Talk:Vietnamese language

Writing systems

I have again reverted the addition of Chữ Hán to the "Writing systems" field of the infobox. A writing system is not just a collection of symbols, but also the conventions by which those symbols are used to represent the language. Chữ Nôm was a system for writing Vietnamese using Chinese characters for Sino-Vietnamese loans and some native words, and many characters invented in Vietnam for other words. The Chinese script was used in Vietnam, but to write Chinese rather than Vietnamese. Kanguole 13:54, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

It seems that you do not understand very well the writing systems of the Vietnamese people.It's as simple as this, Chữ Nôm is used to write pure Vietnamese words, and Chữ Hán are used by us to write Sino-Vietnamese words that are not Chinese as you think, and to write a complete Vietnamese text, we have to use all of the two system of characters to form Hán Nôm. Choixong di (talk) 16:45, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Chữ Nôm refers to the whole writing system, using both Chinese characters and locally created ones in a particular way. If you look at the Tale of Kiều example of this system in the "Writing systems" section, you will see Chinese characters being used both for Sino-Vietnamese words and for native Vietnamese words, and locally created characters being used for other native Vietnamese words. Kanguole 17:52, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

Um, that's what I meant, but just now, you said "The Chinese script was used in Vietnam, but to write Chinese rather than Vietnamese" your first answer and your next answer you don't seem to match very well, what do you mean? Choixong di (talk) 18:33, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

I'm sure you know that Vietnamese intellectuals wrote most prose in Chinese until the early 20th century. Kanguole 18:40, 3 December 2021 (UTC)

they write in Chữ Hán and read in Sino-Vietnamese, I already told you this Choixong di (talk) 00:04, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

They wrote in the Chinese language. When they read out the text, they used Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations for the characters. Other users of literary Chinese could also read their works, though they would use different pronunciations. Kanguole 11:08, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Um, you mean Vietnamese people write in Chữ Hán also means they write in Chinese language, so Japanese people write in Kanji and Koreans write in Hanja then both are considered to be written in Chinese language right? Choixong di (talk) 16:46, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

What language do you think Việt Nam vong quốc sử was written in? And Koreans did do most formal writing in Chinese until the late 19th century. It's not possible to write Korean in hanja (ignoring the ancient Idu, which was very awkward and saw limited use). Kanguole 17:35, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

I think the confusion might arise from a narrow definition of Chữ Nôm as only comprising innovative characters for native Vietnamese words. But Chữ Nôm is usually described as a writing system; this writing system consists of innovative characters which are the hallmark of Chữ Nôm, but also characters that are identical to Chữ Hán characters (mostly for nativized loanwords, I guess). So a text written in Vietnamese in the Chữ Nôm writing system will inevitably contain characters that are also used in Chữ Hán writing, but it's still Chữ Nôm. This is what I have gathered from elementary sources such as Đình Hòa Nguyễn's chapter about Vietnamese in Comrie's The World's Major Languages. –Austronesier (talk) 17:38, 4 December 2021 (UTC)

Sino-Vietnamese words were written with Chữ Hán, but the Vietnamese language cannot. Kanguole 18:44, 17 March 2022 (UTC)

@Suoperidol: The answer to "How are Vietnamese documents and documents written over thousands of years?"[1] is that there are not thousands of years of writing in the Vietnamese language – Vietnamese intellectuals did all their formal writing in literary Chinese until the early 20th century. It wasn't possible to write in Vietnamese until the Nôm script was created.

In addition, this edit replaced an accurate description of Nôm, per the sources and the rest of the section, with an inaccurate description. Kanguole 08:41, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole: So from this point of view, the Japanese kanji and Korean hanja systems are also not used to record those two languages, so why are they still included in the Korean language article and the Japanese language article on wikipedia? Suoperidol (talk) 09:34, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

You have not responded to what I wrote above. Japanese and Korean are different articles that are not our concern here – we are talking here about Vietnamese, and should follow what the sources say about this language.

I repeat that your description of Nôm is inaccurate, contradicting the sources and the rest of the section. For example, it does not cover the usage of an unchanged Chinese character 些 to write the native Vietnamese word ta 'our'. Kanguole 10:13, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole: I already replied, I give examples of languages ​​that have a similar relationship with Chinese as Vietnamese and Chinese, and from your point of view, Chinese characters are not used to record those languages? The use of an unchanged Chinese character to write the native Vietnamese word is just one way to create Chữ Nôm, you can't take the minority to represent the majority, the word "ta" even has 3 writing style Suoperidol (talk) 15:18, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Old Japanese was written with the Man'yōgana script; modern Japanese is written with a mixed script; Old Korean was written with the Idu, Hyangchal and Gugyeol scripts; until recently, Korean was written with a mixed script; the pre-20th-century writing system for Vietnamese was Chữ Nôm. (Of course, all of those places also used literary Chinese, written with Chinese characters.)

Check the sources. Chữ Nôm refers to the writing system as a whole, not just the symbols, but how those symbols are used to represent the Vietnamese language. Chinese characters do not constitute a writing system that can represent Vietnamese. Kanguole 15:58, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole: The writing systems you talk about are still basically Chinese character. The Man'yōgana writing system is still Chinese character, but they are used to denote both original Chinese words and Old Japanese words with similar meanings. The Korean Indu and Hyangchal writing systems are similar to some methods of making Chữ Nôm, using Chinese characters to record native words, and even Koreans assume these are Korean readings of Chinese characters. As for the Gugyeol system, they are just the classical Chinese reading of the Koreans, similar to the Văn ngôn system of the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese writing system before the 20th century is Chữ Nôm and Chữ Hán, they are used mixed together, the Hán writing (Văn ngôn) of the Vietnamese can be considered as a script similar to Gugyeol you just gave as an example. Chữ Hán without forming a writing system that can represent Vietnamese, then how can Hanja and Kanji become a writing system that represents Japanese and Korean? Suoperidol (talk) 16:47, 9 July 2022 (UTC)

Your descriptions of all of these systems are incorrect. They are all based on Chinese characters, but in characterizing them as "basically Chinese character" you are leaving out the essential characteristics that make each of them function in different ways.

More to the point, the text you are pushing diverges from how linguistic sources describe the Nôm script. In this edit, you removed

Vietnamese was historically written using Chữ Nôm, a logographic script using Chinese characters (Chữ Hán) to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, together with many locally-invented characters to represent other words.

which accurately summarizes the corresponding section of this article and the cited source (Li pp102–103) and replaced it with text that does neither. More sources can be found in the body of the article and subarticles, e.g.:

• DeFrancis, Colonialism and language policy in Viet Nam pp24–25
• Nguyễn Ðình-Hoà, Vietnamese pp7–8
• Trần Trọng Dương, "Graphemic borrowings and transformations from Sinitic" pp45–49

Kanguole 09:44, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Indeed, it would be akin to saying that "Latin, Etruscan, and Cyrillic are just different versions of the Greek alphabet". Nationalism has essentially blinded many people from seriously debating these topics in Korean and Vietnamese history. Chữ Nôm are based on Chinese characters in the same way that the Cyrillic alphabet is based on the Greek alphabet, it is different enough to be considered its own writing system, we don't call Cyrillic a "locally invented Bulgarian version of the Greek alphabet". --Donald Trung (talk) 10:14, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Just a thought: why don't we make it simple and follow good sources like Thompson (1991, s. Bibliography) or Brunelle (2015) ("Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt)", in: M. Jenny & P. Sidwell (eds.) The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages, Brill) who just say that Vietnamese was written in a Chinese-derived script called Chữ Nôm? Remember, this is the lead-section, so we can actually do without cumbersome details such as the fact that some characters are identical to Chinese characters, while others are innovated. And if there is consensus that we need to do so, do we then really need to confuse our readers by (IMO unduly) mentioning the Vietnamese name for the script that is used to write Chinese when this article is about Vietnamese?

I am aware of the fact that some authors restrict the term "Chữ Nôm" to only designate the innovated inventory in Chinese script-based Vietnamese writing, but this is not common usage. –Austronesier (talk) 12:10, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Quotes from the works mentioned earlier:

Brunelle (2015): Paradoxically, the largest Austroasiatic language is typologically very divergent from its Austroasiatic neighbors because intensive contact with Chinese dramatically restructured its lexicon and affected its phonology. Vietnamese was also written in a Chinese derived script, chữ nôm, from the 14th to the early 20th century, but is now exclusively written in quốc ngữ, a Latin script developed by Portuguese Catholic missionaries from the 16th century and first fully codified in Alexandre De Rhodes (1651)’s Vietnamese-Latin-Portuguese dictionary (p. 909).

Thompson (1991): The system of chữ nôm makes use of Chinese characters, either simply or in various combinations not occurring in Chinese writing. Sometimes the Chinese writing is used unchanged to suggest either the meaning or the pronunciation of a Vietnamese syllable. (Typically each Chinese character represents a syllable.) However, a large proportion of the characters combine two or more of the original Chinese elements together, one part suggesting the meaning, another the pronunciation (p. 53).

So these sources refer to the script as Chữ Nôm in its entirety, not just the part of the inventory that is has been innovated. Consequently, characters that happen to be identical to their counterpart in Chữ Hán are nevertheless an integral part of Chữ Nôm. Just like Latin capital "A" is part of the Latin alphabet, and not a Greek letter in a "hybrid" alphabet, even if the Latin latter hasn't changed the shape taken from its Greek source. –Austronesier (talk) 15:53, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole: hm, isn't it on Man'yōgana's wikipedia page that this "is an ancient writing system that uses Chinese characters to represent the Japanese language"? In Idu's wikipedia page, doesn't it say that this "is an archaic writing system represents the Korean language using Hanja"? And if the Hyangchal and Gugyeol system are really two types of script, then why can't the names of the two Hyangchal and Gugyeol be written by those two types of script but must use Hanja and Hangul? Put those aside, in your opinion, you think that because until recently, Korean was written with a mixed script, so Hanja was included in the list of Korean writing systems, not until recently Vietnamese was also written in a mixed script of Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm, so at why not add Chữ Hán to the list of Vietnamese writing systems? Suoperidol (talk) 15:13, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

Do you have a source that calls the Chinese-derived pre-Quốc ngữ writing system of Vietnamese (= Chữ Nôm) "mixed" or "hybrid"? A source, and not just musings based on analogies drawn from other WP articles? –Austronesier (talk) 15:53, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

@Austronesier: No, I mean that in the past, Vietnamese people used a mixture of both Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm to form Hán-Nôm, but I don't say that Chữ Nôm is a mixed script Suoperidol (talk) 16:02, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

So, you still don't have a source for that opinion of yours that "Vietnamese people used a mixture of both Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm" when I have presented you two sources that state the opposite? And based on an unsourced opinion, you keep on re-reverting (= edit-warring) and inserting unsourced material to the infobox that isn't supported anywhere else in the article by a reliable source either?

Here's another long quote from a source cited in the article (DeFrancis 1977):

The result was a new script, Chinese in appearance and yet not Chinese, which came to be called Chu Nom or simply Nom in Vietnamese [...] This writing consists of two main categories of characters. One comprises what may be called 'simple borrowings'. Characters in this category are borrowed from Chinese for their phonetic value to represent Vietnamese words with more or less the same sound. Some of these 'simple borrowings' are used to represent words of the same meaning, and indeed many were loan words from Chinese in the first place [...] The second category comprises what may be called 'composite creations'. These are new Nom characters made by combining two Chinese characters (p. 24–25).

See, there is no mention of a "mixture" of Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm, but two basic categories of characters that make up the Chữ Nôm script. –Austronesier (talk) 20:26, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

I have given three more sources for the same point above.

In addition, Nguyễn Đình Hoà "Graphemic borrowings from Chinese: the case of chữ nôm – Vietnam's demotic script" discusses some of the many classification schemes for characters used in the Nôm script that have been proposed. Those of Nguyễn Tài Cẩn and Lê Văn Quán make a primary distinction between borrowed and newly created characters (like DeFrancis above), with the former including characters for SV words, characters chosen for sound and characters chosen for meaning. Nguyễn Ngọc San makes a primary distinction between phonetic and non-phonetic characters, with characters for SV words buried deep within the former. Kanguole 22:29, 10 July 2022 (UTC)

@Austronesier: The author doesn't mention it doesn't mean it doesn't exist, Vietnamese people who don't know to write a traditional written text with the same content as the Chữ Quốc ngữ must use both Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm, forming a mixture of Hán - Nôm to write, I thought you must know this already. Not to mention the part you quoted is that the author is talking about the formation and development of Chữ Nôm, then of course the author will not mention mixed writing Suoperidol (talk) 02:32, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

The passage quoted by Austronesier is so clear that further explanation seems pointless, but I will try. The author is talking about the whole script or writing system for Vietnamese, which he says is called Chữ Nôm. He says that this script uses two kinds of characters: unchanged Chinese characters and new creations, with the former including characters for Sino-Vietnamese words. This is typical of the treatment in linguistic works, of which several are cited above: Vietnamese texts were written using a writing system, Chữ Nôm, which employed characters of various kinds. It directly contradicts your assertion that Vietnamese was written with two writing systems. It this point, you would need to produce expert sources saying that The Tale of Kiều, for example, was written in two scripts. Kanguole 08:54, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole: "Characters in this category are borrowed from Chinese for their phonetic value to represent Vietnamese words with more or less the same sound", did you not read carefully or did you not understand? The author mentioned that these characters were borrowed from Chinese to have phonetic value to represent Vietnamese words with more or less the same sound, but did not say that they represent Sino-Vietnamese words. Or do you mean this paragraph: "Some of these 'simple borrowings' are used to represent words of the same meaning, and indeed many were loan words from Chinese in the first place", Hmm, I didn't understand what the author meant when I wrote the paragraph. By the way, the author is mentioning that some words represent synonymsinclude both pure Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese words right? Erm, you know that Tales of Kieu takes its plot from the Chinese novel Jin Yun Qiao right? Then surely you know that Mr. Nguyễn Du did not change the character's name, right? We can see with the naked eye that the names of characters such as Thúy Kiều 翠翹, Kim Trọng 金重, Thúy Vân 翠雲, Vương Quan 王觀,... are all in Chữ Hán. Suoperidol (talk) 17:07, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

I hope that you now understand that quotation, and that it supports the text you removed and contradicts your position. Several other expert sources mentioned above say the same.

By the Wikipedia:Verifiability policy, this is where you need to produce expert sources supporting your assertion that these Vietnamese-language texts were written in two scripts. Kanguole 18:03, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole:

A person who is fluent in Chinese and Chinese characters who does not know Vietnamese and cannot read Nom literature (such as a Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or even Western scholar) when looking closely at a text of a Nom work, it is completely possible to recognize which characters are familiar Chinese charactersand which characters are "strange" characters that they have never known.

(Hán Nôm Magazine; No. 6(79); P.5-20), Is this enough for you to know that in Nôm literature works still use Chinese characters? Suoperidol (talk) 19:25, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

No, this is certainly not enough. All sources we have provided explicitly tell you that Vietnamese was written in Chữ Nôm script before the introduction of the modified Latin alphabet. The Chữ Nôm inventory comprises characters that are were taken over unchanged from the Chinese script – yet the writing system is Chữ Nôm. So deliver a source that explicitly says that Vietnamese was written in Chữ Hán and Chữ Nôm. Otherwise, you are disruptively defending the introduction of unsourced content in Wikipedia. –Austronesier (talk) 20:14, 11 July 2022 (UTC)

@Austronesier: I have added explicit source to the page Suoperidol (talk) 07:43, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

You have misread the first source (which is not by Sercome, the book's editor, but rather Phan Le Ha, Vu Hai Ha and Bao Dat). Here is the quoted statement with a bit more context:

Up until the 13th century, 'Chinese with its Han script was used as the [only] official language' in Vietnam (Pham 1991, 1994; cited in Do 2006, p. 2). In the 13th century an adapted writing system known as Nom was initiated making use of new phonetic elements to denote the tones in the Vietnamese language. ... In the 17th century a number of European Jesuit missionaries travelled to Vietnam to spread Christianity. To facilitate communication for this mission, they initiated the creation of a coding method to record the Vietnamese phonetic system in Romanized script, called Quoc Ngu. With this addition, up to the early 20th century in Vietnam, there co-existed three writing systems in the administration comprising Han, Nom, and Quoc Ngu.

That is, three writing systems: Han for Chinese, Nom and Quoc Ngu for Vietnamese.

The second source (Hannas) merely states that Nom was based on Chinese characters, which is not in contention. Kanguole 08:05, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole: Maybe the first source I am wrong but the second source is not, the author also talks about the use of Chinese characters to record Vietnamese, this will not be disputed if you do not think that the author is only talking about Chữ Nôm based on Chinese characters Suoperidol (talk) 11:22, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

"Maybe" you are wrong? The first source you cited actually contradicts your position.

So does your second source (Hannas). After the introductory sentences you quoted, we find more detail:

The application of Chinese writing to Vietnamese, called chữ nôm ("southern writing," nôm < nam) as distinct from chữ nho ("writing of the scholars," i.e., classical Chinese), differed from its application to Korean and Japanese in three other respects.

Since you're having trouble reading these sources, perhaps it would be better to bring them here rather than pasting them straight into the article. Kanguole 12:20, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

I would also add that on English-language Wikipedia, Vietnamese-language words need to be tagged with {{lang|vi}} and English-language explanations are more accessible to the readership. Kanguole 12:26, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

@Kanguole: ? It seems that the part you quoted has nothing to do with your point of view, if not a contradiction. Suoperidol (talk) 20:03, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

It says that Vietnamese was written with one script, chữ nôm, not the two you have been claiming. Kanguole 20:19, 12 July 2022 (UTC)

Your latest source[2] is an aside in a chapter "English in Vietnam". As the title indicates, the topic of the source is not the Vietnamese language or its scripts. It is not an expert source on Vietnamese writing systems, and makes a series of errors: Vietnamese was not written at all during Chinese rule (with Chinese characters or anything else), and chữ Nôm is not Sino-Vietnamese. Kanguole 08:45, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

@Suoperidol: When you do your Google Books search for Vietnamese writing system before the 20th century, you get back books on a variety of subjects, from traditional medicine to travel guides to linguistics. Just being books does not make them reliable sources for a particular claim: one must weigh their authors' expertise in the subject area of the claim. In-depth treatment in an academic book of paper about the Vietnamese language or writing system is obviously much more reliable on that topic that a passing remark in a work about something else, be it traditional medicine or the modern use of English in Vietnam. There is much more on this at Wikipedia:Reliable sources.

In addition, relying on searches in this way makes it easy to miss the context of the statement, e.g. whether it is a passing remark or an in-depth treatment, what the author means by the terms they are using, even who is the author of the statement being quoted. For example, some of the quotations you've used have come from separately authored chapters of books, and you have missed the title (and therefore topic) of the chapter being cited and its author(s), incorrectly attributing the remark to the editors of the book. Kanguole 22:16, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

The latest source is another example of a passing remark in a book about another topic, this time the history of warfare in Vietnam. Again, this is not an authoritative source on Vietnamese writing systems, in contrast to the half-dozen linguistic sources discussed above. Kanguole 17:29, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

I should add (to do justice to the source) that Tucker (1999) actually does not make wrong claims. He talks about writing systems but not about which languages were recorded by them. The unmodified Chinese writing system obviously continued to be used in independent Vietnam, but NB to write Chinese, as all expert sources confirm.–Austronesier (talk) 17:58, 15 July 2022 (UTC)

The latest source is another passing remark, this time in a section about the modern Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in a survey of the writing systems of the world. This is a tertiary source, drawing on the expertise of subject specialists. The author is clearly not an expert in the history of Vietnamese writing, and it is unsurprising that he makes errors. But surely you know that "an official version used in government (chữ nho 'learned script')" was literary Chinese. Kanguole 10:20, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Of course, it is used to write in the Chinese literary style, but isn't it also used in the local style? In your opinion, Kanji and Hanja are just Chinese literature Suoperidol (talk) 09:22, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Your question is unclear. The issue is what language chữ nho documents are written in, and the answer is Chinese, not Vietnamese. (There is also a long history of Chinese-language texts created in Korea, and to a lesser extent Japan.) Kanguole 09:31, 19 July 2022 (UTC)

Arbitrary break

I have reverted again yet another attempt[3] to introduce the spurious claim that chữ nho (= Chữ Hán) was used to write Vietnamese. The source cited to back up this claim (Li 2020, btw a solid expert source of the kind we need here), however, does not say anything in support of it. To the contrary, Li goes at length on pages 101–102 to describe how chữ nho and the language written in it (= Classical Chinese with a particular local pronunciation) were used for administrative and scholarly purposes until the 19th century: "chữ nho was not just a script or a set of characters but should be more accurately understood as a written language, that is, Classical Chinese, encoded in the Chinese script" (emphasis added). Only at the end of the section that deals with chữ nho and the Chinese language, Li transitions to the following section that covers Chữ Nôm (emphasis added): "A modified script based on the Chinese writing system came into existence and began to be used to write the Vietnamese language". That "modified script", obviously, is Chữ Nôm. –Austronesier (talk) 08:08, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

C1 and C2 tones swapped

This article says that hoi is C2 and nga is C1, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#Tone has it the other way round (C1=hoi, C2= nga) on multiple occasions. Which article is right? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.114.245.42 (talk) 17:07, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

j

what happened to the proto viet muong phoneme /j/? (it says there that it merged with d (/z/) but later in middle vietnamese section it says it has dissapeared). please clarify 2A00:23C7:5882:8201:B1D4:4AD0:AB80:E5C9 (talk) 16:59, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Old tone classification

There’s a myth that Chinese-based tone names have meaning; they don’t. Like Vietnamese tone names, Chinese tone names are self-referential (and therefore spelling the fourth class “rù”, i.e., in Mandarin, is an oxymoron) and don’t have intrinsic meaning. 仄 simply means any tone that’s not 平 (meaning any tone in the first class; it does not really mean “level”) and does not really mean “sharp”.—al12si (talk) 18:38, 4 May 2023 (UTC)

Injunction added to the lead

I have again reverted the addition of the following to the lead:

Transliteration from modern Vietnamese into chữ Nôm or Han script is highly discouraged, because many words now don't have a Nôm or Chinese counterparts.

While I agree with the sentiment, it is out of place in the lead, which is supposed to be a summary of the key points of the article and an overview of the subject. It is hard to imagine an overview of the language published anywhere else including such a statement.

It reads like a Manual of Style injunction directed at Wikipedia editors in support of edits like this[4]. I would suggest that an appropriate place for it would be somewhere in WP: space. Kanguole 17:46, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Hmm... where should I put that sentence in then? Maybe at the "Chữ Nôm" section? I think it is necessary to say so somewhere in the article because as a native Vietnamese, seeing people putting both the Vietnamese and Nôm name is extremely annoying and puzzling, because that's not how Vietnamese works. CactiStaccingCrane (talk) 17:50, 14 May 2023 (UTC)

Your beef is with Wikipedia editors. You should direct this at them, not the readers, who would never think of using an obsolete script. There is no MOS:VIETNAM, but maybe there should be one. Kanguole 18:00, 14 May 2023 (UTC)