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The Origin of the Peculiarities of the Vietnamese Alphabet André-Georges Haudricourt

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The Origin of the Peculiarities of the Vietnamese Alphabet André-Georges Haudricourt The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet André-Georges Haudricourt To cite this version: André-Georges Haudricourt. The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet. Mon-Khmer Studies, 2010, 39, pp.89-104. halshs-00918824v2 HAL Id: halshs-00918824 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00918824v2 Submitted on 17 Dec 2013 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Published in Mon-Khmer Studies 39. 89–104 (2010). The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet by André-Georges Haudricourt Translated by Alexis Michaud, LACITO-CNRS, France Originally published as: L’origine des particularités de l’alphabet vietnamien, Dân Việt Nam 3:61-68, 1949. Translator’s foreword André-Georges Haudricourt’s contribution to Southeast Asian studies is internationally acknowledged, witness the Haudricourt Festschrift (Suriya, Thomas and Suwilai 1985). However, many of Haudricourt’s works are not yet available to the English-reading public. A volume of the most important papers by André-Georges Haudricourt, translated by an international team of specialists, is currently in preparation. Its aim is to share with the English- speaking academic community Haudricourt’s seminal publications, many of which address issues in Southeast Asian languages, linguistics and social anthropology. The article “The origin of the peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet” is not one of Haudricourt’s most famous articles, and therefore it will not be included in the projected volume of collected papers. However, to this day, it remains an insightful and vivid account of the origin of the modern Vietnamese script. It traces the peculiarities of this spelling system back to the spelling habits of the Romance languages that were familiar to the authors of this system. The article illustrates Haudricourt’s passion for reconstructing the historical origin of complex phenomena, and his skill for adducing evidence from an impressive range of sources. The article was clearly intended for a broader audience than most of Haudricourt’s other publications. Its style is colloquial; technical terms are avoided. This work appeared in the third and last issue of the journal Dân Việt Nam (« The Vietnamese People ») published by the Ecole Française d’Extrême- Orient in Vietnam in 1948 and 1949. The original is now difficult to find; moreover, many of its potential present-day readers may not have a command of French, whereas back in 1949, Haudricourt could confidently expect that the general public could read French. The present translation aims to make this document available to anyone interested in Vietnamese, and in writing systems in general. The Vietnamese publisher obviously had a difficult time composing this article, which uses a wealth of symbols. The present translation corrects some typos: in the original edition, C had been substituted for G on page 64; the diacritic in p‘, t‘, k‘ had been rendered approximately, as pc, tc, kc; etc. Peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet page 2/18 Transcriptions in the present-day version of the International Phonetic Alphabet were systematically added at translation. Translator’s comments are placed in square brackets or in footnotes. Many thanks to Michel Ferlus for pointing out this article, to Boyd Michailovsky and Martine Mazaudon for corrections to the translation, and to Jean-Michel Roynard for his help with the figures. Abstract: A summary of the origin of the letters and groups of letters representing Vietnamese sounds [quốc ngữ spelling]: The missionaries who adapted the Latin alphabet to Vietnamese were Portuguese, Italian and French. The resulting spelling inherited some peculiarities from the spelling systems of Romance languages. Aspirated consonants H, PH, TH, KH [IPA: /h/, /pʰ/, /tʰ/, /kʰ/] are not found in Romance languages; however, in these languages, the combinations of letters PH, TH and KH are present in words of Greek origin, as equivalents for the Greek initials phi, theta, khi (φ, θ, χ), which were aspirated consonants in Greek; and thus these combinations were used to transcribe Vietnamese aspirated stop consonants. Dorsal stops C, G are only used before the vowels /a/, /o/ and /u/. This is because, in Romance languages, it is the only position where these consonants preserved the obstruent pronunciation they had in Latin; GHE, GHI are used with the phonetic value they have in Italian; the combinations KE and KI resort to the letter K, used in Greek (kappa, κ) and in Germanic languages. Labiovelar stops QU and GU are taken from Italian and Latin spellings. Among prepalatals, the unvoiced stop CH is taken from the Portuguese and the Spanish, which themselves borrowed this notation from Old French, where it had been created to transcribe a new sound, not found in Latin. The voiced stop D is used as an approximative notation for a sound not found in Europe, where D is the voiced counterpart of T. In Vietnam, a new letter, Đ, was coined [for a preglottalised alveolar stop: /ɗ/], its horizontal bar pointing to a similarity with the letter T. The voiced spirant1 was written as GI, as in Portuguese and French (at the time, J was not yet in use in Europe). The unvoiced spirant X is borrowed from Portuguese and the Northern dialects of Spanish: in these languages, the S is pronounced at the back of the 1 Translator’s note: the term “spirant” as used in this paper is an equivalent of “fricative”. For details concerning the difference that can be made between spirants and fricatives, see note 2. Peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet page 3/18 mouth [IPA: retroflex /ʂ/], as in Vietnamese, whereas elsewhere in Europe S is an anterior sibilant as in French [IPA: alveolar /s/]. NH [for the palatal nasal /ɲ/] is borrowed from the Portuguese; TR is an approximative notation for a sound which is not found in European languages [IPA: /ʈ/]. Ô, Ê are taken from the Portuguese, which is why the pair Ê, E does not have the same phonetic value as in French. [In French, Ê stands for /ɛ/, E stands for /e/, whereas the opposite is found in Vietnamese quốc ngữ, namely Ê for /e/, E for /ɛ/.] Y is used in Vietnamese quốc ngữ in a way similar to what is found in Spanish, where it replaces I in-between vowels or at the end of words. The letter Y comes from the Greek alphabet (upsilon, υ). Ơ and Ư were created to represent Vietnamese vowels that do not have equivalents in Western Europe [IPA /ɤ/, /ɯ/]. INTRODUCTION Alphabetic writing aims to represent the pronunciation of words. In theory, each letter stands for one sound [one phoneme], a given letter always stands for one and the same sound, and a given sound is always represented by one and the same letter. This ideal situation is not found in the case of the alphabetic writing of languages that have a long history and a literary tradition, because as time goes by, their writing systems remain the same whilst their pronunciation changes. Written texts are passed on from one generation of speakers to the next without changes (or only with minor changes, which lag behind the evolution of pronunciation). Thus the correspondence between written signs and spoken sounds changes as the spoken language evolves. What I refer to as the peculiarities of a given alphabet consists of the lack of one-to-one correspondence between letters and sounds: one and the same letter standing for different sounds, or the same sound being represented by different letters. These peculiarities originate in the historical evolution of pronunciation in the language at issue. When a language is put into writing for the first time, the writing system devised for this language is generally based on the writing system of another language, and the new writing system inherits peculiarities from the writing system which served as a model. Thus the Vietnamese quốc ngữ alphabet was based on the orthography of several Romance languages, and it inherited peculiarities which can be explained by the way the pronunciation of Latin evolved in Europe. Recall that Latin, which in the 3rd century BCE was only Peculiarities of the Vietnamese alphabet page 4/18 spoken in the town of Rome, spread all over Europe at the time of the Roman empire (up until the 5th century CE), only leaving a few non-Latin-speaking areas, e.g. a small region of the Western Pyrénées where the Basque language was preserved. Later, the varieties of Latin spoken in different areas evolved in different ways: the Latin of the region of Florence became the Italian language, the Latin of Paris became the French language, that of the region of Burgos became Spanish. However, throughout the Romance area, Classical Latin continued to be used as the language of religion and science, although its accurate original pronunciation was not known anymore. (To this day, Classical Latin remains the liturgical language of the Roman Catholic church, and scholars doing research in natural history refer to plants and animals by Latin names.) The present-day French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese languages are called “Latin languages”, “Neo-Latin languages”, or “Romance languages”. The Latin alphabet was adapted to other languages of Europe (Celtic, Germanic and Slavic) by scholars who knew the Latin transcriptions of Greek words, Greek being the language of culture of Antiquity.
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