermarrital family in Taiwan so far given the near margin of 25 million population?" In the aggregate, "how many have racially-mixed Vietnamese come into the world throughout the 1000-year period of Chinese colonization?" An independent Taiwan will be another case of Vietnam in about 1,000 years later if it were pushed back in time in 939. The Taiwan's analogy is helpful to picture how the process of Sinicization of the ancient Annam with a very much smaller population having presumably started at 900,000 inhabitants as tallied in the earliest Han's statistics not long after 111 B.C. Keep in mind that while the ancient Annamese land had to accommodate a larger number of Chinese soldiers as parts the invading army, amounting to hundreds of thousands in numbers, having continuously advanced southward starting from the Qin and the Han dynasties thhroughout a time span of 1,000 years from the 2nd century B.C. onward. As the Chinese colonists established their strong foothold in Annam, other Chinese immigrants from the mainland just followed suit, similar to what happened to the Formosa island.

Anybody but a hardcore Vietnamese nationalist can easily take notices of such a rationalization without much ado about how the author has drawn the affirmation of the Chinese racial admixture with earlier Chinese resettlers in the ancient Annamese land. Origin of Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma could be postulated based on the same analogy. Similar cases happened elsewhere in the world as well. For example, the French people do not speak their ancestral Gaulois speech but all speak a Roman language of the Latin origin, the same as those of Italian or Portugese, and Bulgarian is a hybrid language with all the loanwords. Faraway from the Old European continent, we can still find in the Central and South America's countries the transformational and mutational, genetically and linguistically, similarities in the biological trait and linguistic composition, such as those of Spanish conquistadors and their composition with the indigenous people to give birth to the new populaion after less than 360 years of their colonization. That is, their conquer changed the racial make-up of the populace in a remarkable way as we see them today.

Specifically in the case of Vietnam, while most previous Chinese immigrants in ancient times successfully blended themselves into the Kinh majority, many of the more recent ones that have migrated to Vietnam later over the last four hundred years might remain ethnically Chinese if they so chose. They were largely from China's southern provinces of Guangxi, Guangdong (Canton), and Fujian (Amoy), who were categorized into several different groups, namely, of Chaozhou (Tchewchow), Cantonese, Hakka, Hainanese, and Fukienese origin. Notably, the larger batch of Chinese immigrants who arrived in Vietnam en masse especially after the fall of the Ming Dynasty in China were called the "Minhhương" (明鄉), that is, descendants of the Ming's subjects who had fled the Manchurian regime were resettled by the exclusively in the vast vacant land in the southernmost region of Vietnam thanks to their peculiar geo-historical circumstance; the Tchewchow comprised of majority of the recent latecomers from that batch, who, surprisingly were fully absorbed into Vietnamese society as shown in variances of their Chinese family surnames, e.g., Hoàng vs. Huỷnh (黃), Vũ vs. Võ (武), Hàn vs. Hàng (韓), Lưu vs. Lều (劉), etc. In other words, theirs represent virtually all Vietnamese last names of Chinese origin, the best proofs to show they are of a subset from a larger Chinese set inherited from so many generations ago. Just ask a Vietnamese how they bear Vietnamese versions of their Chinese last name, Tran vs. Chen (陳), Truong vs. Zhang (張), for example, chances are that three or four out of ten individuals will be still able to tell you their family genealogy. (See Appendix I)

Constant southward movement of Chinese immigrants changed the makeup of Kinh ethnicity in Vietnam eventually, so did the Vietnamese language with the penetration of vast Chinese vocabulary stock over time, one on top of the other, so to speak. The becoming of the Vietnamese language could also be the result of forceful imposition of the use of some form of Chinese as lingua franca on the local people during the Chinese rule of the then Annam as a prefecture of China. Inevitably, the Chinese influence steadily found its way into all arrays Vietnamese and left strong marks permanently on it so that words from basic linguistic stratum – distinguishable from the core indigenous remnants originated from the proto-Taic forms as pointed out earlier – to an upper overly scholarly vocabulary stock, all used by the Vietnamese widely in all walks of daily life up to the present time. As a result, if we block out all the possible vocabularies of Chinese origin from the modern Vietnamese, it is doubtful that anyone can ever make a complete sentence intelligibly; or at the very least, their speech would sound rigid like archaic Chinese style 'wenyanwen' 文言文 – classical writing Chinese – not to mention all grammatical function words (虛詞), including prepostions, all of them from Chinese.

The ancient Vietnam entered her statehood along with other successive state names, chronoilogically, called NamViệt, Annam, Giaochỉ, Giaochâu, ÐạicồViệt, ÐạiViệt, ÐạiNam, etc. Historical facts on the becoming of Vietnam and her people with their language are manifested and reinforced with more and more archaeological and pre-historical artifacts being unearthed along the path that her forefathers went through. Be reminded that in the old days transportation and communication among people in different places were extremely difficult. Characteristically, as said, its national development is similar to other nations anthropologically in other parts of the world, such as South America, South Africa, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.

To understand it better, let us return to the case of today's Taiwan again. After the imperial China's takeover of the island since the early 16th century from Holland, three hundred years later in 1949 the Kuomingdang rulers and their soldiers fleeing from the mainland of China established their exile government on the island. To considate their rule on the island, they asserted their dictatorship onto the island's indigenous people – just in thise case it was comparable to what had happened to the Muong minority in ancient Vietnam – who gradually became a minority group in their own ancestral land, among approximately 24 million souls living there as late as 2018. Imagine how enormous the influence this small island nation has endured as of today, racially and linguistically, such as new Chinese mainland's resettlers and forced use of Mandarin as national language. If we could even frame this picture back in time as mentioned above and map it into the scenario of Vietnam's historical settings in the 2nd century B.C. assuming that the then Taiwan having only 1/25 of its today's population – comparable to the Han census data of the population of Giaochỉ (交趾) at the time approprately about 900,00 people – had survived until the 21st century as an independent nation, it would have evolved into something very similar to what today's Vietnam has become with her people, and probably her speech, as well, given the communication limitation of that time.

All colonial factors accelerated the process of total Chinese assimilation in Annam even more rapidly in the course of its development with the country's "self-inflicted Sinicization" for more than 1,100 years after it became a sovereignty until now. The term "self-inflicted Sinicization" coined here is to implicate the fact that the ancient Annamese monarchs continued to voluntarily adapt the Chinese despotic model for their country, including the linguistic domain. That said, linguistic adoption was a necessity since the Vietnam had always used the Chinese writing system until the early 20th century. At the same time, besides other cultural tradition and custom, religious beliefs as dictated by Confucianism, Taoism, and even Buddhism, all notably shined and resonated in locally-grown religions such as Caodaism and Hoahaoism that blended national belief – worshipping one's own ancestral spirits – altogether with other religions coming via the China's routes in our contemporary era.

In an effort to build its own national writing system, in a later development as shown with the work "Phậtthuyết..." (Doctrine of Buddhism on...) since the 15th century, Annam's creation of Nôm characters (ChữNôm 𡨸喃, the Vietnamese sound of 字南 ZìNán) that imitated the Chinese ideographic block writing system with modifications to transcribe native and local sounds, such as indigenous strange placenames or Sinitic-Vietnamese variants of ancient Chinese words, pushed the Nôm literature up to another level as it flourished from the 16th century onward. By the end of the 19th century, however, after the French colonists took control of the country, "Quốcngữ", the new romanized national Vietnamese orthography created by Western missionaries gradually began to have replaced Chinese writing system both by the colonial government's decrees and national consensus. In modern Vietnamese orthorgraphy that transcribe the Vietnamese language, consequently, there have emerged 3 sets of Vietnamese vocabularies, the first one widely known as the HánViệt 漢越 HànYuè (Sino-Vietnamese – SV), second, the HánNôm 漢喃 HànNán (Sinitic-Vietnamese – VS) or Vietnamese lexicons of Chinese origin, third, native lexicons from older substra such as Daic, Chamic, including Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer and loanwords from all other sources. As one can expect, the first two Chinese origin sets occupy the majority of the Vietnamese vocabuary stock. To put it another way, if Vietnam were still a prefecture of China all along its history (remember to add 1,200 more years of Chinese rule to the Annamese land), Vietnamese would have been considered as a Sino-Tibetan language like Cantonese of Fukienese or any Chinese dialects nowadays as discussed previously with no question raised. That is to say, characteristically similar to those indispensable Latin and Greek elements in the English language, Sinitic elements in the Vietnamese language are the essence of modern Vietnamese, if not the whole language itself, as it is known as is, based on solid Sinitic data we can identify with certainty commonalities of archaic Chinese lingua and its derived equivalents existing in Vietnamese with a wide range of lexicons known as pre-Sino-Vietnamese (TiềnHánViệt) of the proto-Vietic speech. All in all, there exist hundreds of such earlier Old Chinese forms since ancient times which had, synchronically, found their way into the Vietnamese language in many avenues.

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B) Core matter of Vietnamese etymology

Cao Xuân Hạo (2001), a contemporary renown Vietnamese cultural and linguistic scholar, in his article "Tiếng Việt là Tiếng Mã Lai?" (Could Vietnamese be of Malay origin?), states that most of the Vietnamese words are considered original – "từ thuần Việt" – were actually not aboriginally pure. Per the author's view, in linguistics, there is no such thing called "pure". He emphasizes that it does not matter much to which origin should Vietnamese be classed, be it of Chinese, Thai, Mon-Khmer, or Austroasiatic cognates, the core matter of the debatably etymological issue remains the same as in some cited basic words cited by Cao, e.g., chim bird (of Mon-Khmer origin), vịt duck (of Thai origin), cá fish (of Austroasiatic origin), thỏ hare (of Chinese origin), they all are still considered "pure Vietnamese" (p. 90).

As suggested more than once, it is perceived that the story of the formation of a nation matters much more than that of the origin of her people and their ancestral speech in time and ground zero. Characteristically what counts in any language on earth is its wholeness, not a few of core basic words. What makes Vietnamese as it appears holistically in its current state carries more weight than status of its scores of basic words under the scrutiny of whether or not they are of Austroasiatic or Austronesian origin, of which the claim of the former is indecisively up in the air and the latter merely another supposition. After the discovery of Sino-Tibetan etyma in the Vietnamese basic lexical stock, readers will reclassify themselves which linguistic family Vietnamese should belong to (see Chapter 10 on Sino-Tibetan etymologies.)

Etymologically, Chinese words entered the Vietnamese language by means of borrowings from several Chinese dialects, especially those sub-dialects of Yue 粵 (Cantonese) and Minnan 閩南 (i.e., Fukienese, Tchiewchow, Hainanese, etc.) in addition to whatever common in the lexical stock they already shared, e.g., Fukienese /kẽ/ ~ VS 'con' (child), Tchiewchow /yẽo/ ~ VS 'dê' (goat), Hai. /bat7/ ~ V. 'biết' (know), etc. Dialectal variants of lexicons of the same root brought in and re-introduced into the Vietnamese vocabulary stock by immigrants coming from different areas of China South are recognized as 'doublets', which are commonplace in the Chinese language (as usual, Chinese is mentioned only as "Chinese" in this general context throughout to actually mean the overall Chinese "dialects" with the highest denominator that shares the same Sinitic etymology, be it a specific, explicit or implicit Chinese subdialect individually, mostly official Mandarin in a particular period. ) Such symnonymous phenomenon is to account for heavy Chinese dialectally vernacular linguistic influence in Vietnamese throughout different historical stages, including derived forms, e.g., 'cold' 寒 hán (SV hàn) vs. Hai. /kwa2/ to account for VS 'cóng' (freezing cold) while for the concept 'cold' with VS 'giá', 'rét', and 'lạnh' cognate to Chinese 淒 M qī, 冽 liè, or 冷 lěng, respectively, depending on preference by northern or southern speakers.

As you will see later, doublets with the same pronunciation might have been initially introduced in one form or another by some renown literati that could facilitate their usage. While some characters were retained some coloquial speeches, other forms from different dialectal sources could replace older forms with differentiated contexts in some later period as they relect in different appearances, e.g., 'cộ' (carriage) 車, 檋, 輂, 輁, 梮 jù. The total numbers of Chinese characters being tallied approximately 74,900 units while the Kangxi Dictionary collected about 50,000 items, many of them being words of the same sources, dialectally, and extinct doublets.

It is recognized that there had been a thrusting force that pushed the integration of many Old Chinese loanwords into the ancient Vietic language during its early stage until they emerged in more stable modern forms. On the one hand, it could be credited with the role of the mass, many being possibly illiterate, consisting of common people from all walks of life, such as sentries and village chiefs, market sellers and traders, artisans and laborers, and, especially, those native wives who were married – voluntarily or not, as in many cases they had been awarded or even decreed by respective Chinese emperors as noted in some historical records being quoted previously – to those stationed Han's soldiers or warriors of valor by officials of local authority. That is to explain why there were so many scholarly Sino-Vietnamese words in daily use by the common mass. Similarly, on the other hand, linguistically, the same fate fell onto those massive Middle Chinese loanwords from the Tang Dynasty, even though they were considered as of scholarly court's language known as Mandarin of the time that of which the vernacular speech was used in daily life one way or another just as they have been used in Cantonese; otherwise, the Middle Chinese words in the Sino-Vietnamese forms would never attain their popular usages in modern Vietnamese in such high frequency.

In our contemporary settings many people among us were witnessing reality shows where the Vietnamese women, mostly from the poor background, had been servicemaids to French colonialists or American soldiers in the recent past. The practice carries on to the 21st century that witness another class of Vietnamese women striving to get out of proverty married husbands in Singapore, Taiwan, China, and even to South Korea. To roll back in time their roles in affecting local vernacular language have been great that new dialects could eventually emerge for practical purposes, like ancient Annamese, "Taiwanese" was one of them. All happened for an economic reason. The author found that the way the Vietnamese speak contextually is similar to northern Mandarin as readers will see in some illustrations in this survey. Linguistically, similar to the circumstances experienced by both the contemporary Vietnamese brides and her husbands in Taiwan nowadays. Another way to explain the phenomenon is that, specifically, further back in both Qin's and Han's times at first native brides probably spoke some forms of 'pidginization' of Ancient Chinese in order to communicate with their "outlander" husbands. At the same time, unlike those foot soldiers within China South, those early long-march cavalrymen who came from the further China North (CN), based on their position of more prestigious status, they could have possibly contributed more new words of their own northern dialects into commune vocabularies while they might just pick up from the local speech one word at a time. In any cases, they all were also trying to fit themselves into new habitat as they were prepared to adapt in new environment, or even got ready to resettle there for good. Children who were born into family of priviledged class for being an element of the ruling class would likely be better educated and later, as grown-ups, partake in local governing body. Linguistically, their literary usages, having been derived from the mainstream Mandarin linguistic stock, went hand in hand with some form of vernacular lingua-franca perpetuated in the imperial court and formal correspondences. In only a few generations after that, many of them might fall into disgraced status – this penomenon has been very popular in both China and Vietnam – but some could still possibly pursue scholarship, playing the role of teachers, for example, and become one of the members of the Kinh people. It was they who had ever spoken the language of the mandarins or officials in the imperial courts throughout different dynasties. Such postulation explains partly the reason why there exist so many Middle Chinese scholarly words exist in modern Vietnamese spoken daily on any occasions, e.g., 'sínhlễ' 聘禮 pínglǐ (betroth), 'vuquy' 于歸 yúguī (bridal marrital ceremony), 'kínhtrọng' 敬重 jìngzhòng (respect), 'ẩmthực' 飲食 yǐnshí (food and drink) , etc., which are indispensable in the Vietnamese language. So those learned scholars spoke 'Annamese' at home that already mixed with a great number of early Sinitic-Vietnamese lexical items even older than Sino-Vietnamese from the Middle Chinese in addition to many newly-coined items made out of the Old Chinese materials, such as syllabic stems, roots, affixes, etc., e.g., VS 'chủxị' < VS chủtiệc' < SV 'chùtịch' < M zhǔxí < 主席 MC /tʂʊzjek/.

That linguistic localization process kept going has pushed further the speed of integration of more loanwords into the mainstream language. The process work with the same mechanism just like the easy adoption of new computerese and texting lingua in our modern times. Such phenomenon appear to be quite common in any languages, including those in the Indo-European linguistic family (so said since they were well researched and documented, e.g., Albanian, Haitian 'French', etc.)

Throughout its evolution, colloquial Annamese emerged with regional subdialects in the north, central and south, and their variants could also come from what they spoke blended seamlessly with aboriginal kernels and other Chinese dialectal elements, or not, for example,

• 'ăn' 唵 ăn vs. 'xơi' 食 shí or 吃 chī (eat),
• 'uống' 飲 yǐn vs. 'hớp' 喝 hè (drink),
• 'buồn' 悶 mèn vs. 'phiền' 煩 fán (sorrow),
• 'khoái' 快 kuài vs. 'vui' 娛 yú (joyful),
• 'lùn' 短 duăn vs. 'thấp' 低 dī (short),
• 'bảnh' 昺 bǐng vs. 'sáng' 亮 liàng (bright),
• 'mơi' 明 míng vs. 'mai' 明ㄦ mír (tomorrow),
• 'mới' 萌 méng vs. 'xịn' 新 xīn (new),
• 'cũ' 舊 jìu vs. 'cổ' 古 gǔ (ancient),
• 'heo' 亥 hài vs. 'lợn' 腞 dùn (pig),
• 'cọp' 虎 hǔ (SV hổ) vs. 'hùm' 甝 hán (tiger),

etc.

New Chinese loanwords and their variants with unique attributes as innovation into those dominant Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabularies. A similar process went on and improved to differentiate homonyms with tones and form polysyllabicity, mostly dissyllabic words, though, over the last 2,000 years or so and still continues doing so as of now.

In their matured stage, those localized loanwords that evolved under such circumstances eventually emerged as new elements in Vietnamese, both in impartable and separate forms as they appear at present time. Surprisingly, transformation of lexicons from any Chinese to Vietnamese as such must have been rather smooth in most of linguistic aspects and taken place in environments that required no or very little intervention from the intelligentsia who used to regard mispronounced or misused words used by the illiterate were unrefined and vulgar. For example, the dissyllabic form of the word "驚恐" jīngkǒng orignially mean "terrifying" or "kinhkhủng" in Vietnamese that gave rise to both "terrifying" and "terrific" with the first character "驚" to convey both meanings while 恐 only for "terrifying" of which now, a very recent development, 恐 as "khủng" has been in popular usage as stand-alone word to mean "terrific". For voth cases above associated with the meaning "terrifying" and "terrific" do not exist in modern Chinese usage, to say the least.

Prior to the 17th-century, literary works writen during that period still needs a lot of notations in modern language in order for today's students to appreciate clasic literature, lexically. They help explain the connotational discrepancy in word usages and the speed of modernization and changes in the Vietnamese language. That was the result of transitional linguistic changes underwent a great deal of phonological shifts and sound changes independent of colloquial speeches throughout the ages. At their initial stage, there might exist two sets of literary languages where one was in writing format such as classical Chinese (文言文), say, SV "Niên" for 年 nián and the other the local spoken language VS "Năm", of which the latter was yet to be recorded – like what happened to the modern Latinized Vietnamese orthography, e.g., "Việtnam" vs. "Ziệtnam" – until the emergence of the Nôm characters around the 12th century with local phonetic transcription or transliteration using extant Chinese characters, e.g., 𢆥.

With an additional 1,200 years longer than that of their Southern Yue cousins across Vietnam's border to the south after their homeland in the NanYue Kingdom ceased to exist in the ancient China South region in 111 B.C., a different evolutionary process occurred to those subdialects of Chinese Yue and Minnan dialects – also known as Cantonese and Fukienese – as their speakers were confined within the Sino-sphere. Under the heavy Sinicization pressure their speeches eventually succumbed into the Sinitic realm as a result. Both dialects are now classed as of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family. As their earlier forms of ancient Yue speeches weathered through numerous dynastic changes, many native forms had been gradually buried beneath layers of Chinese superstrata. Proofs for such undeniably fundamental layers in the bottom indigenous stratum still remain in the linguistic vestiges that their equivalents in Vietnamese still exist, e.g., 戶 hủ = "cửa" (door), 胡 hú = "cổ" (neck), etc.

The linguistic aspects of the development of the ancient Annamese language might be analogous to the corollary in relating great bronze drum culture of the Đôngsơn and Ngọclữ with the Phùngnguyên that the Yue entities had existed long before the Han-colonized Annam (111 BC–939 AD) ever came into existence. That is to say, the linguistic and cultural remnants that originated from Sahuỳnh, Ốc-Eo, and Khmer civilizations further in the south actually had already existed before the 12th century when all the Annamese entities just barely made it to the south. In other word, first there had existed the Taic-Yue, only them emerged the Taic-Han elements, i.e., 漢 Han = 楚國 (Chu State) + 秦國 (Qin State), that were later mixed again with the Yue etities to give birth to whatever known as "Annam".

On the aspect of progress and modernization, the force of phonological sound changes slowed down considerably and shifted gears into a more interactive mode as the country officially adapted the romanized Vietnamese writing system in the early 20th century, firstly imposed and decreed by the French colonial government. In so far as of our modern time, partly thanks to both the widespread of distributed information on the internet – including wireless technology such as smart phone communication in the 'WiFi' era – in addition to mass movement via fast and convenient transportation from one region to another, gaps of local accents and pronunciation discrepancies are being lessened and their frequency of discrepancy slowed down considerably.

As of today in terms of scientific and hi-tech terminologies many words came from both Japanese via Chinese medium that had their roots from French and, later, English. With currently rapid rate of new loanwords which keep coming in from such fields, not to mention new words that have been constantly created out of existing lexical stock, such as creative acronyms, abbreviations, and short forms designated to existing words, partly due to development in new wireless techonology such as texting messages being actively put in use by young people via smart phones and the likes. In short, new terms are being coined, one overlapping the other, yet, each still retaining some original linkage to corresponding forms of the same etymology. For example, young people write 'khủng' for 'kinhkhủng' (terrific), 'ko' in place of 'không' (no), "Hum ni là sn of e, dc gì hit." for "Hômnay là sinhnhật của em, đâucó gì hết.", introduction of letters of F, W, J, Z, to replace the consonantal clusters of ph-, qu-, gi-, d-, or 'Tiếq Việt' by Professor Bùi Hiền (2018), etc.,

Linguistic essentials are what makes up the whole body of a language, holistically; what sustantially counts are the most that exist in the language. In the case of Vietnamese, both Sino-Vietnamese and Sinitic-Vietnamese elements are the living soul and substance of its existence. As with other languages in the world, no classification of languages could solely rely on isolated cases such as scores of residues of basic words, especially in the case of crowning Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer on the head of the Vietnamese language just because scores of Mon-Khmer words that exist in Vietnamese. In short, we did not do so with the English language, e.g., excluding all Roman and Greek elements, neither should we do away with Sinitic ones in Vietnamese,

Importantly, it is imperative that prominent linguistic attributes should not be oversighted and newcomers into the field should not spend too much time in weather-beaten trails where only scores of basic Mon-Khmer Vietnamese cognates were already confirmed. They are insufficient to substantiate the Austroasiatic origin of Vietnamese because any historical linguistics needs to be sustained by history itself. Pre-historic Austroasiatic approach only leads to all world's languages were descended from one common source though. That old theory has taken the Vietnamese language out of the historical context, which shifted its wholeness out of balance, i.e., over 90 percent of Chinese linguistic elements -- about 400 fundamental items found having originated Sino-Tibetan etymologies (see Chapter 10) -- from on top of the 10% postulated Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer base, which is in contrast with the 'holistic' view the author is emphasizing here, that is, it is the wholeness that counts. On top all those issues, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists did not take into consideration of the fact that many of those fundamental words cited in the Austroasiatic cases are also found cross-cognate to either Chinese or Sino-Tibetan etymologies in the same basic realm – all is but filled with documented paper trails, so they werenot included in the percentage counts above – probably due to their ignorance of the history and culture of both China and Vietnam right from the beginning when they started to formulate the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis. Such crossover phenomenon of basic words in other Mon-Khmer languages that have been found in both Vietnamese and Chinese might be noticed by Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists but they only examined it under a scope of genetic affiliation.

On a parallel development with respect to the history and culture they neglected such as those intimate forms of addressing one's blood family's kins, e.g., parents, siblings, all genetic-affiliated relatives, etc., that mirrored the analogy of the logistics of how possibly bronze drum relics were found in the faraway Indonesian archipelago. NONE of similar bronze artifacts was even found on spot in previous regions of the ancient Khmer Kingdom. It is out of question on the assumption that they might have been transported by the sea route there as tributes by the late Chamic Muslims on their pilgrimage to the Indonesian Mecca because the time frame did not fit well into the early period of the Han invasion of ancient Annam; by then the Champa Kingdom was still deeply permeated by the ancient Hindu religion and culture. In other words, archaeologically, no bronze artifacts were found neither in the perimeters within the former territory that once belonged to the Champa Kingdom, as well, nor in a vast extending aboriginal habitat where their proto-Chamic genetically affilated Li minority (黎族) inhabited in China's Hainan island's southern Tongzha mountainous autonomous region. In terms of anthropology no cultural objects similar to bronze relics were found in connection with the three regions together, let alone written history that Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer as the aboriginal base in order to build a linguistic historical profile. For all the well-intended nationalism, zealous Vietnamese enthusiasts claim on other archaeological findings unearthed beneath the soil of southwestern Mon-Khmer locality as cultural heritage left behind by their forefathers anyway. Unfortunately, for a serious academic research they could not have both ways. The point to make here the Austroasitic Mon-Khmer is just another theory, or even only a hypthesis before 400 plus Sino-Tibetan etyma of the Vietnamese fundamental words cited in this survey.

On a similar rationalization, linguistically, a critical question hence can be raised on the matter of how several Mon-Khmer basic words had crept into the Vietnamese language by the end of the 12th century when the border of Vietnam stopped at Thanhhoá in today's Vietnam's northern central part. History points to the fact that not until the 13th century and thereafter, and only long after the new emergence of ĐạiViệt (大越), or 'the Great Viet', when it became a strong nation and its people advanced further towards the south, invaded and eradiacated the 1,600 year-old Champa Kingdom from the world's map, and, moreover, annexed nearly a third of territory to the east of former Khmer Kingdom. Historically speaking, for those etyma still unknown it is possible that should we keep on digging deeply into the past. That is how we substantiate the Vietnamese linguistic matters with written records, i.e., history. For example, history had it that the ancient Khmer Kingdom also lost its western flanks of their land to the Siam State, now known as the Kingdom of Thailand and it is the land of the Dai (傣) aboriginal . The Thai people are descendants of the Dai people, so to speak, who were, in turn, descended from the same Taic people who ruled the Chu State (楚國) in ancient China as their cognacy in basic words could be found in Erya (爾雅) dictionary (De Lacouperie. [1887] 1963.) So said, analytically, one can see etymological relations between those basic etyma of Thai and Vietnamese as long already recognized by Haudricourt in the early 20th century, such as 'gạo' ข้าว /kʰâːw/ (稻 dào 'rice') or 'gà' ไก่ /kài/ (雞 jī, 'chicken') (T). Apparently, those two Vietnamese and Thai cognates were dated back to the period before the hypothetical -Yue (傣越) linguistic family split into those of Dai (傣)(臺 Tai by Ding Bangxin. Ibid. 1977. pp. 36-45) and Yue (越) branches in the China South region. There evidently exists a Khmer gap in between, of which history of the Khmer Kingdom reinstated the fact that the penetration of Mon-Khmer basic words into Vietnamese in places where Mon-Khmer speeches appeared as isoglosses.

The Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists have treated non-Mon-Khmer basic words separately for those fundamenal items that were found not to be cognate to those of Austroasiatic languages. It naturally occurs to the Austroasiatic theorists that Vietnamese vocabularies must have had the Mon-Khmer origin, not the other way around. As a result, it is of no surprise to see that they threw a whole Austroasiatic blanket on the rest of other Vietnamese basic etyma, calling any Sinitic-Vietnamese words that do not match the Mon-Khmer stock being Chinese loanwords. If we, however, suppress the term "loanword" for those non-Mon-Khmer basic words, portions of their lexicons are not "borrowed" from Chinese, of which they show similar characteristics either of Cantonese and Fukienese dialects – which, as forementioned, are classed as of Sino-Tibetan languages by Chinese institutes – or of other Sino-Tibetan etymologies, and the latter two are not of Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer root at all (see next chapter on "Sino-Tibetan Etymologies").

An old wisdom dictates that the more advanced and powerful people most likely influence the weaker ones. It seems like an axiom in the face of medieval or savage rulers, as history showed, handled by iron-cladded hands, e.g., by the Han against the Vietnamese. For the linguistic development that was parallel to culturally annihilating policies such as the destruction and melt-down of all bronze drums by General Ma Yuan (馬援 Mã Viện) of the Han "conquistadors" since the early days of their domination. It is also safe to state the same that those aforementioned unverifiable basic words could have originated from the powerful Khmer Kingdom that had ever become so enormous such a power – lasting from the 9th to the 13th century so dominant in Southeast Asia as shown by their colossal stone citadels and palaces among which the initially prominent Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom palaces with their remaining ruins enough for the whole world to marvel at so far. Recently, as reported by the BBC London, the western technology had find out that there would be more walled cities of the ancient Khmer Kingdion to be discovered in the years come after they laser-scanned the Cambodia's tropical jungle and found some still stayed hidden deeply underneath dense layers of the rain forests. By that same period, nevertheless, the young Annam sState had just barely emerged from the long submergence in the Chinese sphere that everything was permeated with Chinese elements, culturally and even racially. It was postulated that in very late period that the Mon-Khmer isoglosses spread out and got in touch with the Middle Vietnamese when the ancient Annam had been still located in the upper north of 16th laditude.In fact, the ancient Vietnam still remained as a vassal state of their China long after her independence and easily succumbed to its power until these days.

In terms of lexical development, any etyma that could be traced back to their verifiable roots within the span of 1,000 to 1,500 years or so are likely loanwords from one another by contacts, especially among those neighboring languages. In the case of Vietnamese, the scale leaned on the Chinese side heavily for the same reason that Vietnam had been a prefecture of China. Geographically, prior to such long span of times the indigenous LạcViệt people had been located faraway up north around the Red River Basin while further in the south there existed a 1,000 year old Kingdom of Champa that had been sanwiched at all times in between the old Annam and ancient Khmer Kingdom. However, instead of elaborating on the racial mixture of people in the mainland of China, linguistically, to accomodate the cognateness of those Chinese and Vietnamese basic words, it appears that the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists came up with clever rationalization that Chinese and Vietnamese basic etyma have been a result of cultural causability, based on the fact that, culturally, for whatever China got Vietnam also has. That is to say, on the contrary, China, in a restrictive sense, does not have what is so peculiarly Vietnamese, for example, 'nướcmắm' (fish sauce) – to be exact, surprisingly, the staple originated from the Chamic culinary – which got an equivalent modern Chinese loan translation as 魚露 yúlù for which, syntactically, the transposition of each individual morphemic syllable matched 魚汁 yúzhī for which Fukienese, a Minnan dialect, gave rise to the English 'catsup', or 'ketchup', as previously mentioned. Note that in VS 'nước'mắm', respective syllable is in reverse of 鹹液 xiányè (SV 'hàmdịch', Cant. /ham2jik8/) for which the original etymon could have been an indication of another of anchovy as consumed by the people of Yue origin.

The Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists, therefore, could not but recognize the existence of not only Mon-Khmer but also Chinese in basic cognates as fundamental in forming modern Vietnamese. When facing with so overwhelming such an influx of Chinese words in Vietnamese, they stopped short of viewing Vietnamese as a mixed language. At the longest they lumped the rest of its approximately 98% vocabulary stock that is cognate to that of Chinese as loanwords. With the less than 2% they postulate that Vietnamese was formed from the Austroasiatic roots that form the re-classification of Vietnamese under a sub-linguistic family of the Mon-Khmer branch, not the other way around.

In reclassifying Vietnamese as of Mon-Khmer origin, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer misnomer seems to be a result of a matter of convenience, though. It is so termed with one another in order to account for basic words that are shared by Vietnamese and all other Muong dialects. As the name implies, Vietnamese has never incredibly been the origin or the sources that have diverted and evolved into other Mon-Khmer languages. It never occurred to them that, nevertheless, ancient Taic or Yue languages might be ancestral roots of all languages, probably including Chinese and Mon-Khmer languages as well, depending on how to look at each them, like Vietnamese. The author could only elaborate the latter one based on the essentials of linguistic peculiarities that dominate it, namely, all the Chinese elements in Vietnamese.

The problem stems from the fact that Austroasiatic specialists had no history to support their hypothesis but enumerated solely on linguistic mechanics to hustify scores of Mon-Khmer basic words, that could be regarded as etymological relics, spoken mostly by mountainous ethnic minorities who barely constributed only a fraction of DNA into the genes that made up the Kinh people, so did their language. To be exact, the Vietnamese have always been representative of the ancient Yue as they were also known as "the Yue of the South", i.e., "Vietnam", the last stronghold bastion of the ancient Yue. When we are talking about Vietnamese historical linguistics, naturally, we are talking about the ancient Yue language which they spoke are closely related to all ethnic languages spoken in today's China South, but not the Mon-Khmer ones in today's Indochinese peninsula. The Mon-Khmer can be included as a part of the Yue descents in China South if the Austroasiatic could prove that the Mon-Khmer had also emigrated from the China South to the current location in Indo-China hundreds of years prior to the emergence of the ancient Annamese and they were not from the southwest and northwest from the direction where the Munda isoglosses are indentified.

Etymologically, being par for the course, geographical and influential factors could normally bring in practical words from Vietnamese into Mon-Khmer languages in return, so to speak, the same way as those Mon-Khmer basic words did to Vietnamese. Each of those fundamental words in reality might be brought into the Vietnamese via the Muong whose closeness with the Vietnamese is doubtless genetically affiliated. The Muong groups, in return, were in contact with the Mon and Khmer speakers all along after the breakout of the Viet-Muong people when the Chinese-Han came into the picture. In other words, the existence of those Mon-Khmer words in Vietnamese is simply what has been naturally passed down from the Muong speech, a linguistic buffer between the Vietnamese and Mon-Khmer lexical entities.

Due to the author's lone voice in the presentation of this case, under a new viewpoint, though, it might not be as persuasive enough for not so being elaborate enough while the refined Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer hypothesis continued to be re-defined and upheld by those linguists who have just lately ventured into this field of research. Newcomers in the field tend to follow footsteps of veterans eagerly accepting their theories and normally start to expand their work from the same old premise and baseline as first paved by predecessors. For example, for the theory on tonality they would side with Haudricourt's theorization and argued that the ancient Annamese was originally toneless simply because it was a Mon-Khmer language, and it is only that Vietnamese has been dressed up with plenty of Chinese vocabularies with generous tones that mark up its vocabulary.

On the contrary, tonality must be something that occurs naturally in a language. We all can see that spoken languages could not happen artificially, such as adding linguistic attributes to make a toneless language to become a tonal one. The Vietnamese speakers loved to add tones to those early French loanwords which in the end made them intelligible to the French ears because that is the core of Vietnamese is a tonal language. Haudricourt's hypothesis on Vietnamese tone genesis, therefore, was not applicable in the Vietnamese language, i.e., per his hypothesis, the ancient Vietnamese became tonal in the 12th century af after long contact with the Chinese language. In its primitive stage, actually any human languages must have started as a toneles one. That is not our point, though. For our Sinitic theorization, it is probably that, on the contrary, the proto-Yue or early Taic languages might have intonated the proto-C pitches into 4 tones, say, 恐龍 kǒnglóng (SV khủnglong) for **/klong/ (dinosaur); the phenomenon of dissyllabicization of the complex consonantal initial **kl- helps explain their similarities.

We see that tones did not accompany Chinese loanwords in unrelated non-tonal languages and they would not develop tonality at all. The best examples are those toneless Chinese loanwords borrowed into the Japanese and Korean languages. All Chinese loanwords in both languages were stripped off of the embedded tones. Histrorically, during the Tang Dynasty (618-907) Japan and Korea borrowed systematically a substantial amount of Chinese lexicons and, as intelligent as there are, best of all, they learnt how to extract sound phonemes from the Chinese ideographs to make up their national alphabets, a revolutionary breakthrough from Sino-mindset; however, at the same time they could not simultaneously accommodate both the tones and semantics to differentiate marginally nearby sounds of concept due to the inhibition of intrinsic structure of their languages. They still stubbornly insist on pronounce Chinese loanwords without the morphemically-accompanied tone anyway. For example, to the Korean's ears, both 防火 fánghuǒ (prevent fire) and 放火 fànghuǒ (set fire) may sound the same as /banghwa/. Contrarily, speakers of modern standard Vietnamese still distinguish 'phònghoả' and 'phónghoả' being 2 completely opposite concepts, respectively. In other words, each and every word of Vietnamese vocabulary are morphemized with one or more of 8 Middle Chinese tones.

Ironically, for the same matter, the modern Putonghua, based on Mandarin, said to have been directly descended from the ancient MC, now retains only 4 tones. That is to say, the historical northern Chinese themselves – such as of Manchurian or other Altaic origin – could not even keep up with traditionally original tonal schemes of Middle Chinese meticulously with 4 tones in 2 registers (sometimes altogether referred to as 8 tones in total) let alone those speakers of a Mon-Khmer language who may even be unable to differentiate subtle contrasts between registers. Just observe a Westerner learn Chinese trying to differentiate 4 Mandarin tones in simple words such as ma1, ma2, ma3, and ma4. The Austroasiatic theorists, therefore, fell into their own trap for their diminutive understanding of powerful impacts of both Vietnamese and Chinese history on the Vietnamese language in their hypothesis grouping the 'aboriginal V' into those Mon-Khmer speaking groups.

Having so said, academically, the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer road is certainly not the only way to go for the reason that there exists only a scanty portion of basic words that exist insignificantly in the Vietnamese vocabulary stock even though they are disputably shared by those of the Mon-Khmer languages. For those insignificant cognates, they are found to have Chinese origin, as well, e.g., 'chồmhỗm' (squat) /chromom/ vs 犬坐 quánzuò, 'chòhõ' ( Stand at ease streching out one's legs apart) /choho/ (đứngchànghãng) vs. 伸站 shēnzhàn, etc.

Approaches on the Vietnamese etymology in fact could be done differently, among other things, with a new methodology and perspective based on, firstly, a great number of Sino-Tibetan basic vocabularies, over fundamental 420 items by last count, which demonstrate their common roots as illustrated in Shafer's Sino-Tibetan breakthrough colossal work (1972) as we shall examine in detail later, and secondly, yet importantly, new evidences of cognateness in Chinese and Vietnamese etyma along with undeniable matches virtually in every single linguistic category.

From the beginning I also believed in the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theory which used to be my conviction (see Bình Nguyên Lộc. 1972) before I started to work on this research. The underlining reason for that was simply its followers always outnumber their Sino-Tibetan opponents and I do not know Mon-Khmer, which have long become rigidly sticky from the time they first came out. Nevertheless, later on in the course of my own expedition in Vietnamese historical linguistics I made a sharp turn to the much older Sino-Tibetan school at the sight of Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer specialists taking the umbrella approach indiscriminately in drawing their own conclusion solely based on the shared portion of Mon-Khmer basic words in the Muong subdialects, so they rationalized that the same ought to be applied to that of Vietnamese, which covers all issues with discrepancies with those Mon-Khmer basic words as frequently cited by old-timers, including the Khmer numbers 1 to 5.

If that is the case, how did the comparative wordlist start in the first place? It is known that while they were doing linguistic surveys, Western-schooled Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer linguists were not shy to explicitly state that their work did rely much on data provided by local informants on their fieldtrips or, to be exact, interpreters who might have not understood correctly what linguistics is, let alone being well versed in its comparative and historical fields. Not long after I started doing some comparative analysis of the basic words in the new Sino-Tibetan listings compiled by Shafer (1972) with those Old Chinese sound values as reconstructed in Chinese historical phonological linguistics by Karlgren, Schuessler, Wang Li, Zhou Fagao, etc. While their monumental works shed new light on the Old Chinese phonological insight, what I found was the Sinitic-Vietnamese fundamental words also had a lot of commonality to share with the Sino-Tibetan much more than those of Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer.

Over the years I have intuitively collected from both Chinese classics and modern Chinese media words that will prove that some forms of classical Chinese and vernacular Mandarin have long permeated deeply in Vietnamese. Interestingly, in modern Vietnamese, there exist certain lexical usage and Chinese expressions that they are incomparable in those subdialects of Cantonese and Minnan dialects. For example, for the concept "sleep", it is /fajng1kao1/ Cantonese and /k'waj5majk8/ in Hainanese, the Vietnamese say "ngủ", that is an cognate of 臥 wò (SV ngoạ) in Chinese.

Besides, the Sinitic-Vietnamese etyma as follows prove the close knit of the Vietnamese daily language with Chinese vernacular forms that are independent of the written ones that were once spoken in the Annamese land and later evolved into what makes up the wholeness of Vietnamese today.

• 何故 hégù (how come) VS 'cớsao',
• 為啥 wèisha? (why?) VS 'vìsao?',
• 誣賴 wúlài (blame on) VS 'đỗlỗi',
• 賴他 lài tā (because of him) VS 'tại nó',

or


• 幹活 gànhuó (work) VS 'làmviệc',
• 忙活 mánghuó (busy) VS 'bậnviệc',
• 生活 shēnghuó (life) VS 'cuộcsống',
• 勤勞 qínláo (diligent) VS 'làmsiêng',
• 勞動 láodòng (labor) VS ;làmlung',
• 再來 zàilái (do it again) VS 'làmlại',
• 上來 shànglái (come up here) VS 'lênđây',
• 離近 líjìn (come closer) VS 'lạigần',
• 離開 líkāi (leave) VS 'rờikhỏi',

etc.

The cited samples above are parts of new discoveries prepared by the author. They could be considered as a breakthrough long overdue in Vietnamese historical linguistics that no linguists in the Austroasiatic camp that a few Austroasiatic theorists had tabulated have capacity to come up with. Recall that Austroasiatic specialists have been so fond of exaggerating the fundamentality of their basic words that only a few had tabulated in the past with the help of local 'tour guides' from some Mon-Khmer minority speech pockets in their field trips funded by some summer institutes.

While the linguistic world does not accept the Sino-Tibetan theory of Vietnamese, Austroasiatic theorists have effectively held the Vietnamese language hostage in the Mon-Khmer confinement for so long that they have seriously hindered further the study of Vietnamese etymology for several decades without any notable advancement. As a result, a journeyman who want to venture in this linguistic field could solely rely on academic courses at collegiate institutes and then imitate their predecessors, e.g., to go out on fieldtrips with a local guide doing surveys and asking questions here and there and so on so forth. Their antique approaches will only promulgate misleading information as having been doing over the last 60 years to the effect that they digged deeper trenches but have found nothing new. Their works simply widened the gap that other linguists hesitate to surpass.

In actuality, for the same reason used in rebutting opposing views, anyone could fall on similar fallacy due to the lack of expertise in different fields including languages, for instance, illiteracy in related languages such as Chinese dialects and Mon-Khmer isoglosses. In fact, researching any etymology requires not only intelligently making use of resources but also involves a great deal of mental work and intellectual energy that are much demanding than techical skills knowing how to manipulate mechanical tools, devise creative applications of linguistic rules, or tabulate vocabulary correspondence lists in order to justify legitimacy, but only fractional, of a sharing pool of a few of basic words that are so familar tio us all these years. How many Mon-Khmer words that one can find are cognate to those Vietnamese fundamental ones among more than 20,000 Sinitic-Vietnamese items in daily active use? Do those Mon-Khmer cognates constitute the intelligible language as a whole? It is noted that Vietnamese speakers can still articulate and communicate effectively without those similar basic words.

In practicality no one could be fully competent in all relevant linguistic subjects, let alone mastering all related languages, say, Thai, Zhuang, Mon, Khmer, Mandarin, Cantonese, Hainanese, Fukennese, Vietnamese, etc.. Students can pass collegiate tests on historical and comparative linguistics depending on their aptitude in accumulative acquisition and cognitive judgement in linguistic realm, plus sharp eyes and ears and quick wits. That said, given acceptance of works done by veterans in the field as well as one's own training, specialists working in each particular field, yet, could be able to reach a satisfactory conclusion based solely on their own analysis and observation, not specific knowledge in the field. Those who made a false start would end up creating another other fallacy and possibly pass on misinformation unless someone who is a well-informed expert who could manage to avoid stumbling on and fall into the same pot-holes.

To introduce new students the Sinitic-Vietnamese etymology, a novel approach put forth in this research could teach them a thing or two about the methodology that could trace roots of numerous Vietnamese etyma that match with those etymologies in both the Sino-Tibetan and Sinitic sphere which in turn are on par with those of dialectal speeches in the Chinese realm. My work is guaranteed to be original, which might not be discussed anywhere else before this draft of paper first appeared some 16 years ago in the web format on the internet. Since then my work has been quoted here and there as supporting argumentation and more authentic voices in the field have raised and carried heavier weight.

Sentimentally, work on comparative historical linguistics could be much more demanding beyond interesting findings thanks to one's keen 'linguistic receptors', i.e., quick wits. However, one would find their personal sensibility surpassing the realm of instinct and senses towards the target languages, which involves collective identity such as where and which culture they live in and what the mother tongue they speak. As previously mentioned, nationalism would normally override individual self-identification. For instance, third or fourth generation children of Chinese immigrants in Vietnam would consider themselves Vietnamese even though some are still nostalgic but they will be ready to fight against any invaders from China, similar to the national spirit Taiwanese or Singaporeans of Chinese origin behold. That is, those who were born in locality consider themselves as citizens of the respective republic. The latter national factors may cloud one's judgment over the academic issues.

Be reminded again that the purpose of this research is, however, neither to positively prove the Sino-Tibetan origin of Vietnamese genetically nor to bluntly denounce the cognateness of Mon-Khmer basic words in Vietnamese but only to present a new methodology throwing in new data to assist in affirming roots of thousands of Vietnamese words from Chinese. For the same purpose those newly conceptual tools to be introduced can be used to re-evaluate most of common words that have been previously posited by other forerunning linguists in the field in both camps whether or not they are of Chinese or Mon-Khmer origin.

The prominent commonality is undeniable in all lexical aspects of each and every word for their shared etyma in basic vocabulary stock, which all has been cleverly captured by the Austroasiatic theorists for their etymological overlap with Mon-Khmer basic stock but they do not cover all the following basic examples such nạ 娘 niáng 'mother', bố 父 fù 'father', mẹ 母 mǔ, xơi 食 shí 'eat', ăn 唵 ăn 'eat', uống 飲 yǐn, ngủ 臥 wò 'sleep', mắt 目 mù 'eye', đầu 頭 tóu 'head', sọ 首 shǒu 'cranium', ngực 臆 yì 'chest', phổi 肺 fèi 'lung', bụng 腹 fù 'stomach', gạo 稻 dào 'rice', chim 禽 qín 'bird', cá 魚 yú 'fish', lửa 火 huǒ 'fire', lá 葉 yè 'leaf', nhà 家 jiā 'home', lợn 豚 tún 'pig', săn 田 tián 'hunt', and so on so forth.

Expectedly, those Vietnamese linguists in the Mon-Khmer camp will raise their eyebrows and come to the defense on all fronts.

As you will see in this research we can tally all the Mon-Khmer cited basic vocabulary up to more than 170 items. Naturally, it is controversial for this research to rectify such a long old reckoned connection for Vietnamese words proved to have Chinese origin. If they fall into the fundamental category – usually identified at approximately 200 items as universally recognized in the linguistic world and the consensus is that they should not be considered as loanwords but only cognates, that is, etyma evolved from the same roots – could Vietnamese then be classed as of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family? Wasn't it that the way the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists had previously done based on cognateness of scores of basic words?

In terms of cross linguistic sub-family, the two major dialects of Chinese languages, namely, Cantonese and Minnan groups, are classified into that of the Sinitic division of the Sino-Tibetan family. Interestingly, such classification is weighed mainly on their share of common Sinitic stock rather than for basic words, etymologically and syntactically. The same conclusion can be drawn for the Vietnamese language for the same reason then because of most of the same characteristics that apply. In any cases, they all affirmatively were Yue descendants of the same family in the Taic-Yue lineage with Sino-Tibetan crossover. Postulation of the Taic-Yue and Sino-Tibetan affiliation is possible given highly plausible theories about the proto-Taic elements and the pre-Sinitic forms that they all share when they had been in contact some time prior to the Zhou Dynasty from 1122 B.C. to 256 B.C..

Despite of their common etymologies proved to have shown up across all Sino-Tibetan linguistic isoglosses (Shafer, 1972); however, there is no need to rush to classifify Vietnamese as a Sinitic language in the same division even though that should be the case. As the Sino-Tibetan etymologies show, their basic lexicons are plausibly cognate. Besides, those Sinitic-Vietnamese words are also embedded in their core with most of identical linguistic attributes and traits, including those subtle and unique characteristics that should exist in closely kin languages.

Below are some of their striking linguistic similarities – many more examples and elaborations will follow later as we come along and possibly some may be repeated just to emphasize or illustrate a point:

Figure 7.6 – Core matter of Vietnamese etymology

1. The tonal system:
   
   The Vietnamese language with an 8 tone system – seen by many as 6 tones based on the visual look of modern orthography without regard to two "entering tones", or "thanhnhập" 入聲 rùshēng – that matches perfectly into the Middle Chinese tonal scheme of four two-registered tones, where one can not only easily map them into those of modern Cantonese and Minnan dialectal systems but also use them to chant Tang's poems and their poetic rhythm, all fits perfectly into strict Tang's poetic rules that regulate both melodic tonality and rhyming syllabic finals. (Xu Liting. 1982, p.219)
   
   It is also noted that Mandarin only retains 4 tones nowadays, yet, interestingly, its registered tonal values and pitches are almost fairly squared equally for homonyms in Vietnamese – so are those in other Chinese dialects, especially Minnan and Yue, both containing variably somewhere from 7 to 10 tones – plus 6 additional other tonal equivalents in Cantonese, that is, 'ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4, ma5, ma6, mak7, mak8, mak' as compared with Vietnamese 'ma, mà, mả, mã, má, mạ, mác (mát, máp), mạc (mạt, mạp), mac (mat, map), etc. Interestingly enough, besides, similar tonal values, for instance, M 'mā, má, mă, mà' compared with Vietnamese 'ma, mả, mà, má', can also be loosely applied to those vocabularies in several other minority languages spoken by the Zhuang, Dai, Miao, etc., nationalities in those provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, Guangxi, Hunan, Guangdong, Fujian, etc., in China South. In this case, each respective tone in the tonal system carry almost the same sound value as that of the equivalent that distributes throughout many Chinese dialects. The phenomenon appears to be inherent, that suggests they ought to belong to the same language family. Again, not that all those tonal features are totally lacking in other Mon-Khmer languages, to be exact, of which their intonation is somewhat equivalent to the Vietnamese 2 tones, namely, /ma/ and /mà/.


2. Main sentence structure:
   
   Basic structure appears in model {Subject+Verb+Object} (SVO), as well as its variance, in both languages,
   
   我愛小燕. Wǒ ài Xiăoyàn. "Tôi yêu Tiểu-Yến." (literally, "I love Xiaoyan."),
   
   not excluding other exceptional reverse patterns such as O+S+V in modern Putonghua, e.g.,
   
   飯我吃了. Fàn wǒ chī le. "Cơm, tôi ăn rồi'". (literally, "Meal, I already ate"),
   
   這本書我看了. Zhè běnshū wǒ kàn le. "Quyểnsách nầy tôi xem rồi.' (literally, "This book I have already read."),
   
   把水果帶過來請客. Bă shuǐguǒ dāi guòlái qǐngkè. "Mang tráicây đem quađây mời khách." (literally, "Bring the fruits over here to treat our guests."),
   
   or that of dual subject SS+V+O, e.g.,
   
   小燕她愛我. Xiăoyàn tā ài wǒ. "Tiểu-Yến nó yêu tôi." (literally, "Xiaoyan she loves me").
   
   Note that in the last sentence, except for cases of direct and indrect objects, they both do not have dual S+V+OO in similar contextual structure where the OO are "Tiểu-Yến nó". At the same time it is possible to omit either subject or object when either one is implicitly understood in a sentence. Linguists know that best as of how important this linguistic structure is when looking for commonalities in languages in the same family.


3. "Isolate" construction:
   
   Both Chinese and Vietnamese do not have words with inflectional affixes to play the role of grammatical functions or syntactic word order like those of Indo-European languages but fixed words to form stative, copulative, submissive, active transitive, and qualificative constructions, e.g., 'không' 不 bù (for negation), 'có' 有 yǒu (there is), 'là' (thì, SV thị) 是 shì (to be), 'bị' 被 bèi (passive and active voices in Chinese, yet in Vietnamese passive voice only), 'đượ'c 得 dé (Vietnamese active voice), and adjective-verbal actant (such as 'nó thôngminh' 她聰明 tā cōngmíng ('she' + 'intelligent'), etc., and interrogative sentences are constructed by simply adding 'cóphải' 是否 shìfǒu or 'cóphảilà' 是不是 shìbùshì ('Do..?', 'Is that...?', etc.) in the beginning of sentence, or 'không' 不 bù (否 fǒu) ('...is'nt it?', '... doesn't it?', '...dont' you?', etc.) to the end of the interrogative sentence.
   
   At the same time it appears that the elements of morphemic syllables that are used for word building, structurally, sometimes could take over the role of affixes, e.g., 'hoa(nhỏ)' 花兒 huār (flower), 'mai(nầy)' 明兒 mínr (tomorrow), 'họcgiả' 學者 xuézhě (scholar), 'tácgiả' 作者 zuòzhě (author), 'vôlễ' 無禮 wúlǐ (impolite), 'vôhiệu' 無效 wúxiào (ineffective), 'phithường' 非常 fēicháng 'phichínhnghĩa' 非正義 fēizhèngyì (injustice), etc. In other words, all these morphemic forms are about the same in both languages because, partly, Vietnamese simply borrows the whole Chinese allomorphic sets and at the same time uses its lexical material to build the same polysyllabic words of identical characteristic connotation, for instance, 'casĩ' (singer) 歌手 gēshǒu \ @ 手 shǒu ~ 'sĩ' 士 shì, 'hoạsĩ' (painter) 畫家 huàjiā \ 家 jiā ~ 'sĩ' 士 shì, 'nhàthơ' (poet) 詩人 shīrén \ @ 人 rén ~ 'nhà' 家 jiā (gia), etc.


4. Syllabic structure:
   
   Basic lexical building block is constructed with the pattern [initial + middle + final], mostly with the pattern of CVC (consonant+vowel+consonant), characterized by dominant consonant-initialed leading words (that is, smaller numbers of vowel-initialed words), all sharing simple consonants without clusters, e.g., Chinese /k/, ch /c/, t /t/, tr /ʈ/, n /n/, ng /ŋ/, nh /ɲ/, etc., rounded and glided middles like -w-, -j-, such as x+o+ang [swaːŋ˧˧] vs. q+i+ang 腔 MC /hɑŋ⁵⁵/, h+ư+ơng [hɨəŋ˧˧] vs. x+i+ang M /ɕi̯ɑŋ⁵⁵/ 香 MC /hœːŋ⁵⁵/.
   
   t Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabularies are doubless mostly close the Middle Chinese in all aspects, especially finals with endings evolved from Old Chinese to MC /-wng/ [-əwŋ˧˧], /-wk/ [-ʊk̚⁵/] such as 'thống' [tʰəwŋ˧˥] MC /thowng5/ 痛 vs. M tòng /t'ong4/ [/tʊŋ⁵⁵/] (pain), 'đông' [ɗəwŋ˧˧] MC /downg1/ vs. 東 M dōng /tong1/ (east), 'cốc' [kəwk˧˥] MC /kowk7/ [/kʊk̚⁵/] 榖 gǔ (cereal), 'tốc' [təwk˧˥] MC /towk7/ [/ʦʰʊk̚⁵/] 速 vs. M sù /su4/ (fast), etc.


5. Basic vocabulary stock:
   
   This prominent commonality is undeniable in all lexical aspects of each and every word for their shared etyma in basic vocabulary stock, for examples, 'nạ' 娘 niáng (mother), 'tía' 爹 diè (dad), 'bố' 父 fù (father), 'xơi' 食 shí (have (meal)), 'ăn' 唵 ăn (eat), 'ngủ' 臥 wò (sleep), 'xem' 瞧 qiáo (look), 'mắt' 目 mù (eye), 'đầu' 頭 tóu (head), 'ngực' 臆 yì (chest), phổi 肺 fèi (lung), 'gạo' 稻 dào (rice), 'cá' 魚 yú (fish), lửa 火 huǒ (fire), 'lá' 葉 yè (leaf), 'nhà' 家 jiā (home), 'lợn' 豚 tún (pig), 'trồng' 種 zhòng (cultivate), 'săn' 田 tián (hunt), and so on so forth.


6. Shares of dialectal origin:
   
   'đúngrồi' 中了 zhòngle (correct), 'đượcrồi' 得了 déle ('That's okay!'), 'luônluôn' 老老 (牢牢) láoláo (always), 'ngàymai' 明ㄦ mínr (tomorrow), 'nóichuyện' 聊天 liáotan (talk), 'ngầu' 牛 níu (hefty), 'đánhcá' 打魚 dăyú (net fishing), 'gàcồ' ~ 'gàtrống' 雞公 jīgōng (rooster), (Hainanese, Fukienese), 'gàmái' 雞母 jīmǔ (hen) (Hai., Fukienese), mắtkiếng 目鏡 mùjìng 'eye-glasses' (Hai.), 'biết' /bat1/ 'know' (Hai., Fukienese), soài 檨 shē (soa) 'mango' (Fukienese /suã/ ), con 囝 Fukien (Fuzhou) [/kiaŋ/, /kiã/, /kẽ/] ('son', 'child'), 'chạy' 走 (Cant.) /zau2/ (run), 'xơi' 食 shí /ʂʐ̩³⁵/, uống 飲 (Cant.) /jam3/ (drink), etc.



7. dissyllabicity or dissyllabics:
   
   Majority of vocabularies consists of mostly two-syllable words and their frequency of usages is very high, such as 'siêngnăng' 勤勉 qínmiăn (industrious), 'làmsiêng' 勤勞 qínláo (hardworking), 'nonsông' 江山 jiāngshān ('river' + 'mountain' for 'country'), 'ánhmắt' 目光 mùguāng (the look), 'ánhnắng' 陽光 yángguāng (sunlight), 'giàucó' 富有 fùyǒu (wealthy), etc.
   
   Amusingly, many of them are of peculiar semantic composition of lexical building blocks such as 'bàntay' 手板 shǒubăn ('panel of the palm'), 'cổchân' 腳脖子 jiăobózi ('neck of the foot' for 'ankle’), 'khuônmặt' 面孔 miànkǒng ('the frame of a face'), 'dướiquê' 鄉下 xiāngxià ('(down there in the) countryside'), 'đoáhoa' 花朵 huāduǒ ('(a stem of) flower'), etc. (Note the reverse order of some of the syllabic units.)


8. Morphemic syllable, a building unit to coin new words:
   
   Words in both Vietnamese and Chinese languages are mainly composed of either one with another to make up the combination of a morpheme, syllable, or both, e.g., 'bồihồi' 徘徊 páihuái (melancholy), 'yêuđương' 愛戴 àidài (love), 'khổsở' 苦楚 kǔchǔ (hardship), 'mắcbệnh' 犯病 fànbìng (sick), 'bắtcóc' 綁架 băngjià (kidnap), 'cẩuthả' 苟且 gǒuqiě (sloppy), etc., in which each morphemic syllable is either wholely or partially independent of the semantic bound of the original meaning of the root, that is, they are mostly phoneticized transcriptions of actual spoken words. Characteristically, compounds of this type are similarly constructed with the same material and structure in both languages, of which most of them are likely Chinese loanwords in Vietnamese.


9. Syllabic parallel compounds (in synonymous / antonymous / reduplicative forms):
   
   In Vietnamese and Chinese, there exists a larger number of monosyllabic words that are homonyms due to limited combinations of all possible valid syllables in each language. Just imagine there have been accumlated a pool of nearly 70,000 characters in Chinese with these phonetic structures {(C)+V+(C)}. To avoid problems of ambiguity that monosyllabics may cause, compounds have been formed by combining by two of either symnonymous or antonymous monosyllabic words, e.g., 'đấtđai' 土地 tǔdì ('(soil +) land'), 'thươngyêu' 疼愛 téngài ('(affection +) love'), 'buồnrầu' 愁悶 chóumèn ('(sad +) sorrowful'), 'chịuđựng' 承受 chéngshòu ('(take) + accept'), 'tìmkiếm' 尋找 xúnzăo ('(seek +) search'), 'chimchóc' 禽雀 qínquè ('(fowls +) birds'), 'caothấp' 高低 gāodì ('(height' + low'), 'trêndưới' 上下 shàngxià ('(above + below) positional'), etc., or creating new reduplicative dissyllabic words, such as 'liênmiên' 連綿 liánmiăn (continuous), 'mongmanh' 渺茫 miăománg (slim), 'lôithôi' 囉嗦 luōsuō (verbose), 'dễdàng' #容易 róngyi (easily), 'lòngthòng' 籠統 lóngtǒng (long-winded), etc., and adding morphemic parallel compounds, e.g., 'cayđắng' 辛苦 xīnkǔ ('(tasty hot + bitterly'), 'lạigần' 離近 líjìn (get closer), 'dìghẻ' 姨姨 yíyí (stepmother), etc.


10. Similarities in colloquial, and idiomatic expressions:
    
    Both languages possess by their own nature the same distinctive attributes in many aspects, peculiarly unique with characteristics that exist in different dialects including colloquial expressions, for example, 'tại tôi' 賴我 lài wǒ (because of me), 'vìsao' 為啥 wèishă (how come), 'làmviệc' 幹活 gànhuó (work), 'chồmhổm' 犬坐 quánzuò (squat), 'răngkhểnh' 犬牙 quányá (canine), 'saocứ' 總是 zǒngshì (how come), 'tấtcả' 大家 dàjiā (everybody), 'mauchóng' 馬上 măshàng (immediately), 'ítr'a 起碼 qímă (at least), 'trờinắng' 太陽 tàiyáng (sunshine), 'đâunào' 那裡 nàli (where), 'đểý' 在意 zàiyì (to mind), 'Tên này thật tếu.' 這個人挺逗 Zhè gè rén tíng dòu (this person is really funny), or culturally specific idioms, such as, 'uốngnướcnhớnguồn' 飲水思源 yǐnshuǐsīyuán (drink water and remember its source), 'lárụngvềcội' 葉落歸根 yèluòguīgēn (like a leaf one returns to his root when he dies), 'ếchngồiđáygiếng' 井蛙之見 jǐngwòzhījiàn (shortsighted as a frog sees the sky from the bottom of a well), 'sưtửHàđông' 河東獅子 Hédōngshīzǐ (tiger wife), etc.


11. Classifiers and their function as pronouns:
    
    These grammatical and functional words are used to specify objects or facts and usually positioned in front of nouns or, alternately, could be used alone as pronouns, with virtually the same usages in both Chinese and Vietnamese, e.g., 'cái' 個 gè (a unit of), 'chiếc' 隻 zhī (a piece of), 'đôi' 對 duì (a pair of), 'con子 zǐ (a head of), 'cuốn' 卷 juān (a roll of), 'bó' 把 bă (a bunch of), 'chìa' 匙 chí (a stick of), 'trang' 張 zhāng (a sheet of), 'trận' 陣 zhèn (instance), 'cục' 塊 kuài (a slump of), 'miếng' 片 piàn (a sheet of), 'cơn' 場 chăng (a round of), 'chuyện' 件 jiàn (a matter of), 'ván' 盤 pán (a game of), 'cuộc' 局 jú (a round of), 'bữa' 飯 fàn (a meal), etc. Sematically and syntactically, many of the classifiers statically being paired with only certain words, which makes them even more unique in the whole with each unit each that forms a complete specific meaning for each word in so many category that characterizes certian semantic realm. For example, words starting wiith /b-/, /f-/, /ph-/ and their derivatives /x-/, /gi-/, /z-/... can convey the same implication of something gliding or flowing in the air, e.g., 'phậpphồng' 彭彭 péngpéng (erratic heartbeat), 'bềnhbồng' 泛泛 fànfàn (floating and drifting), etc.


12. Particles:
    
    Grammatical particle is generally added to the end of a sentence to indicate direction, state of affairs, or the tone of one's sentiment, etc., for example, "đây" as in 'Lênđây!' 上來 Shànglái (Come up here!), "đi" as in 'Vềđi.' 回去 Huíqù (Go home.), "ơi" as in 'Trờiơi!' 天啊 Tiānna! (My Lord!), "nè" as in 'Tôi đây nè.' 是我呢 Shì wǒ ne (It's me.), "nha, nhé" as in 'Tôi ăn nha.' 我吃啦 Wǒ chī lā (I eat now.), 'Chạy không nổi nữa rồi!' 走不了了呢! Zǒu bù liăo le ne! (I cannot walk anymore!), etc.


13. Functional words:
    
    All prepositions and conjunctions are completely the same in both languages, for example, 'và' 和 hé (and), 'với' 與 yú (with), 'từ' 自 zì (from), 'nếu' 若 ruò (if), 'vì' 為 wèi (because), 'nhưngmà' 然而 rán'ěr (but), 'vìthế' 於是 yúshì (therefore), 'dođó' 所以 suǒyǐ (hence), 'dùrằng' 雖然 suīrán (although), 'dovì (bởivì)' 由於 yóuyú (due to), etc. In other words, virtually all Vietnamese functional words originate from those of Chinese 虛辭 xūcí (hưtừ).


14. Grammatical markers:
    
    They are words used to fulfill the grammatical function that frames or fossilizes a string of fixed words or expressions, with many becoming stand-alone words stately, that is, a state of affairs or circumstances, which are mostly remnants of classical Chinese, or 文言文 wényánwén. They have evolved into active use until the beginning of 20th century in both countries, for example, 'sự', 'cái', 'việc', 'nhỉ', etc. as in 'có sựchuẩnbị' 有所準備 yǒu suǒ zhǔnbèi (a state of being prepared and get ready), 'cáigọilà' 所謂 suǒwéi (the so-called), 'cái tôi có' (~> 'của tôi') 我所有 wǒ suǒ yǒu ('(of) mine'), 'cái việc nó làm' 他所作所爲 tā suǒ zuò suǒ wéi (what he has done), 'ởtrong' 其中 qízhōng (among), 'cáikhác' 其他 qíta (other), 借問白頭翁, 垂綸幾世也? Jiēwèn báitóuwēng, chuí lún jǐ shì yě? 'Xinhỏi ônglão này, thả câu được mấy đời nhỉ?' (May I ask how many generations that your people have done net-fishing like you?), etc.

and so on and so forth. In other word, any linguistic features that one can find in Chinese can probably be found in Vietnamese and their derivatives, and vice versa, including exceptionally grammatical word order between the two, e.g., 'đằngnầy' (~>'đằngấy') 我等 wǒděng ('we all' > 'thou'), 'chúngmình' (~> 'chúngta') 咱們 zánměn ('we all'), etc.

Analytically, all those linguistic features are something unique, so intimate and peculiar to only languages of close affiliation that share the same internal traits, not to mention cultural and sentimental factors that are delicately embedded in each elements or messages. For example, 'mẹruột' 親媽 qīmmā (natural mother), 'charuột' 親爹 qīndiè (natural father) vs. 'mẹghẻ' 繼母 jìmǔ (stepmother), 'chaghẻ' 繼爹 jìdiè (stepfather), respectively. Similarly, when a Chinese speaker curses with bad words such as "他媽 Tāmà!", literally 'his mother', s/he can be seen as lip-syncing the pronunciation of "Đụmá" in Vietnamese – cf. 屌 diào (Cant. /tjew3/) VS 'đéo' (đụ) or 'fuck' – with the same semantic concept that is an equivalent to "Fuck you!" in English.

With little premeditation and some effort one can almost translate complete sentences word by word from one language to another, of which every word mirrors each other with almost the same textual connotation. Clauses and phrases are also fabricated with the same structure and even rhetorical texture. For example, virtually all Chinese classics and Kongfu novels, such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the Water Margin, by The Ming's Shi Nai'an (Thị Nại-Am), or Romance of an Archer by Hong Kong's contemporary Jin Yong (Kim Dung), or those of Gu Long (Cổ Long) have been translated that way from the early 20th century until present time, and for those native-born speakers they have no problems apprehending old-styled terms, which is something stylish similar to 'Shakepearean language' used in 'Hamlet' for modern works in English, so to speak. Modern Vietnamese readers of Chinese classics enjoy reading them with ease like that for generations despite of all the heavily-accented Chinese style, semantic, syntactic, and lexical, deeply encoded in the corresponding Sino-Vietnamese transliteration, not intended for foreign learners of Vietnamese who still need to exert some more efforts in order to master them.

In short, if the Vietnamese speakers recognize some 3,000 individual Chinese characters, they can read any aforementioned Chinese works with ease that no any other people on earth can be able do so without some effort. It is so said because with each 'chacracter' (字) the Vietnamese can form so many dissyllabic words that they have already known as fundamental vocabularies after they finish 8th-graded schooling in their own language. For a Westerner to study modern Chinese, recognizing /guó/ (State), /jiā/ (home), and /guójiā/ (nation), /fù/ (wife), /nǚ/ (female), and /fùnǚ/ (woman)... means to study 6 different concepts, that is, 國 guó, 家 jiā, and 國家 guójiā, 婦 fù, 女 nǚ, and 婦女 fùnǚ, respectively, that they have to learn, so to speak.

In comparison of Vietnamese with other Chinese dialects, variations between Mandarinand Yue (粵) and Minnan languages – that are spoken in 'Canton' and 'Fukien', again, with all the Sinicized elements on top of them after more than two long millenia under the rule of China – could be similar to what makes all differences between Vietnamese and Mandarin languages to the full extent despite of the fact that Vietnam was no longer a part of China for a long time ago.

While having been struggling to keep off from falling into the status of a colony or vassal state of the greater imperial China, Vietnam absorbed similar linguistic permeation under one form or another that accounts for all what appears in the Vietnamese language today. The early Annamese language was spoken daily by the common mass, including indigenous Muong groups and local wives of Chinese immigrants or foot soldiers stationed there. In all probabilities, to start with, at first, all related Yue speeches under discussion, i.e., Cantonese, Fukienese, Tchiewchow, etc., evolved from the same aboriginal root and then variant Sinitic layers gradually piled up onto such linguistic substrata since the Western Zhou's era. Throughout the Han's colonial period, the proto-Vietic language, i.e., descendant of a branch of the Yue language, submerged into Sinicized lingua-franca and then emergerd as aforementioned ancient Annamese with even more later added-on Sinitic elements, i.e., Old Chinese, Ancient Chinese, Middle Chinese, Mandarin, etc., that were gradually contributed further by the mandarins, who had brought the official court's language into the old societal mainstream that continued for the last 2,000 years until now (to explain why in some way modern Vietnamese still retains characteristics of spoken Mandarin and common usage of Middle Chinese vocabularies, Sino-Vietnamese or HánViệt.) Again, as an emphasis, if Vietnam had not gained and maintained her sovereignty since the 10th century, the twist of historical fate that occurred to other Minnan or Yue languages. i.e., Fukienese and Cantonese, as their speakers remain as parts of the Middle Kingdom, the Vietnamese language could be now officially already treated as a Chinese dialect by some national institute such as a Chinese linguistic academy.

Interestingly, even contemporary Cantonese and Mandarin, along with the composition of the population of speakers of those two speeches – both being described as two Chinese dialects descended from an "ancestral Chinese" spoken by the "Chinese" – Vietnamese somehow still retains what is on par with those basic "Chinese" items in both two large dialects as they are still in active usage today. However, existing semantic discrepancies in Cantonese for common lexical items in its basic layer deviate a bit from those of Mandarin. Comparison of their existing basic words will support this argument profoundly, e.g.,

• *where*: Cant. /pin5dou2/ (where) as opposed to M 那裏 náli vs. VS "nơiđâu" [ SV nalí, also VS 'nơiấy' <~ 'nơiđấy' <~ 'nơiđó', @# M 那裏 nàli | M 那 nà, nuó
• *sleep*: Cant. /fajng1kao1/ as opposed to M 睡覺 shuìjiào (SV thuỵgiác) vs. VS # "giấcngủ" [ @# M 睡覺 shuìjiào \ @ 覺 jiào ~ giấc, @ 睡 shuì ~ ngủ 臥 wò (SV ngoạ) | M 睡 shuì < MC ʑwɜ < OC *dhojs || M 覺 jué, jiào < MC kauk < OC *kru:k | cf. 去睡 qùshuì (VS đingủ) 'go to bed' ],
• *eat*: Cant. /sək8/ 'eat' 食 shí (SV thực) as opposed to M 吃 chī (SV ngật) vs. VS "xơi'" | M 食 shí < MC ʑik < OC *ljək || See 'ăn' for M 吃 chī, cf. the phonetic 乙 yǐ (SV ất) ],
• *drink*: Cant. /jam3/ 飲 yǐn (SV ẩm) as opposed to M 喝 hè (SV hát, VS 'hớp') 'drink' vs. VS "uống" [ cf. M 飲 yǐn < MC ʔɪm < OC *ʔjəmʔ | Zyyy: ijəm2 || cf. M 喝 hè: VS hớp, húp, hò, hét ~ M 喝 hè < MC xʌt < OC *ha:t | According to Starostin, to yell, cry (angrily) (LZ). Regular Sino-Viet. is 'hát'. The earliest attested usage of the character (Han) is for *ʔra:ts, MC ʔaj, Mand. yè 'to cry (with a constrained voice)'. In modern Mand. the character is most frequently used for hè 'to drink' (with an unattested MC reading) ],
• *urinate*: Cant. /o5niew2/ as opposed to M 尿 niào (SV niếu) vs. VS "tiểu", hence "đái" (urinate) | M 尿 niào < MC niew < OC *ne:ws) | ¶ n- ~ đ- (t-) | However, for this word, according to Starostin, Viet. t- is rather strange here, so Viet. tiểu may be quite independent from the Chinese word. He suggests a possible explanation of the Viet. word would be a contraction of the Chinese euphemism for 'urine, urinating' 小便 (MC sjew3bjen2). Even under the influence of Sino-Vietnamese, Starostin missed the sound change pattern { ¶ n- ~ đ- ~ t- } that frequently appears in both Mandarin and Vietnamese, e.g., 鳥 niăo: điểu, 那 nà, nuó: đó, đấy (Vietnamese Huế subdialect 'nớ') cf. 'điđái' 拉尿 làniào (go to pee), 'điỉa' 拉屎 làshǐ' \ ¶ l- ~ d- (đ), 'go to poop' ],
• *tired": Cant. /kwuj2/ as opposed to M 累 lèi (SV luỵ) vs. VS "mõi" [ M 累 lèi < MC lwɛ < OC *rojʔs ],
• *see* Cant. /t'ʌj3/ 睇 thấy (look) as apposed to M 見 jiàn (see, seen) vs. VS "thấy",
• *descend*: Cant. /lɔt8/ 落 for as opposed to 下 xià vs. VS "xuống",
• *take*: Cant. /lɔ3/ ~ M 拿 ná (SV nã) vs. VS "lấy",
• *go*: Cant. /hoj1/ ~ M 去 qù vs. VS "đi"
• *run*: Cant. /zau2/ ~ M 走 zǒu vs. VS "chạy" [ cf. modern M 跑 păo for 'run' as apposed to 走 zǒu 'go' ],
etc.

In both Vietnamese and Chinese there exist only minor discrepancies in grammar in syntactic word order, which is in reverse in Vietnamese, i.e., { noun + adjective }. Overall, however, readers can see so far that the core matter of Chinese and Vietnamese etymology has even a much more deeper root in the realm of vocabulary than the Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer would like to admit. Etymologically, in the following examples, they demonstrate that it is possible to draw an etymological rule from a word-concept for all possible alterations out of one root for all plausible Chinese and Sinitic-Vietnamese cognates, in restrictive sense though, that is, if most of the etyma appear to be cognate in one category and belong to the same class, it is likely that they are possibly of the same origin even sometimes they appear to be of dubious origin due to their discrepancy in phonology. The generalization is that as long as they carry etymological traits and all the same phonological peculiarities and underlined contextual connotation, they could possibly originate from the same etyma, mostly loanwords from Chinese.

The illustrated list below will also show how lexical transformation happens by means of semantic analogy approach is formulated and coupled with dissyllabic sound change approach and both methodologies can be used to find candidate patterns of sound shifts of related words (to be furtherdiscussed in detail later as we continue on.)

• 'đầu' (head) 頭 tóu – 'sọ' (cranium) 首 shǒu,
• 'mặt' (face) 面 – 'mày' (eyebrow) 眉 méi,
• 'mắt' (eye) 目 mù – 'mũi' (nose) 鼻 bì,
• 'gan' (liver) 肝 gān – 'ruột' (intestines) 腸 chăng,
• 'sống' (live) 生 shēng – 'chết' (die) 死 sǐ,
• 'ăn' (eat) 唵 yān – 'uống' (drink) 飲 yǐn,
• 'khóc' (weep) 哭 kù – 'cười' (laugh) 笑 xiào,
• 'đi' (walk) 去 qù – 'đứng' (stand) 站 zhàn,
• 'chạy' (run) 走 zǒu – 'nhảy' (jump) 跳 tiāo,
• 'nặng' (heavy) 重 zhòng – 'nhẹ' (light) 輕 qīng,
• 'cao' (high) 高 gāo – 'thấp' (low) 底 dì,
• 'dài' (long) 長 cháng – 'ngắn' (short) 短 duăn,
• 'lạnh' (cold) 冷 lěng – 'nóng' (hot) 燙 tàng,
• 'hay' (good) 好 hăo – 'dỡ' (bad) 亞 yà,
• 'buồn' (sad) 悶 mèn – 'vui' (happy) 快 kuài,
• 'gần' (near) 近 jìn – 'xa' (far) 遐 xiá,
• 'trước' (before) 前 qián – 'sau' (after) 後 hòu,
• 'cũ' (old) 舊 jìu – 'mới' (new) 萌 méng,
• 'đắng' (bitter) 辛 xīn – 'cay' (spicy hot) 苦 kǔ SV 'khổ' (bitter) [the meaning switches here.] (苦), etc.

The postulation above is drawn from reasonable rationalization, methodologically, to relate Sino-Vietnamese and Sinitic-Vietnamese words, to be used in parallel with another dissyllabic approach by which we can identify, analyze, and extract monosyllabic basic words from Vietnamese synonymous or parallel compounds as cited previously in the cases of "chài+lưới", "xe+cộ", "cậu+mợ", "chú+bác", and so on. By following such approach we will be able to find reliable traces of sound changes and semantic shifts from Chinese to Sinitic-Vietnamese as well in all possible venues which, no matter how unconventional as they appear, have been posited via some traditional methods by many specialists of Vietnamese, for example, to associate

• "voi" with 'vi' 為 wēi (elephant),
• "lúa" ~ 'lai' 來 lái (unhusked rice grain),
• "gạo" ~ 'đạo' 稻 dào (rice) [ also, again "lúa" (Starostin) ],
• "nắng" <~ "trờinắng" ~ 'tháidương' 太陽 tàiyáng (sun, sunshine),
etc,

and indigenous lexicons in the Chinese and Vietnamese zodiac systems with the whole set of names of related animals such as

1. tý 子 zǐ SV tý, also VS 'chuột' (rat) [ @ 'chuột' <~ 鼠 shǔ (SV thuộc) 'mouse' ],
2. sửu 丑 chǒu, also VS 'trâu' (buffallo) [ @ 'trâu' <~ 牛 níu (SV ngưu) 'ox' ],
3. dần 寅 yǐn, also VS ''cọp' (tiger) [ @ 'cọp' (~>'hùm' ~> 甝 hán 'hàm' ) 虎 hǔ (SV hổ) 'tiger' ],
4. mẹo 卯 măo, VS 'mèo' (cat) [ @ 'mèo' <~ 貓 māo (SV miêu) 'cat', cf. 卯 măo, SV 'mão' <~ 'mẹo' (older pre-SV) ],
5. thìn 辰 chén, also VS 'rồng' (dragon) [ @ 'rồng' 龍 lóng (SV long) 'dragon'. Does 'thìn 辰 chén (SV thẩn)' sound more like 'rắn' (snake)? See 'tỵ' below. ],
6. tỵ 巳 sì, also VS 'rắn' (snake) [ @ 'rắn' <~ 蛇 shé (SV xà) 'rắn', 巳 is pictograph of a 'snake' ],
7. ngọ 午 wǔ, also VS 'ngựa' (horse) [ They are perfect cognates, but with the direction 'ngựa' ~> 'ngọ' .],
8. mùi 未 wèi, also VS 'dê' (sheep) [ @ 'dê' 羊 yáng (SV dương) 'goat'. For 未 wèi (SV vị), in Ancient Chinese and Vietnamese, there existed no /v/, but /j-/ sound, hence, possibly /jej/ for /je/ (VS 'dê') For the controversial 'sheep', etymologically, it is not correct. That only reflect the wishes of those biased Chinese scholars, especially those from the north of China. ],
9. thân 申 shēn, also VS 'khỉ' (monkey) [ @ 'khỉ' 猴 hóu (SV hầu) <~ 猢 hú (SV 'hồ'), 猻 sūn (SV 'tôn', cf. 'thân' 申 shēn) <~ 猻猢 sūnhú (SV tônhồ'); for 申 shēn ~ 猿 yuán SV viện, SV vượn, that matches the pattern { 伸 shēn (stretch) ~ 援 yuán SV viện }, VS vươn (reach out), all means 'monkey'. (See An Chi. 2016. Vol. 1, pp. 177-183) ],
10. dậu 酉 yǒu, also VS 'gà' (rooster) [ @ 'gà' <~ 雞 jī (SV kê) 'chicken' ],
11. tuất 戌 xù, also VS 'chó' (dog) [ @ 'chó' <~ 狗 gǒu (SV cẩu) 'dog', cf. 戌 xù ~ 犬 quán (VS 'cún') (puppy) ],
12. hợi 亥 hài, also VS 'heo' (pig) [They are perfect cognates. Cf. 腞 tùn ~ Northern Vietnamese 'lợn' (hog) ],

hence, mẹo 卯 măo must be 'mèo' (cat) accordingly, absolutely not 兔 tù 'thỏ' (hare). Regarding the question of where they truly originated from, i.e., the 12 animals thereof, the ancient proto-Chinese undoubtedly copied it from the Southern Yue, so to speak.

That is to say, from a series of solid etyma from the same category, we could plausibly drawn a parallel or induction for other words. Below are some more examples:

• "Tết" <~ 節 jié (SV tiết) [ as in (# tiếtxuân') 春節 Chūnjié (Spring Festival), "ănTết" 過節 guòjié (celebrate Spring Festival), "TếtNguyênđán" 元旦節 Yuándànjié (Spring Festival), "TếtÐoanngọ" 端午節 Duānwǔjié (Late Spring Festival), "TếtTrungthu" 中秋節 Zhōngxīujié (Mid-Autumn Festival), etc.]

Based on such analysis we can easily induce to posit the etymon "Tết" to denote the Vietnamese Spring Festival with certainty as a cognate with 節 jié (SV tiết) from which another compound such as "guòjié" 過節 (SV quátiết) gave rise to the Vietnamese equivalent "ănTết" (to celebrate the Spring Festival). While 過 in M guò is /kwo4/ (to pass), SV "quá" /wa5/ associates with 'ăn'. Suppose that 過 guò is cognate to "ăn" and in this case the latter with the sound /ɐn/ has evolved into and functions as an affix for many other compounds with similarly related meaning as in "ănTết". The meaning of "eating" in "ăn" no longer means "eat" and is generalized and "sublimated" to another level to denote the concept of "celebrating" in this dissyllabic word "guòjié" 過節 = "vuiTết" or "ănTết" (celebrate Spring Festival) even though it implicitly conveys an equivalent concept literally to mean "to feed on", "have a feast", "to party", etc. That is to say, "quá" /wa5/ has given rise to "ăn" with its associated meaninhg despite semantic disparity etymologically in each respective stem monosyllabically. We can also say that 過 guò has been likened or identified with "ăn" (唵 ǎn) 'eat'. In other words, an affix in a Chinese dissyllabic word, regardless of the original meanings in its root or dissyllabic form, could converge on an existing form in Vietnamese and then deviate into a newly-founded concept with the very same loaned element, i.e., { 過節 guòjié > ănTết / guò [wa5] > ăn | => ăn- / [ xz / x > y > Ø- ] }.

That is what is mentioned as "principle of sandhi process of association" in this paper. Once the affix "ăn" becomes, or functions as, a "prefix" – an indispensable tool to associate, apply, or create more new words – take shape to carry more extensive meanings such as "take in", "take part in", "engaged in", etc.

In the same manner that the rule [ xz / x > y > Ø- ] associate SV quá 過 guò to give rise to /ăn-/ we can further explore other possibilities as those dissyllabic words below with the extended meaning that the prefix "ăn-" could attach and spread to other dissylabic coumpounds:

• "ăntấtniên" 過小年 guòxiăonián (feast on New Year's Eve week),<.li>
• "ăntiệc" 宴席 yànxí (feast),
• "ăncưới" 酒席 jǐuxí (go to a wedding banquet),
• "ănmừng" #慶祝 qìngzhù (celebration) [ @ 祝 zhù ~ 'xơi' 食 shí, 'ăn' 吃 chī ],

which are in line with


• "ănmặc" 衣食 yīshí (food and clothing => 'lifestyle'),
• "ănuống" 飲食 yǐnshí (eat and drink => 'diet'),
• "ănngon" 吃香 chīxiāng (enjoy delicious food),
• "ănnói" 言語 yányǔ (talking => 'manner'),
• "ănhiếp" 威脅 wéixiè (to bully),
• "ăntiền" 贏錢 yíngqián (win money),
• "ăntiền" 要錢 yàoqián (extort money),
• "ănmày" 要飯 yàofàn (begging),
• "ănhàng" 吃貨 chīhuò (eat gluttonously. Also: run counterband),
• "ănđòn" 挨打 áidă (get beaten),
• "ăncắp" #竊案 qiè'àn (steal),
• "ănbám" #白吃 báichī (live on other's labor),
• "ănnhậu" 應酬 yìngchóu (drinking and eating) [ ~ 'ănchơi' ]
• "ănthua" #輸贏 shūyíng (betting, fighting to compete), etc.

and futher development as a morphemic-syllabic suffix like


• "làmăn" 生意 shēngyì (do business),
• "đồăn" 食物 shíwù (foods), also "thứcăn",
• "ngánăn" 厭食 yànshí (anorexia); also, "biếngăn" ~ "nhịnăn",
• "thamăn" 貪吃 tānchī (be obssessed with food), "hamăn"
• "háuăn" 好食 hàoshí (have good appetite),
• "cóăn" #有錢鑽 yǒuqiánzuàn (make money),
• "ănnóibợmtrợn" 胡說霸道 húshuōbàdào (talk nonnsense), etc.

We can see that the affix "ăn" in the examples above centering around the vocalism of both the initial y-, w- substituting "ăn" and sh-, ch-, j-, etc., has become a prefix in Vietnamese to take on different meanings such as 'swallow', 'consume', 'take in', 'endure', etc., which can be associated with other sound bits that center around the initial CH- as well as twisted variations of the Vietnamese "ăn".

For the etymology of 吃 chī, we have the etymon [ M 吃 chī, ji2 < MC ʔjet, kit < OC *ʔrjət, *kɨt | Note: The actual character is 喫 chǐ. The loan character 吃 chī is used only in modern Mandarin. The new reading is based on 乙 yì < MC ʔit < OC *ʔrjət, with the phonetic stem 乙 SV 'ất', and the sound change pattern with the ending {-t ~ -n}, which could possibly give rise to 'ăn'. For 喫 chǐ, phonologically, M 喫 chǐ < MC khiek < OC *khe:k. (吃 originally means "stammer"). According to Starostin, it means 'to eat', 'drink', 'swallow' (Han). Karlgren gives a LZ reading *khra:ts (MC khaj) 'energetic' – very dubious and not attested elsewhere. The reading *khe:k is attested since Han; modern chī is quite irregular. In short, 吃 chī, a basic word, that means "ăn" (= 唵 M /an3/ 'eat', and M 唵 ǎn has phonetic stem of 奄 yăn, yān < MC ʔɜm < OC *ʔramʔ ) and the word 唵 ǎn proves that there exists a cognate with "ăn". ]

In effect, as the basic words show, that is how the author has tentatively posited those cited Vietnamese words as variants of categorically different Chinese words under one umbrella, conceptionally, of "ăn-" with other derived and extended meanings of the prefix. They could not be all plausible but a majority of them possibly is. The point to make here is that they do not follow the old rigid patterns that a linguist wants them to fit in. After such postulation and formation, what the author expects hear by now is influx of renunciations from orthodox Austroasiatic Mon-Khmer theorists.

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C) Chinese and the Vietnamese basic vocabulary stock

It is of no surprise that scores of the Vietnamese basic vocabularies, to say the least, appear to have originated from the same linguistic roots as those of Chinese, as enumerated previously, for the reason that they were long in close contact at least 1,500 years before the confirmed influence of the Chinese language on Vietnamese started from the Warring Periods (403 B.C. – 221 B.C.) as recorded in Chinese history. In fact, a great number of cultural Vietnamese words are cognate to ancient Chinese etyma, such as

• "nạ" 娘 niáng (old Vietnamese "mother") [ Doublet: 奶 năi (SV 'nãi') ],
• "nhà" 家 jiā (home) (SV gia) [ <= M 家 jiā \ ¶ ji- ~ nh- ],
• "chén" 盞 zhàn (bowl) (SV tràn) [ M 盞 zhàn < MC can < OC *tsjre:nʔ ],
• "mâm" 盤 pán (tray) (SV bàn) [ M 盤 pán < MC bwʌn < OC *ba:n | cf. 'bàn' 案 àn (SV án) 'table' ],
• "bát", "tô", "tộ" 砵 bō (large bowl) (SV bát) [ M 砵 (鉢, 缽, 缽, 盋) bō < MC bo < OC *pa:t | Cant. but3, Hẹ bat7 | According to Starostin, bowl. A Sanskrit loanword ( < Skr. pa:tra), attested | ¶ b- ~ t-, -n ~ -t ],
• "đũa" 箸 zhú (chopsticks) (SV trợ, chừ, trừ) [ M 箸 zhú < MC ɖʊ < OC *dras | FQ 遲倨 | cf. Hainanese: /duə2/],
• "thìa", "chìa" 匙 chí (spoon) (SV thi, chuỷ) [ M 匙 chí < MC tʂe < OC *dhe ],
• "cằm" 含 hán (chin) [~ VS cắn, ngậm, mĩm, hàm (AC 'chin') | M 含 hán < MC gæm < OC *ghɒm < PC **gɒ:m ~ Tibetan PC **kɒ:m (VS cắn 'bite') > Tibetan: agam (VS gặm 'gnaw'), akham (VS cắn) | Note: phonetic stem 今 jīn (kim) Cant. /kʌm5/ ],
• "sọ" 首 shǒu (cranium, head) (SV thủ) [ M 首 shǒu (VS đầu) ~ 頭 tóu (SV đầu) | M 首 shǒu < MC ʂjəjw < OC *sluʔ (AC 'head') | According to Starostin, cf. perhaps also Viet. sọ 'cranium, skull'. ],
• "mắt" 目 mù (eye) (SV mục) [ M 目 mù < MC mouk < OC *moukʷ (AC 'eye') | cf. Hainanese /mat7/ ],
• "bếp" 庖 páo (kitchen) (SV bào) [ M 庖 páo < MC bạw < OC *bhū < PC **brū ],
• "tấmcám" 糝糠 sănkāng (broken rice chaff) (SV tầmkhang) [ M 糝 săn < MC sɣm < OC *sjə:mʔ | According toStarostin, 糝 săn: rice (in grain); to add rice to gruel (L.Zhou). Standard Sino-Viet. is tầm. Protoform: *chya:mH, Meaning: gruel, soup. Chinese: 糝 *ʂjə:mʔ rice gruel with meat. Tibetan: a~z|/am (resp.) soup. Lushei: côm mix (any liquid food) with cooked rice. || M 糠 kāng < MC kʌŋ < OC *ka:ŋ ],
• "canh" 羹 gēng (broth, soup) [ M 羹 gēng < MC kɒiŋ < OC *kra:ŋ | Note: as opposed to modern M 湯 tāng which is also a loanword in Vietnamese 'thang' for both 'noodle soup' 湯粉 tāngfěn 'búnthang' and 'medicinal brew' 藥湯 yàotāng 'thangthuốc' ],
• "bàn" 案 àn (table) (SV án) [ M 案 (桉) àn < MC ʔɒn < OC *ʔa:ns | ¶ -Øn ~ ban | Note: towards the end of Zhou Dynasty: OC *ʔa:ns, cf. 'ấn, bấm, nhấn' 按 àn (to press) || ex. 香案 xiāng'àn (bànhương(án)) 'altar', 案稱 àn​chèng​ (bàncân) 'scale', 案子 ànzi (cáibàn) 'table' ],
• "ghế" 椅 yí (chair) (SV ỷ) [ M 椅 yǐ < MC ki < OC *krjəjə | Note: it could also be 几 jǐ (stool) (SV kỷ, kỉ), M 几 jǐ < MC ki < OC *krjəʔ | cf. 几倚 jǐyǐ (VS 'ghếdựa') 'reclining chair' ],
• "tủ" 櫝 dú (cupboard) (SV độc) [ M 櫝 dú < MC duk < OC *lho:k ],
• "guốc" 屐 jī (wooden sandals) (SV kịch) [ M 屐 jī < MC gajk < OC *ghrek | Dialect: Cant. kek6, Hak. kiak8 ], etc.


including other early Ancient Chinese and Mandarin compounds, for example,


• "TânMão" 辛卯 XīnMăo (Year of the Cat) [ NOT Chinese 'Year of the Hare'; also, 'NămMão' ~ 'NămMèo' 卯年 Măonián (SV Mãoniên) 'Year of the Cat) ],
• "TânHợi" 辛亥 XīnHài (Year of the Boar) [ Also, 'NămHợi' 亥年 Hàinián (SV Hợiniên), 'Year of the Pig' ],
• "thángchạp" #臘月 làyuè (the 12th month of the year in lunar calendar),
• "ăntấtniên" 過小年 guòxiăonián (Feast on the week before the Lunar New Year Eve),
• "bâygiờ" #者番 zhěfān (right now),
• "vuquy" 于歸 yúguī (bridal wedding ceremony),
• "sínhlễ" 聘禮 pìnlǐ (betrothal dowry for the bride),
• "thànhphố" 城舖 chéngpǔ (city),
• "chợbúa" 市舖 shìpǔ (~ #phốchợ) (market),
• "khaigiảng" 開講 kāijiăng (start a school year) [ modern M 'beginning a lecture' ],
• "thơmộng" 詩夢 shīmèng (romantic),
• "đườngcái' #街道 jièdào (road),
• "đòngang" 渡江 dùjiāng (riverboat),
• "xinlỗi" 見諒 jiànliàng (apology) [ where @ 見 jiàn ~ 'xin' and @ 諒 liàng ~ 'lỗi'. If that is the case, it could be possibly a cognate of 道歉 dàoqiàn \ @ 道 dào ~ 'lỗi', @ 歉 qiàn ~ 'xin' (apologize) | Note: modern M # 對不起 duìbùqǐ > VS 'xinbỏqua' (Pardon me!) ],
• "cảlũ" 大伙 dàhuǒ (the whole group) [ cf. 火 huǒ (VS lửa) ],
• "đồngloã" 同夥 tónghuǒ (accomplice) [ cf. 火 huǒ (VS lửa) ],
• "ungthư" 癰疽 yōngjū (cancer) [ ~ VS 'ungthối', 'ươngthối' (spoiled) | M 癰疽 yōngjū (ungthư) | M 癰 yōng < MC ʔoʊŋ < OC *ʔoŋ ],
• "chồmhổm" 犬坐 quánzuò (squat),

and the like, etc.

Note that all listings above and the likes are so numerous and seemingly inexhaustible. While some of those words are still common in contemporary usage in Vietnamese, in modern Mandarin the same forms may have already become obsolete, old-fashionable, or rare, even they still convey same denotation and meaning, though, for instance, 活 huó (SV hoạt) vs. 務 wù (SV vụ) for 'việc' (task), 睡 shuì (SV thuỵ) vs. 臥 wò (SV ngoạ) for 'ngủ' (sleep), etc.

The list will become much densely populated if we include more of old-timed literary words that both Chinese and Vietnamese are still using now. Specifically in this cultural context, it appears that Vietnamese adopted most of Chinese words of the same kind for its own use rather than they were evolved from common roots genetically, or, in other words, they are Chinese loanwords, for example:

• "thánggiêng" #正月 zhèngyuè (January) [ ~ #元月 yuányuè ],
• "TếtÐoanngọ" 端午節 duānwǔjié (Late Spring Festival),
• "thángchạp" #臘月 làyuè (the 12th month [in the Lunar calendar ]),
• "cúngTáoquân" 祭灶君 jìZàojūn (sacrificial offerings to send Kitchen God to pay homaage the Emperor of Heaven),
• "ăntấtniên" 過小年 (feast on the week of "cúngTáoquân" starting from the 23rd day of the 12th month of the Lunar Calendar),
• "Tết" 節 jié (Spring Festival),
• "xinchào" 見過 jiànguò (hello),
• "giãbiệt" 辭別 cíbié (good-bye),
• "kháchsáo" 客套 kètào (polite),
• "caosang" 高尚 gāoshàng (high class) [ SV 'caothượng' (noble)],
• "bợmtrợn" 霸道 bàdào (high-handed),

and early Mandarin, such as,


• "dulịch" 遊歷 yóulì (travel),
• "kháchsạn" 客棧 kèzàn (hotel),
• "duhọc" 遊學 yóuxué (study abroad),
• "lydị" 離異 líyí (devorce),

as well as a great number of fundamentally basic words which originated from the same roots, e.g.,


• "cha", "tía" 爹 diè (father) (SV ta) [ Note: 'tía' is much close to modern M 爹 diè while 'cha' seems like an older reading as in MC description 假開三平麻知 : FQ 知麻 tr+a ~ cha (M 知 zhī (SV tri), Hai. /tai1/ > t-), level tone, open, read as 假 jiă (giả) ~ trá; phonetic stem 多 duō < MC tʌ < OC *ta:j | FQ 得何 ],
• "mẹ", "mợ" 母 mǔ (mother) (SV mẫu) [ VS variants: (1) mái, (2) cái, (3) mệ, (4) mạ, (5) mợ | M mǔ 母 < MC myw < OC * mjəʔ | Cant. /mou6/, Hai. /mai2/ (~ mái) | cf. me = 梅 méi (tamarin), bể = 海 hăi (sea), © nạ 妳 nǐ > (nhĩ) 娘 niáng ],
• "chị" 姊 zǐ (older sister) (SV tỷ, tỉ) [ M 姊 zǐ, jiě (~ modern M 姐 jiě (小姐 xiáojiě) tiểuthơ <~ ) M 姊 zǐ, jiě < MC tsjɨ < OC *ɕjəjʔ (~ɕjəi) ],
• "em" 妹 mēi (younger sister) (SV muội) [ Note: the Vietnamese form "em" could be the result of contraction of 妹妹 mēimēi; a Vietnamese popular form derived from Mandarin to address oneself to someone who is older, wife to husband, younger sister to older siblings, lady to her lovers. ],
• "anh" 兄 xiōng (older brother) (SV huynh) [ M 兄 xiōng < MC xwyajɲ < OC *smraŋ | Note the aspirated /h-/ in SV 'huynh' is lost => '-uynh' ~ MC xwyajɲ => 'anh' ],
• "em" 俺 ăn (younger brother) [ M 俺 ăn, yàn < MC ʔəm, ʔʌn < OC *ʔams || Note: a popular form in Northeastern Mandarin dialects to address oneself to someone who is older. ],
• "lửa" 火 huǒ (fire) [ M 火 huǒ < MC xwʌ < OC *smjə:jʔ | ¶ hw ~ l- : ex. 大伙 dàhuǒ: cảlũ, 同伙 tónghuǒ: đồngloã, 過 guò: quá /wa5/ lỗi, 灣 wān: loan; 話 huà: lời, 裸體 luǒtǐ: loãthể ~ 果 guǒ: quả /wả/)],
• "lá" 葉 yè (leaf) (SV diệp) [ M 葉 yè < MC jep < AC *lhap < OC *lap < PC **lɒp | MC description 咸開三入葉以 | Note: Like those of AC, OC, and PC, most of the Tibetan languages carry the sound close to Viet. "lá": Tibetan: ldeb lá, "sheet", Burmese: ɑhlap "bud", Kachin: lap2 "leaf", Lushei: le:p "bud", Lepcha: lop "leaf", Rawang ʂɑ lap "leaf wrapper" ; Trung ljəp1 "leaf", Bahing lab. Sh. 138; Ben. 70. ],
• "đất" 土 tǔ (soil) (SV thổ, độ, đỗ) [ M 土 tǔ < MC dwo < OC *daʔ (Li Fang-Kuei : OC *dagx ) | According to Starostin, MC tho < OC *tha:ʔ (Note the final -ʔ) ],
• "cúng" 供 gòng (make sacrificial offerings to spirits) (SV cống),
• "giỗ" 祭 jì (offer a memorial ceremony to one's ancestors) (SV tế),
• "xơi" 食 shí (eat) (SV thực) [ ~ xực (Cant. /sjək8/), đút (feed) | M 食 shí < MC ʑik < OC *ljək | FQ 乘力 | According to Starostin, to eat. Also read *lhjək-s, MC zjy (FQ JY 祥吏) 'to feed, give to eat' (later usually written as 飼 in that meaning). | cf. ăn 唵 ăn 'eat', đút 飼 shí 'feed' || For "ăn" 吃 chī (eat) (SV: ngật, cật), see etymology previously mentioned above. ],
• "uống" 飲 yǐn (drink) (SV ẩm) [ M 飲 yǐn < MC ʔɨmʔ < OC *jəmʔ | FQ 於錦 | According to Starostin: to drink. Also read *ʔjəmʔs, MC ʔim (FQ 於禁) 'to give to drink'.],
• "bú" 哺 bǔ (breast feed, suck) (SV bộ) [ M 哺 bǔ < bo < OC *ba:s ],
• "thịt" 膱 zhí (meat) (SV thức) [ M 膱 zhí | Note: phonetic stem 戠, cf. M 識 shí, zhí (SV thức) < MC tʂɨ < OC *tjəkh ],
• "lúa" 來 lái (unhusked rice) [ M 來 lái < MC ljəj < OC *rjə: | Note: lúa ~ 來 lái, © 來 lái (lúamì, lúamạch - wheat (Triticum aestivum)) | According to Starostin, in Shijing rhyme jə OC *rjəs | OC *r- cf. dialects: Amoy, Chaozhou lai2, Fuzhou li2, Jianou lej2, lai9, Jianyang le2, Shaowu li2. | Note: Starostin posited 'lúa' as 稻 dào (đạo) instead of 'gạo' 'rice' based on OC. M 稻 dào < MC dɑw < OC *lhu:ʔ, *ɫhu:ʔ and it is a loanwoard in Chinese (Protoform: *ly:wH (~ ɫ-), Meaning: rice, grain, Chinese: 稻 *lhu:ʔ (~*ɫhu:ʔ) rice, paddy, Burmese: luh sp. of grain, Panicum paspalum, Kachin: c^jəkhrau1 paddy ready for husking. Kiranti: *lV 'millet' | SR: 1078 h-k .],
• "chả" 炸 zhà (fried meatloaf) (SV tạc) [ ~> VS 'chả' conveys the meaning 'boiled ground meatloaf', a kind of Vietnamese-styled 'ham'. In the new devopment, the extended meaning for the derived word was coined over the years. For the same term "chả" as in "chảlụa" it has been re-transliterated by Taiwanese Mandarin as 扎肉 zhàròu instead of "炸肉" that also originally means "fried meat", literally; hence, "扎" zhà becomes "chả" (Vietnamese-styled boiled ham meat sliced commonly found in "bánhmì" or Vietnamese sanwiches. This particular cases are elaborated here is just to point out the variations in lexical derivatives that are often missed by Vietnamese specialists. See more of "chảlụa" (炸肉) below. ],
• "gỏi" 膾 kuài (salad with minced meat) [ M 膾 kuài < MC kwaj < OC *kwa:ts ],
• "ruột" 乙 yǐ (arch. 'intestine'),
• "tôm" 鰕 xiā (prawn),
• "tép" 蝦 xiā (shrimp),
• "gà" 雞 jī (chicken) (SV kê) [ M 雞 < MC kiej < OC *ke: | ¶ j- ~ g-: ex. 寄 jì (ký) gởi | cf. (Amoy, Hainanese, Old Cant.): 'gàmái', 'gàmẹ' 雞母 jīmǔ (hen), 'gàtrống', 'gàcồ' 雞公 jīgōng (rooster). Note the indigenous reverse order of the structure { noun + adjective } ],
• "mèo" 貓 māo (cat) (SV miêu) [ M 貓 māo < MC maw < OC * mrhaw | According to Starostin, also read *mhraw, MC mew, id. Viet. mèo is colloquial; standard Sino-Vietnamese is miêu. || Note: in Vietnamese 'mèo' as 'mão' 卯 măo appears to be a Yue loanword – with the possibility that the whole Chinese zodiac table originated from the ancient indigenous people in China South. ],
• "chuột" 鼠 shǔ (mouse) (SV thử) [ M 鼠 shǔ < MC ʂo < OC *ɬhaʔ | Note: cf. 子 zǐ SV (1) tý, (2) tử, also VS 'chuột' (rat)],
• "trâu" 牛 níu (water buffallo) (SV ngưu) [ Modern M. 'cow', 水牛 for 'water buffallo'; also, in VS 'ngầu' (hefty) | M 牛 níu < MC ŋjəw < OC *ŋujə | FQ 語求 | According to Starostin, 牛 níu: bovine, cattle, cow, ox. For *ŋ- cf. Xiamen, Chaozhou gu2, Fuzhou ŋu2, Jianou niu2. || Note: like 'mão' 卯 máo, in Vietnamese 'trâu' as 'sửu' 丑 zhou appears to be a Yue loanword – with the possibility that the whole Chinese zodiac table originated from the indigenous people in the ancient China South. ],
• "diều" 鷂 yào (kite) (SV ngao) [ M 鷂 yào < MC jɜw < OC *ɫaws | According to Starostin, kite (Han). Also read *L^aw, MC jew, Mand. ya:o 'a k. of pheasant' (Han). | Note: Modern M for 'kite' is 風箏 fēngzhēng. ],
• "chó" 狗 gǒu (dog) (SV cẩu) [ ~ VS cầy | M 狗 gǒu < MC kjəw < OC *ko:ʔ | Note: proto-Viet **kro. This is a loanword in Chinese while 犬 quán VS 'cún' (puppy) is its native form for its early ideograph form. ],
• "cọp" 虎 hǔ (tiger) (SV hổ) [ ~ VS 'hùm' | M 虎 hǔ < MC xo < OC *xla:ʔ | Note: proto-Viet **ku ~ 虎 hǔ. According to Starostin, VS 'hùm' could be from 熊 xióng (bear). However, An Chi (Ibid. 2016) posited 甝 hán SV 'hàm' ~> 'hằm' for ''hùm' | Note: See 熊 xióng below for 'gấu' (bear) ],
• "gấu' 熊 xióng (bear) (SV hùng) [ Vh @ M 熊 xióng < MC ɦʊŋ < OC *whǝm | According to Bernhard Kargren, 熊 xióng: MC ɣịung < AC g'iung < OC * g'ium. The ordinary Chinese word for 'bear' (ursus) is Mandarin hiung, delevoped from a 6th century ɣịung, which in its turn developed from a still older g'iung < Archaic Chinese g'ium (by disimilation: a labial final - was immpossible after labial main vowel -u- (cf. OC *pịm 'wind' > AC pịung.) That 'bear' really was a g'ium and not a g'iung in pre-Christian times is shown by a form in the Swatow dialect, the most archaic, most peculiar of all Chinese dialects. (Philology and Ancient China, pp. 135, 136 ) || Per Starostin, black bear (Ursus torquatus). Viet. hùm means 'tiger', but is phonetically very close to OC *whǝm 'bear' and probably borrowed from this source; regular Sino-Viet. is hùng. Cf. also Viet. vâm 'elephant'? ],
• "voi" 為 wēi (elephant) [ Viet. © 'voi' ~> @ M 為 wēi, wéi | M 為 wēi, wéi < MC we < OC *waj | FQ 薳支 | MC description A: 止合三平支云; B: 止合三去寘云 | According Starostin, An *-s-derivate from the word is OC *waj-s, MC we\ (FQ 于偽), Pek. wèi 'for, on behalf', Viet. vì, vi.. For initial *w- cf. Min forms: MC we - Xiamen, Chaozhou, Fuzhou ui2; MC we, Xiamen ui6, Fuzhou oi6, Jianou ue6. Shuowen defines the character as 'female monkey'. Although this word is not attested in literature, it may be compared to PST *qwaj reflected in Kach. (D) woi monkey; Moshang vi-sil; Rawang jəwe; Trung a-koi; Kadu kwe id. (STC No 314 *(b)woy; dubious are Mikir ki-pi and Miri si-be). Thomas: voi | Shuowen : 母猴也.其為禽好爪.下腹為母猴形.王育曰.爪象形也.古文為.象兩母猴相對形. | GSR 0027 a-e || Cf. VS derivatives 'mới', 'hãy', 'rồi' \ ¶ w- ~ h-, m-, r- ], etc.,

and the list continues on for many other fundamental derivatives with extended meanings,

• "ruốc" 肉 ròu (meat) [ VS 'nhục' = VS "thịt" 膱 zhí (SV thức) ] as opposed to "ruốc" 蟹 xiè (small long-legged crab) and its variants:
• "ghẹ" 蟹 xiè (small long-legged crab), and variants
• "riêu (rêu)" 蟹 xiè (baby crab),
• "cua" 蟹 xiè (crab),
• "cáy" 蟹 xiè (crab),
• "bún" 粉 fěn (vermicelli) [ cf. 粉條 fěntiáo: (1) búntàu (mungbean vermicelli), (2) phởtiếu (rice noodles), (3) hủtiếu (rice noodles) ], and its variants:
• "bột" 粉 fěn (flour),
• "phở" 粉 fěn (noodle),
• "phấn" 粉 fěn (chalk),
• "bụi'' 粉 fěn (dust),

as more of them will be emumerated later in this survey.

Many of those fundamental items in Vietnamese clearly show traces of both common origin and identifiable loanwords at the same time in both Vietnamese and Chinese. We could postulate that they likely evolved from the same root for the reason that some of them are basic words that should not be borrowed or before loanwords were introduced. To be treated as loanwords they must be obviously of Chinese or "Yue" origin from either direction. While there were studies on loanwords as of Mon-Khmer origin conducted by Austroasiatic theorists in our contemporary period, in this paper they were treated as of "Yue" origin, for instance, 'sông' 江 jiāng (river), 'dừa' 椰 yé (coconut), 'chuối' 蕉 jiāo (banana), etc.

In addition to those basic words of the same root, there is no doubt that the Vietnamese language has acquired many Chinese words of the same basic nature similar to those examples cited above since the ancient times. Historically, that phenomenon could be interpreted as a result of linguistic proccess of active adoption – for instance, having been picked up by native wives of Chinese foot soldiers who had stationed in the ancient Annamese colony, and taught by local scholars at village schools – that continuously went on long after Vietnam's gaining independence from China. As late as of China's Ming Dynatsy in the 15th century (Nguyễn Tài Cẩn. 1979) while it ruled Annam from 1407 to 1427, as Chinese carved wooden tablets were unearthed in Vietnam in the late 1970's with loanwords found to be in late SInitic Vietnamese usages, which reveal that a certain evidence of strong Chinese linguistic influence with the Ming Dynasty's Chinese lexicons were still actively adoped.

It is probably that those Chinese words creeping into the Vietnamese vocabulary could probably have appeared in some form of vernacular Mandarin, which is a recurring phenomenon similar to what is still going on at present time. For example, Sino-Vietnamese usage adapted from modern Chinese specially in Vietnamese Northern dialect had been steadily growing since the division of Vietnam into two divided states of North and South from 1954, and kept expanding long after her national unification in April of 1975, which solidly formed a new set of modern Sinitic-Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese terms semantically much more close to contemporary Chinese, such as SV 'khẩntrương' 緊張 jǐnzhāng (urgent) used casually in a milder sense of 'quickly' than what is much more originally intense in Chinese equal to the sole connotation of VS 'căngthẳng' (strained), SV 'đảmbảo' 擔保 dànbăo (guarantee) instead of 'bảođảm' as used in the south, and other similar loanwords such as SV 'sựcố' 事故 shìgù (incident), SV 'đạocụ' 道具 dàojù (stage prop), 'khaisân' 開場 kāichăng (start a show), etc.

Other than new loanwords or specific deviation from old usages, overall the Chinese linguistic influence on the whole Vietnamese in this respect has been a continual process even in the modern time with those up-to-date peculiar words such as

• "chuồn" 滾 gǔn (get out) [ Also, VS 'cút' as 'partially' cognate to 'cútđi' 去去 qùqù (Get out of here!) ],
• "lặn" 溜 lìu (slip out),
• "khôngdámđâu" 不敢當 bùgăndàng (it's not so),
• "nóichuyện" 聊天 liáotiān (talk),
• "bahoa" 大話 dàhuà (pompous),
• "baphải" 廢話 fèihuò (be all mouth),
• "ẩutả" 苟且 gǒuqiě (unattentively),
• "bạtmạng" 拼命 pìnmìng (recklessly),
• "bênhvực" 幫忙 bāngmáng (take side) [ cf. 包庇 pāopì ],
• "bậnbiệc" 忙活 mánghuó (busy),
• "dêxồm" 婬蟲 yínchóng (lecherous),
• "phaocâu" 屁股 pìgǔ (chicken's butt as a delicacy),
• "tiếtcanh" 血羹 xuěgēng (concentrated duck blood broth as a delicacy),
• "suỷcảo" 水餃 shuíjiăo (dumpling),
• "mìchính" 味精 wèijīng (monosodium glutamate,)
• "tầmbậy" (#baxàm) 三八 sānbā (nonsense) [ Note: a degratory term to redicule women on their International Women's Day in March 8 ] ,
• "biiểutình" 表情 biăoqíng (demonstration) [ cf. modern M 遊行 yóuxíng (SV duhành, VS diễuhành) ],
• "xơitái" 吃生 chīshēng (to eat raw, or 'to butcher', configuratively in VS) [ Also, "ăntái". cf. 生 shēng, Hai. /te1/ for 'đẻ' or 'give birth'. Cant 食生 /shejk8shang1/] ,
• "chếtyểu" #夭折 yāozhé (die young),
• "trúnggió" 中風 zhòngfēng (folk concept equivalent to 'heart attack' or 'stroke'),
• "ôngchủ" #主公 zhǔgōng (master) [ cf. 老闆 láobăn ],
• "tàixế" 司機 sījī (chauffer),
• "láixe" 駕車 jiàchē (drive a car) [ cf. 'chạyxe' ],
• "ngânquỹ" 銀櫃 yínguì (fund) [ in place of 基金 jījīn ],
• "băngtần" 頩道 píndào (TV channel), etc.

How the emegence of many words in these list have come about could be a matter of speculation because border crossings bustled back and forth between China and Vietnam on land routes and sea passages incessantly up until 1949 happened to be open with no entry or exit visa needed on both sides under the nose of the French colonialists. For example, many among Chiang Kai-shek's Guomingtang's troops of undisloced numbers arrived in North VIetm in 1945 after the end of the World War II to disarm surrendered Japanese troops stayed behind after the withdrawal of the Chinese army had left. Besides, linguistically, altogether the free movement undoubtedly had injected vernacular forms of Southern Chinese dialects from Yunnan, Guangxi, anf Guangdong from into the Vietnamese vocabulary. Based on the articulation of those words they sound like some twisted or imitated forms of "accented Mandarin" or, at best, 'pidginization' by the common populace, so to speak, for their deviation in both modern Vietnamese spoken forms and orthograpy, e.g. for 國 guó, SV 'quốc' /wəwk˧˥/ vs. 'quấc' /kwəwk˧˥/ as opposed to VS 'nước' /nɨək˧˥/ (country). At present time, should anybody spend time to observe people's activities living along borders of both countries will get the idea being discussed.

For those words of basic stratum that seem to be cognate to those in both groups of the Mon-Khmer and Chinese languages, the underlined commonality purposely raised here is provisional pending more substantial work needed on linguistic genetic affinity of both Chinese and Vietnamese. This study only attempts to establish a lexically meaningful connection between the Vietnamese and Chinese languages by exploring and elaborating on the significance of the existence of so many Vietnamese words in all linguistic categories that apparrently have Chinese roots, dated as far back as hundreds of years before the first invading infantrymen of the Han Empire ever set foot on the NamViệt (南越 NánYuè) soil. (H1)

As issues of linguistic family only come up in the course of stuffing into this paper both historical sypnosis and linguistic evidences with a touch on several lexical aspects, this Sinitic-Vietnamese study, in a sense, can be seen as an attempt to establish kinship directly from Yue to both Vietnamese and Chinese in both directions, i.e., mixture of the Yue people of ancient states in China South and Han colonists in ancient Annam.

Given the enormous amount of Sinitic-Vietnamese vocabulary plus some other Mon-Khmer basic cognates undecidedly if they all originated from ancient Yue languages or not, linguistically speaking, what makes Vietnamese as it appears today holistically should matter the most, hence, so do any studies of Vietnamese etymology that shows Vietnamese characteristically is undoubtedly closer to Chinese than any languages within Mon-Khmer linguistic sub-family themselves, or even any Chinese dialects to any Sino-Tibetan languages, including Tibetan itself.

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