Table Of ContentVIETNAMESE
LONDON ORIENTAL AND
AFRICAN LANGUAGE LIBRARY
Editors
Theodora Bynon
David C. Bennett
School of Oriental and African Studies
London
Masayoshi Shibatani
Kobe University
Advisory Board
James Bynon, Bernard Comrie, Judith Jacob, Gilbert Lazard,
Christian Lehmann, James A. Matisoff, Vladimir P. Nedjalkov,
Robert H. Robins, Christopher Shackle
The LONDON ORIENTAL AND AFRICAN LANGUAGE LIBRARY aims to make
available a series of reliable and up-to-date descriptions of the grammatical structure of a
wide range of Oriental and African languages, in a form readily accessible to the non-
specialist. With this in mind, the language material in each volume will be in roman script,
fully glossed and translated.
The Library is based at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of
London, Europe's largest institution specializing in the study of languages and cultures of
Africa and Asia. Each volume is written by an acknowledged expert in the field who has
carried out original research on the language and has first-hand knowledge of the area in
which it is spoken.
Volume 9
Nguyen Dình-Hoà
Vietnamese
VIETNAMESE
TIENG VIET KHÔNG SON PHAN
NGUYEN DÌNH-HOA
Southern Illinois University, Carbondale
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of
Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nguyen Dình-Hoa, 1924-
Vietnamese = Tieng Viet Khong Son Phan / Nguyen Dinh-Hoa.
p. cm. -- (London Oriental and African language library, ISSN 1382-3485 ; v. 9)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Vietnamese language-Grammar. I. Title. II. Series.
PL4374.N427 1997
495.9'228421-dc21 97-4965
ISBN 90 272 3809 X (Eur.) / 1-55619-733-0 (US) (alk. paper) CIP
© Copyright 1997 - John Benjamins B.V.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any
other means, without written permission from the publisher.
John Benjamins Publishing Co. • P.O.Box 75577 • 1070 AN Amsterdam • The Netherlands
John Benjamins North America • P.O.Box 27519 • Philadelphia PA 19118-0519 • USA
CONTENTS
Preface ix
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
1.1 Vietnamese as a national language 1
1.2 Affinity with Chinese 2
1.3 Genetic relationship 2
1.4 Class-related dialects? 4
1.5 Language and religion 5
1.6 History of the language 5
1.7 Writing systems 6
1.8 Diversity 9
1.9 Kinesics 11
1.10 Syllabic Structure 11
1.11 Morphemes, words and larger sequences 15
Chapter 2. The sound system 17
2.0 An isolating language 17
2.1 Syllabic structure 18
2.2 Number of possible syllables 28
2.3 Below the syllable 28
2.4 Syllable boundaries 30
2.5 Stress and intonation 31
2.6 Earlier records and recent reforms 33
Chapter 3. The lexicon 35
3.0 The word in Vietnamese 35
3.1 Monosyllables and polysyllables 35
3.2 Full words vs. empty words 36
3.3 Sino-Vietnamese (Hán-Viêt) 36
3.4 Morphemes 38
3.5 The simple word 40
3.6 Morphological processes 41
3.7 Reduplications 44
Chapter 4. The lexicon (continued) 59
4.0 Affixation and compounding 59
4.1 Prefixes 60
4.2 Suffixes 63
vi CONTENTS
4.3 Compounding 66
4.4 More on Sino-Vietnamese 76
4.5 Other foreign borrowings 78
4.6 Nominalization 79
4.7 Unanalyzed forms 81
4.8 Concluding remarks about the unit called tieng 81
Chapter 5. Parts of speech 83
5.0 Parts of speech 83
5.1 Nouns 88
5.2 Locatives 98
5.3 Numerals 101
Chapter 6. Parts of speech (continued) 107
6.0 Predicatives 107
6.1 (Functive) Verbs 108
6.2 Stative verbs 119
6.3 Substitutes 123
Chapter 7. Parts of speech (continued) 139
7.0 Function words 139
7.1 Adverbs 140
7.2 Connectives 162
7.3 Particles 165
7.4 Interjections 168
7.5 Multiple class membership 168
Chapter 8. The noun phrase 171
8.0 Phrase structure 171
8.1 The noun phrase 172
Chapter 9. The verb phrase 185
9.0 The verb phrase 185
9.1 Preverbs 186
9.2 The relative positions 188
9.3 Postverbs 189
9.4 The complement before and after the head verb 197
9.5 The di.... ve construction 198
9.6 The positions of postverb determiners 199
9.7 The adjectival phrase 200
9.8 Coordination
CONTENTS
VII
Chapter 10. The sentence 209
10.0 The sentence as unit of communication 209
10.1 The simple sentence 209
10.2 The subject-less sentence 210
10.3 The sentence without a predicate 212
10.4 The subject-less sentence with a reduced predicate 213
10.5 The kernel <S-P> sentence 213
10.6 Adjuncts to the kernel <S-P> sentence 224
10.7 Sentence expansion 230
Chapter 11. The sentence (continued) 233
11.1 Types of sentences 233
11.1.1 The affirmative sentence 233
11.1.2 The negative sentence 233
11.1.3 The interrogative sentence 237
11.1.4 The imperative sentence 242
11.1.5 The exclamatory sentence 243
11.2 The compound sentence 244
11.2.1 Concatenation of simple sentences 244
11.2.2 Correlative pronouns 245
11.2.3 Connectives of coordination 245
11.3 The complex sentence 251
11.3.1 The embedded completive sentence 251
11.3.2 The embedded determinative sentence 253
Appendix 1. Parts of speech 256
Appendix 2. Texts 257
1. Folk verse about the lotus 257
2. Excerpt from a novel 258
3. Excerpt from a newspaper advertisement 261
Bibliography 263
Index 276
PREFACE
This is not a complete grammar of Vietnamese, but only an essential,
descriptive introduction to a Southeast Asian language that has over seventy
million speakers. It is based on lecture notes I prepared for Vietnamese
language and grammar classes taught in several institutions, including
Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where I had to earn my rice by
means of courses in general and applied linguistics as my main teaching load
between 1969 and 1990.
The book gives a conservative treatment to phonology, lexicon, and
syntax, with relevant comments on semantics and a few historical remarks,
particularly in connection with the writing systems, the loanwords and the
syntactic structures.
Being a native speaker of it, I have made sure I trust less my intuition
than the early analyses undertaken by pioneer linguists from France, Great
Britain, the USA, and Vietnam itself. I am particularly indebted to Le Van
Ly, Murray B. Emeneau, Andre Haudricourt, Patrick Honey, R. B. Jones &
Huynh Sanh Thong, and Laurence C. Thompson, etc. for their works, that
appeared in the 1950s, as well as to the next wave of grammarians of
Vietnamese (Bui Dúc Tinh, Truong Van Chinh, Nguyen Hien Le, Nguyen
Qui-Hung, Duong Thanh Binh, Dào Thi Hoi, Nguyen Dang Liem, Buu Khai,
Pham Van Hai, Tran Trong Hai, Marybeth Clark, etc.), whose publications
came out in the 1960s and 1970s.
While having the advantage of consulting nearly all the excellent
monographs and journal articles produced by French authors of the last
century as well as by Vietnamese academics around the Institute of
Linguistics (established in Hanoi in 1969) , I was handicapped in not being
able to use the voluminous research work by Russian linguists—my foreign
language baggage being limited to French, English and Chinese, with only a
smattering of Latin, Spanish and Thai. Luckily, the relevant courses (in
x PREFACE
general linguistics, English grammar, ESL methodology, Vietnamese
grammar, language planning, and lexicography) at SIU-Carbondale, provided
me with opportunities to do several contrastive analyses and to learn first
hand from many native speakers of non-European languages, including
Chinese, Japanese, and such Southeast Asian systems as Thai, Khmer and
Malay-Indonesian. I am thus very grateful for such an enriching exposure to
a large variety of typological and areal features.
Next I would be remiss if I failed to mention the highly significant
contributions of my esteemed colleagues of the Saigon Branch of S.I.L.
(Summer Institute of Linguistics), including those who did field work on the
minority languages in South Vietnam between 1957 and 1975: I certainly
benefited from various insights offered by Richard Pittman, David Thomas,
Kenneth Gregerson, Jean Donaldson, Richard Watson, Ralph Haupers, to
name only a few, regarding the salient features of Vietnamese in contrast
with other languages of the region.
I am also indebted to the French Bibliothèque Nationale, the British
Library, and Japan's Toyo Bunko Library, to several stateside libraries that
have respectable Southeast Asia holdings, and to the Fu Tsu-Nien Library of
Academia Sinica in Nankang, Taipei, for many valuable materials. Finally
my thanks go to Professors Theodora Bynon, Matt Shibatani and David
Bennett of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London,
where I spent my first sabbatical leave in 1975, and to the editors of John
Benjamins Publishing Company in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, for their
extremely helpful assistance in editorial matters.
I fervently hope that this monograph—meant to be titled "Vietnamese
Without Veneer" following my former supervisor Andre Martinet's Le
Francais sans fard—will help both teachers and students of Vietnamese in
different institutions of higher learning as well as in secondary and primary
schools around the world. This compact sketch of the workings and functions
of a truly wonderful tongue is dedicated first of all to my parents, uncles and
aunts, brothers and sisters, cousins, children and grandchildren, and beyond
the Nguyen clan, to all my former teachers of language and literature (in
Vietnam and abroad), and last but not least to all my former students.
Nguyen Dình-Hoa
