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Sino-Vietnamese words | ||
Tags: Vietnamese | Writing System | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5451 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes  Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 1 of 2 17 April 2010 at 10:18pm | IP Logged |
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I would like to ask the native speakers and the advanced students of the Vietnamese language. Are there many homophones in Sino-Vietnamese words? Are there so many that one would become confused without the context? Do you think the replace of the Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet in Vietnamese was helpful or detrimental?
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| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5756 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 2 21 April 2010 at 9:13am | IP Logged |
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Put it this way...there are nearly 100,000 Chinese characters recognised. Of this, only several thousand are actually ever used anymore. Nearly every Classical Chinese character has a Sino-Vietnamese reading. Of course, if you were to go through the entire list, there would be many characters that share a common syllable and tone. Without context, SV can get a bit confusing. However, since Vietnamese has more tones than Chinese (Mandarin) and also a richer sound inventory, the chances of a SV word with the same syllable and tone as another word, is relatively lower than to Mandarin. There would be very few situations where the SV is without context. SV words are used everyday in all fields.
As with Korean, Vietnamese ditched Chinese writing in favour of an alphabetic (a relatively phonetic) script. To me, every script type has its advantages and disadvantages. Obviously had Vietnamese not ditched the old Han-Nom writing system, it would first and foremost be much more time consuming than the current script and there would be a very clear showing of dependence upon Chinese culture. Every country has its own identity. However, the Han-Nom writing system could much more easily distinguish between homophones and is much more artistically imbued than the current writing system. With that being said, the current script is much easier and less costly to learn, more practical and suited to the modern language and even nationalists promoted this script. Even native Vietnamese has a lot of homophones which are quite easily distinguished. Edited by Qinshi on 21 April 2010 at 9:15am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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