In the past weeks, to prepare for my teaching presentation as well as to learn more about the language itself, I started to delve into more grammar and history related studies. A few things I learned include Vietnamese grammar patterns and a brief history of the language. Vietnamese syntax, similar to Chinese, English, and about 40% of the world’s languages, primarily following the Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) word order. For example, the phrase “tôi đi đến trường” literally translates to “I go to school” with “tôi” as the subject “I”, “đi đến” as the verb “go to”, and “trường” as the direct object “school”. However, in Vietnamese, word order can often be arranged to be “topic prominent”, which resembles languages like Japanese and Korean and unlike “subject prominent” languages like English. For example:
1. “Tôi đã làm xong bài toán này” is a subject driven sentence that means “I have finished this math problem.”
2. “Bài toán này tôi làm xong rồi” is a topic leading sentence that translates to “as for this math problem, I have already finished it.”
One visible difference between the Vietnamese and English language is that in Vietnames, each syllable is separated in Vietnamese, not each word. Additionally, some words are single syllables and will carry a different meaning if attached to another syllable. As a result, words can get long and confusing in writing as there’s not really any indication where a word ends and another begins. For example, the word “bàn cờ” means “chessboard” together but individuality, “bàn” means “table” and “cờ” is “flag”.
This phenomenon is due to the fact that before the adoption of the Latin script, written Vietnamese used “Chữ nôm” / “Chữ Nam” / “Quốc m” (the word changes depending on the region) which are just logographic characters similar to Chinese — which makes sense as Vietnamese was heavily influenced by China like the majority of Eastern Asian. Just like Chinese, each “Chữ nôm” character has its own (but not necessarily unique) definition but can carry on a different definition when combined with other character(s), and when Vietnam adopted the Latin script, the practice simply transferred from logographic characters into the modified Latin alphabet that is used today.
Over 3,000 years ago two communities joined together in the river deltas of Vietnam. During this conjunction of communities, the people created a shared language called Viet-Muong. This language eventually developed two dialects: the lowland dialect and the highland dialect. Later, around 111 A.D. China annexed one of the Vietnamese river deltas. During this period the Chinese created an administrative system based on Chinese characters and the lowland dialect. This system produced the basis for Vietnamese language by creating the Chữ nôm script which was half ideographic and half phonetic. Furthermore, due to the long period under Chinese rule, The Vietnamese language had many borrowed or loan words from Chinese vocabulary that retained some aspects of the original reading while Vietnamized at the same time. An example would be:
Ready: Chuẩn bị [t͡ɕuə˧˩ be˨˧] = 準備 [Zhǔnbèi]
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Hi Han, thanks for the sharing and it is interesting to learn about the history of Chinese influences on Vietnamese. Regarding subject and topic particles in Korean, I'm very confused by them and couldn't really tell the difference. Also, it is interesting to know that there are different languages that were influenced by Chinese but they all developed different language structures at the same time.
That is so cool! I am currently learning Korean which is more complicated as the order of the sentence is SOV with the verb at the end. But it is really interesting to see how both Korea and Vietnam were culturally affected by China but the grammar can still be different!
It is very interesting to know the Vietnamese language had many borrowed or loan words from Chinese vocabulary. Because I am learning Korean right now there are also a lot of Chinese words too. For the example you give, Chuẩn bị [t͡ɕuə˧˩ be˨˧] = 準備 [Zhǔnbèi] which means prepare, and Japanese also used the same word, for example, 準備する junbi surum, which also means prepare.