Vietnamese language history

Henri Maspero divides the history of Vietnamese into six periods.

1. Prehistoric Vietnamese, it is also reigning Vietnamese, a common ancestor of Vietnamese and Muong languages.
2. Pravietnamese, the oldest reconstructed stage of language development, before the adoption of Sinism . Around the 7th-9th centuries n e. At this point in Vietnamese there were three tones.
3. Archaic Vietnamese - the period of the borrowing of Sinism, approx. X century n e.
4. Ancient Vietnamese is a language spelled in tynom until the 15th century. During this period, the splitting of tones and the loss by some consonants of the division into voiced and deaf occurs.
5. Middle Vietnamese is the language described in , the Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary of Alexander de Roda (XVII century).
6. Modern Vietnamese - from the 19th century.

The table below reflects the phonetics of the Pravite-Muong language, after the “>” sign modern consonants are shown, developed from the data ^{[4] [5] [6]} .

↑ According to Ferlus, the presence of / tʃ / and / ʄ / is not confirmed by all researchers; he also reconstructed the sound / dʒ / and the preglottalized / ʔj / instead of the implosive / ʄ / . However, these sounds are very close: both voiced palatal glottalized consonants .

↑ The fricatives given in brackets developed from allophones of explosive consonants appearing between vowels. They were absent in the Muyong rule, since they are not in the Muong, but they were definitely at the next stage in the life of the language. The loss of prefixes made frictional phoneme. Ferlus in 1992 ^[4] suggested that these sounds could be deaf and sonorous fricatives, corresponding to deaf and sonorous explosive ones, however, by 2009 he abandoned this hypothesis ^[5] , considering that explosive ones underwent fricativization and sounding simultaneously according to the following scheme:

• / p /, / b / > / β /
• / t /, / d / > / ð /
• / k /, / ɡ / > / ɣ /
• / s /, / ɕ / > / ς /
• / c /, / ɟ / and / tʃ / > / ʝ /

↑ In the Middle Vietnamese outcome of these sounds was recorded in a special letter   ( / β / ), however, it was different from / w / .

↑ It is not clear what the sound was. In a 1992 paper, Ferlus suggests ^[4] that in the X century it was / ɽ / , and it contrasted / r / .

The following sets of initials existed:

• pr, br, tr, dr, kr, gr> / kʰr / > / ks / > s;
• pl, bl> MV bl> Hanoi "gi", Saigon "tr";
• kl, gl> MV tl> tr;
• ml> MV ml> mnh> nh;
• kj> gi.

Thanks to borrowing from Chinese to Vietnamese, the sounds / ʂ / and / ʈ / (modern Hanoi / s /, / c /) came.

There were no tones in the rule-muong, but in the daughter languages ​​they appeared from the initials and finals. The development was as follows:

The glottal finals end in / ʔ / , the fricative finals in / s / or / h / . Both types of syllables can include nasal sound (for example, / m / or / n / ).

At some point, splitting of tones occurred, similar to many . Allophony turned into tones, since syllables with sonorous initials were pronounced differently from syllables with deaf ones. Qualitative separation is present today in Hanoi and other northern dialects, and in the south (including Saigon) the difference in pitch prevails.

Simple voiced explosive consonants became deaf, and a few more tones appeared. It should be noted that this did not affect the implosive explosive consonants; they developed as deaf.

Syndicate-Muong had syllables with neutral vowels, and in the words with them the initial of the main syllable was in the inter-vocal position, and, experiencing laziness , became a voiced fricative. After splitting the tones, the syllables with neutral vowels disappeared. As a result, in modern Vietnamese, syllables starting with a voiced fricative exist in all six tones, and the register reflects the prefix with a neutral vowel, rather than the initial explosive consonant in Praviet Muong. Similarly, words starting with / l / and / ŋ / exist in both registers. Thompson ^[6] reconstructed the dull nasal consonants to explain the appearance of syllables where the nasal are in the first register, but Ferlus considers these sounds redundant.

The modern Latin script used to record the Vietnamese language was created especially for him by missionaries. Rhyme pronunciation is almost identical to modern pronunciation in the Hanoi dialect, however many initials have changed since then, the Saigon dialect reflects their pronunciation more accurately.

↑ [ p ] occurs only at the end of a syllable.

↑ The symbol was proposed for inclusion in Unicode ^[7] .

↑ [ j ] does not occur at the beginning of the syllable, but can be at its end and can be written with the letter “i” or “y” (the choice often determines the quality or longitude of the previous vowel), and after / ð / and / β / , in this case denoted by "ĕ". The last sound has disappeared from modern language.

It should be noted that the difference between "b" [ ɓ ] and "n" [ p ] never affects the meaning, which suggests their allophony , the same is true for "gi" [ ʝ ] and "y" / "i" / " ĕ "[ j ].

In addition, there were three complex initials that disappeared later in Middle Vietnamese:

• tl / tl / > modern "tr";
• bl / ɓl / > modern “gi” (Hanoi dialect), “tr” (Saigon dialect);
• ml / ml / > mnh / mɲ / > modern "nh".

Most of the unusual letter mappings for sounds in modern Quokings can be explained by the history of the language.

• There were two different letters “b” in the Latin system of de Rhoda: regular b and ꞗ. The latter denoted the sonorous labio-labial spirant / β / . After about a century / β / and / w / merged into / v / , which is written with the letter "v".
• The medal / j / , which was recorded as ĕ, disappeared.
• The signs “đ” for / ɗ / and d / z / were chosen because, although at that time “đ” meant the alveolar sound, “d” meant the tooth / ð / . The letter “d” was assigned to the latter by analogy with the sound designation / ð / in Spanish .
• “X” was / ɕ / , not dental / s / , as it is today. In the 17th century, in Portuguese, known to missionaries, “s” was apical ( / s̺ / (as it is now, on the larger territory of Spain and in some parts of Portugal), and “x” - / ʃ / . / s̺ / in Vietnamese retro-reflex / ʂ / led to this assignment of letters.It should be noted that in the modern Hanoi dialect "x" and "s" mean the same sound - / s / .