# Chinese/Vietnamese: Their Relationship



## gao_yixing

GregHamburg said:


> Its interesting that Northern Vietnamese have the same pronounciation replace ment of "N" with "L". So they pronounce their capital as "Ha Loi" and the name of their Country as if it was written "Viet Lam".
> 
> 
> Greg


 
Yeah....Vietnamese is somehow similar to South Chinese dialects, or it used to be a dialect of China.(You know, North Vietnam was ruled by China directly in some periods of time.)
The nowadays Vietnamese is somewhat similar to Chinese and pronunciation, though it has been romanized.

Moderation Note:
Split from here.


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## I_like_my_TV

gao_yixing said:
			
		

> Yeah....Vietnamese is somehow similar to South Chinese dialects, or it used to be a dialect of China.


No, this is wrong. Chinese language has a profound influence on Vietnamese (similarly on Korean, Japanese as well) but the two are linguistically very different from each other. Also, due to the geographical proximity, the pronunciations of the two languages have quite a few features in common. Vietnamese and Chinese are only as close to each other as English and French are, in a manner of speaking.


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## Lugubert

I_like_my_TV said:


> [...] the pronunciations of the two languages have quite a few features in common. Vietnamese and Chinese are only as close to each other as English and French are, *in a manner of speaking*.


 
My bold.

I agree that *gao_yixing* is overstating the situation, but on the above quote:

What similarities in pronunciation do you find that are conspicuously closer than when comparing them to any other language?

I know no Vietnamese (yet), but from literature I've found Chinese influence in vocabulary and the "alternative" question pattern, but get the impression that the difference is more like between Swedish and Finnish - representing two widely different language families.

Can you prove your points? I'm really interested in learning more of those languages.


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## I_like_my_TV

Lugubert said:
			
		

> What similarities in pronunciation do you find that are conspicuously closer than when comparing them to any other language?


You're quite demanding, aren't you?  

Both are non-inflected, isolating languages; both employ tones to increase the number of syllables; the ranges of sounds are quite similar in the two languages (although Vietnamese has more tones and more final consonants compared to Mandarin, so Vietnamese is phonologically more complex).


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## vince

Vietnamese and the Chinese languages are unrelated, just like Spanish and Basque or Finnish and Swedish. Vietnamese possesses a lot of common vocabulary with southern Chinese languages, especially Cantonese, due to history of close contact. In fact, historically, the Chinese character for Viet and the character for Cantonese (Yue) was the same (though today it is different). They also both have tones.

The phenomenon of unrelated and distantly related languages gaining common features due to historical contact is not unique to Asia. If you look at Bulgarian, Greek, and Romanian, you'll also see similarities in vocabulary and grammar that don't exist for other members of the respective language families.

Vietnamese was once written in Chinese characters. Initially, like with most Cantonese speakers today, people just wrote Standard Chinese but pronounced the characters in the Vietnamese way. Later on, they switched to using Chinese characters but using the native grammar of Vietnamese. Then, they adopted the Latin alphabet after the arrival of the French.


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## doman

Brilliant post, Vince !


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## I_like_my_TV

vince said:
			
		

> Later on, they switched to using Chinese characters but using the native grammar of Vietnamese.


Not quite. The characters used in this system of writing (which is called "Chử Nôm") are adapted from / based on Chinese characters, and they are not Chinese characters.


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## panjabigator

I_like_my_TV said:


> Not quite. The characters used in this system of writing (which is called "Chử Nôm") are adapted from / based on Chinese characters, and they are not Chinese characters.



Do people still learn Chinese characters in Vietnam?


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## I_like_my_TV

> Do people still learn Chinese characters in Vietnam?


No, not as part of learning Vietnamese. Chinese characters are now learned as part of a foreign language. (However, there's a very tiny minority of scholars and monks who still learn Chinese characters as part of their training in some earlier Vietnamese literature written in Chinese (= "Hán Văn").)


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## Iarna_Alba

Hello there,
I don't think that the exchangable use of L and N is standard in Vietnamese language, though you can sometimes hear people say "Việt Lam" or "Hà Lội". That way of saying is often found in some villages in Northern Vietnam, and it is called "nói ngọng" in Vietnamese or "to mispronounce" in English.


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## Maurice92

vince said:


> Vietnamese and the Chinese languages are unrelated, just like Spanish and Basque or Finnish and Swedish.


 
Vietnamese and Chinese do not belong to the same language family !!
Chnese belongs to the Sini-Tibetan language family
Vietnamese belongs to the Austroasiatic family


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## Not being

I am really surprised at your knowledge here, also in the context that most of you here are not natives. Really admirable  Hope we all can discuss some interesting topics like this SOON.

PS: By the way, *Chữ*, _not_ Chử. That's all.


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## Bilbo Baggins

I thought that Mandarin directly influenced all the languages of French Indochina.


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## Maurice92

The chinese have ocuupied Vietnam during thousand years and also the Chinese culture , namely philosophy,was adopted by Vietnamese very longtime ago ; it's then not surprising that a good part of the Vietnamese words are from Chinese origin. It is also true , though to a lesser extent , for other languages of the region as Japanese and Korean, the origins of which have nothing to do with Chinese and Vietnamese. 
The similarity has nothing to do with the French Indochina : in Laos, they speak a variety of the Thai languages, which is part of another language family (Austrothai) and which is influenced by Sanskrit; in Cambodge, they speak Khmer which is from the same family (Austro-Asiatic) as the Vietnamese. 
The similarity between Vietnamese and Chinese has nothing to do with the romanisation of the writing. Writing has generally very few influence on the oral language; it's the contrary : from time to time, the orthograph is modified for being nearer of the prononciation.
The tones of Chinese and Vietnames are different; the number of tones are different. 
The grammar of Chinese and Vietnamese are also different; there is however some common features, but some of which are common to this geographic region and are also present in various languages from different language families in this region (south east Asia).
The languages of the people of the south of China are not similar to Vietnamese: their belongs either to the Chinese family or to the Thai family.
Sorry for my bad English, please, excuse me.


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## Not being

gao_yixing said:


> Yeah....Vietnamese is somehow similar to South Chinese dialects, or it used to be a dialect of China.(You know, North Vietnam was ruled by China directly in some periods of time.)
> The nowadays Vietnamese is somewhat similar to Chinese and pronunciation, though it has been romanized.


 
Is it good or bad when I bring this topic back to life?  Exactly my motivation is this sentence, which I find not really precisely put. However I am not an expert in terms of world-language study or of kind and secondly the 'true' nature and characteristics of a language can be found fairly easy on the internet, thus why we have to raise such propositions "this is from that and that is from the other, blah blah", right? 

About the matter of ruling one country, I may debate like these, using my humble opinions
1- Who is the leader of the army? and the army itself? I am rather sure that the Chinese back then didn't recruit their soldiers from the tribes that lived across the boderline, but the ones down the deltas instead. Then, who spoke the language and spread it among the common people, according to that? Definitely not the language of the people in the moutain areas. Another point, we have the delta area of Red River, surrounded by mountains (some sort of vast valley, right?) in which the minority groups live(d) until now. The transportation between those two places is still rough today, certainly not a piece of cake to travel up and down, let alone spreading that much.

2- The matter of occupation doesn't mean that much if we take another example to see better the point. The Roman Empire arrived at the British Isles and they did rule some land there. But how about the Celts and other natives back then, the common people? Did they communicate by Latin? Definitely not. They maintained their own language. Latin was used among the elites, ok, or some rulers adopted by the Romans, right, but those people did not and never occupy the large proportion of the population.

3- If you really want to mention the ratio of Chinese in Vietnam, I will tell you. It's not the North but the South, along the Mekong Delta. Many many of them fled to there during the war of Chinese empire and Western armies. The same, in some way, to what we often saw also in the construction of the Railway Express of the US. where many Chinese workers were employed, almost at the same time.


I see the matter from the history standpoint. Hope it does make clearer. Thanks  Assumptions can be made, yes, based on factual facts.


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## 李健雲

I live in NYC at the moment, and there is a Chinatown there (with a lot of different nationalities). While walking around I've noticed a lot of Vietnamese words don't have visible ties to the Chinese counterparts to the untrained eye. Me, being somewhat self-trained can see some of it. At a glance, the pronounciations of many Vietnamese words are corruptions of the Cantonese versions. For example:

神: xân ➙ tan (The alveolar fricative sound changes to an alveolar plosive)
金: câm ➙ kim
丁: đíng ➙ đinh (The alveolar nasal sound becomes a palatal nasal)
星: xíng ➙ tinh (Same phenomenon as with "tan" and "đinh".)
There are many more, but I'm not inclined to do more research at the moment.

At the moment my explaination for the "l" = "n" phenomenon is that "l" and "n" are both alveolar sounds. This happens in Korean words as well. For example, 綠茶 (green tea) is 녹차 (nok cha) in Korean today, but previously written and pronounced as 록차 (lok cha). In Cantonese, it's pronounced _lùk tsa_ (_cha_).


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