An Analysis Of The Vowel System Of Chinese And Vietnamese

In a long period of time,both Chinese and Vietnamese are used among ancient Vietnamese people. However, Chinese is even used as the official language in Vietnam. Sino-Vietnamese is the product of historically cultural exchange between Chinese people and Vietnamese. The Chinese loanwords share a long history with a great quantity, thus making a profound influence on the modern Vietnamese. The truth can be explicitly explained with the fact that the Vietnamese absorbed and imitated many Chinese pronunciations to pronounce their own characters.Sino-Vietnamese which used as an Outside Chinese Pronunciation, remains a very important material to study Chinese phonetics. So the study of the Sino-Vietnamese is meaningful to both Chinese and Vietnamese. Even Mantaro J.Hashimoto(1978) once mentioned the unique value of Sino-Vietnamese in "The Overview of Sino-Vietnamese Research".The research on the Sino-Vietnamese isn’t much and becomes even less when it comes to finals. This paper classifies the finals of Sino-Vietnamese according to the category of the Chinese phonology and describes the finals, which used the classical comparative method and analytic hierarchy process. The paper also summarizes the corresponding relationship and explains the pattern between the finals of Sino-Vietnamese and Medieval Chinese in detail.This paper consists of five chapters: The first chapter briefly introduces the history of the Sino-Vietnamese, then review the research status of the finals in Sino-Vietnamese. Finally, explains this paper’s main idea and the methods used. The second chapter classifies the finals of the Sino-Vietnamese and describes the different levels of the finals. In the comparative study, this paper also explains the cause of the final evolution based on the history of Chinese phonology. In addition, this chapter pays special attention to analyzing the exceptions. The third chapter describes the opening or closing mouth of the finals in Sino-Vietnamese and offers a preliminary explanation to the patterned ones. The fourth chapter describes the palatal endings-?and-?.The fifth chapter summarizes the corresponding relationship between Sino-Vietnamese and Chinese, then describes the confluence among the Sino-Vietnamese finals. At the end of this chapter, the reasons lead to the confluence has been discussed in reference to the Chinese phonology.