Wiktionary:About Vietnamese

Vietnamese is an Austroasiatic language that originated in Vietnam, where it is the national and official language. It is the native language of the Kinh ethnicity, as well as a first or second language for the many ethnic minorities of Vietnam.

Etymologies
Modern Vietnamese is descended from the various dialects of Middle Vietnamese, including those documented in Alexandre de Rhodes' Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum, which mainly focuses on Northern Vietnamese. According to Wikipedia, modern Vietnamese is the language as it was spoken from the 19th century to the present. Other early materials of Vietnamese, including Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh (佛說大報父母恩重經) and Quốc âm Thi tập (國音詩集), are also in the Northern dialects, as evident in the consistent presence of diphthongs in words that show the conservative monophthongs in the modern Central dialects, as well as usage of the non-Central demonstratives and vocabulary items.

Many Vietnamese words are loaned from Chinese, either with the orthodox Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations (for which use the template ) or with non-Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations (for which use ).

Dialectology

 * Proto-Vietnamese: universal nasalization of implosives and neutralization of final palatals, preserved, a full system of demonstratives.
 * Northern Old Vietnamese: the oldest Nôm texts; universally affected by, the r-series of demonstratives was much dismissed or lost aside from , innovated , became more prominent.
 * Northern Middle Vietnamese: the main bulk in de Rhodes (1651); throughoutly affected by lenition.
 * modern Inland dialects:, ,.
 * modern Coastal dialects (?):, preservation of the rhotic.
 * other unattested Old Vietnamese dialects (heterogeneous):
 * other unattested Middle Vietnamese dialects (heterogeneous):
 * modern Central Vietnamese dialects (highly diverse and heterogeneous): descended from various unattested Old Vietnamese dialects, clearly already seperated when Northern Old Vietnamese was spoken. Conservative features: much less affected by lenition, modern conservative monophthongs for Northern Old Vietnamese diphthongs, more common preservation of both medial and final (,, etc.); innovations: aspiration for items where Northern dialects are lenited/plain ( vs. ,  vs. , etc.),  from conservative  ( vs. , etc.) Some Central Vietnamese dialects had  as common reflex of , others have ; lost (or reduced the functions of) the đ-, b- and v-series of the demonstratives with n- and r-series fill their functions; unique usage of some Sino-Vietnamese items (, the  in , , etc.).
 * modern Southern Vietnamese dialects (very homogenous): possibly originated from a transitional Central dialect (somewhere in Thanh Hoá?) as base with a very thick Northern substrate. All the phonological features above from the Central dialects apply, just much more inconsistent: much more affected by lenition than the Central dialects (but not completely;, ), some items with monophthongs (, , etc.), some items with aspiration (, , etc.), preservation of (, , etc.). Keeps  and  from the r-series, keeps both the b- and v-series,  became prominent.
 * Modern Standard Written Vietnamese (chiefly a mixture of Northern and Southern dialects): strongly affected by lenition, lacks r-series aside from, presents, competing/interchangeable  vs. , typically Southern treatment of clusters with  (Northern , , ,  eclipsed by Southern , , , ), predominantly Northern readings of Sino-Vietnamese morphemes, only a few uniquely Central items entered this written language ( displaced Northern-Southern , etc.), a few doublets (Northern  vs. Southern , Northern  vs. Southern , etc.).

Pronunciation
The template or  automatically adds several regional pronunciations in IPA.

Parts of speech
Vietnamese is very flexible with parts of speech (PoS). In order to avoid the tedious duplication/triplication/… of information, words should only be listed with their most basic PoS. So would only be listed as a proper noun (meaning "Vietnam") and not as an adjective (meaning "Vietnamese", which is nothing but the attributive use of the noun sense).

Nouns
Nouns can be added with the template, classifiers can be added with.

Combinations of classifier + noun should not receive separate entries, and neither should words transparently nominalized with particles like. This means we should not have entries at, , , , etc. but instead at , , , , etc. Exceptions are when such combinations are idiomatic and have a meaning different from what one would naively expect, such as with , , etc.

Adjectives
Many linguistic descriptions of Vietnamese do not distinguish adjectives from verbs, such that the word for example is analysed as a stative verb meaning "to be beautiful". Here at Wiktionary we follow the tradition of many dictionaries and analyse these stative verbs as adjectives instead. This means is an adjective meaning "beautiful". Only non-stative verbs should go under the  header.

Spelling


The lemma form of Vietnamese words in Wiktionary is the "modern" spelling: always writing i instead of y in monophthongs ( instead of ) and putting the tone accent on the second vowel in oa, uy, oe ( instead of ). Other spellings should be added as "alternative spelling of", for which the template exists. General consensus is that spellings need not be attested, as long as some spelling of the same word is. For consistency, the main lemma at Wiktionary is always found at this standadized spelling, for example:


 * (attested) defined at (unattested)
 * (common) defined at (rare)

These spelling reforms have not been widely adopted by Overseas Vietnamese communities and is far from universal within Vietnam: the choice of which orthographic variant to use depends mostly on the user's whim, they could use one variant in a sentence and a different variant the next. When writing for these audiences, you can set your Vietnamese input method to automatically convert to the traditional tone mark placement.

Proper names are not included in the spelling reform, such that the "traditional" spelling can be the main lemma.

As Nôm script (chữ Nôm) was (with decreasing frequency) used until well into the twentieth century, Nôm spellings can be added with etc.

Note that these are orthographic variants and have no bearing on the pronunciation of the spoken language, and thus are alternative spellings, their impact on intelligiblity is negligible if not zero. On the other hand, variation such as vs. reflects actual spoken variants and is not alternative spellings.

Reduplication
Vietnamese has many reduplication patterns with varying levels of productivity. For a full treatment, see our appendix on the subject. For purposes of inclusion in this Wiktionary: In the first three cases, cites, quotes, example sentences, etc. should be put at the main lemma (so quotes of, , and should go at ), unless they are to prove the existence of the reduplicated form.
 * Words formed through and  reduplication should not be included.
 * Full reduplication of adjectives and verbs without modification (of type → ) should not be included.
 * Diminutive reduplication of adjectives (of type → ) and &#8209;a reduplication of disyllabic adjectives or verbs (of type  → ) should be included as soft redirects to the main lemma (one can use the template ), provided they meet the criteria for inclusion (such as three independent uses).
 * Full reduplication (with or without modification) of other parts of speech usually gives a different lemma (such as or ).
 * Other types of reduplication are considered wholly independent lemmas.

Reduplicants (such as in  and  in ) can be given soft redirects with the template.

Chinese vs. Vietnamese
Note that many works written by Vietnamese people (especially older ones) were actually in Chinese. These works are nowadays often transcribed into quốc ngữ, reflecting the Vietnamese pronunciation; this does not change the fact that the language is still Chinese. Quotes from these works and word meanings derived from them should therefore not be added under the Vietnamese-language header.

To clarify, the following is Chinese: The following is actual (Archaic) Vietnamese:

Transliterations of pre-modern Vietnamese written in Nôm characters
Ideally, there would be systems in place for transliterations of Old and Middle Vietnamese texts, in the same line of the usage of Yale with proper tone-marking for Middle Korean among linguists, or the systems that show the various vowel distinctions and prenasalization in Western Old Japanese. However, since these systems do not yet exist for Vietnamese (exept for many spontaneous and very problematic reconstructions in various papers by Vietnamese linguists), the modern Vietnamese descendant forms have to unfortunately be used.