User:PhanAnh123/A voyage to Cochinchina

[https://archive.org/details/voyagetocochinch00barr/ A voyage to Cochinchina, in the years 1792 and 1793. To which is annexed an account of a journey made in the years 1801 and 1802, to the residence of the chief of the Booshuana nation]

"The Cochinchinese having effectually preserved the written characters of the Chinese language, we found no difficulty in communicating with them on all subjects, through this medium, by our Chinese priests. The spoken language, however, has undergone a very considerable change, which is the less surprizing, as the inhabitants of the northern and southern provinces of China are unintelligible to each other, but though it has been altered, it does not appear to have received any improvement, neither from additions of their own, nor from the introduction of foreign words. By a comparison of the short catalogue of Chinese words, which I have given in another work, with their synonyms in the Cochinchinese language, an idea may be collected how far the two spoken languages resemble or differ from each other."

Based on a dialect of Turon, i.e. Đà Nẵng, with the help of Chinese interpreters, which probably has something to do with why some words are listed with Sino-Vietnamese although there are native equivalents used in everyday language, as well as some words that look like straight-up Mandarin, not Sino-Vietnamese. Or maybe this is some kind of trade pidgin based on Vietnamese that arose from contact with Chinese merchants, that was mistaken to be Vietnamese proper, similar to how Yokohama Pidgin Japanese was referred to as simply “Yokohama Japanese”.

Some other words.


 * Preservation of the clusters,, ,
 * Possibly merger of all final nasals into
 * Lenition was operative in "rice" (or maybe not, there's no other ⟨g/gh⟩ initial word for comparison anyway), but unclear (not operative or lenition not marked) in "knife", "door", "oil".
 * Quite a lot of Mandarin, which suggests that it might actually be a trade pidgin.
 * A lot of Sino-Vietnamese as well.