Vietnamese Single Syllable In The Discussion On The Problems Of The Chinese Words And Their Meaning

Vietnam and China are two countries that share not only similar landscapes but also a "Comrades and Brothers" friendly neighborhood. During the two countries' over two thousand year long history of cross communication the Chinese culture has greatly influenced many aspects of the Vietnamese culture. Consequently, Chinese language, as a quintessential aspect of Chinese culture, has deeply influenced Vietnamese, one of the many Sino-Tibetan languages spoken in South-East Asia. Before its first cultural contacts with China and the Chinese language, Vietnamese language was a typical oral primitive dialect without system of writing. The transfer of Chinese characters and language into the Vietnamese culture can be divided into three main periods: approximately from the middle of the Western Han Dynasty until the 13th century the Chinese language and writing were directly used, the language structures being mostly mono-syllabic; from the 13th century until the 17th century the Chinese Vietnamese characters, the Chinese and Vietnamese language co-existed determining the evolution of Vietnamese language towards bi-syllabication; from the 17th century until the 20th century Chinese characters, Vietnamese phonetic writing and the Latin alphabet as well as the Chinese, Vietnamese and French languages were concomitantly used thus exercising a deep influence upon the native dialects which slowly developed towards tri -syllabic structures. Towards the middle of the 20* century Chinese characters and the Latin phonetic transcription of Vietnamese language were both in use.The influence of Chinese language upon the Vietnamese language is diverse and very complex, mainly manifesting itself in the following aspects:1. Vietnamese assimilated many parts of the Chinese language, among which vocabulary borrowings are the most important and numerous, with borrowings from classical Chinese (represented by similarities between Chinese and Vietnamese phonetics) occupying more than 60% of the Vietnamese vocabulary. If we add to these the old and modern vocabulary imports from Chinese language the total of Chinese vocabulary within the corpus of Vietnamese language exceeds 60%.2. Vietnamese language imitated the Chinese syntactical structures.3. In its long history Vietnam has long used both Chinese and Vietnamese and has employed Chinese as official communication language. From the pointy of view of the official language vocabulary borrowings Vietnamese language has preserved various stages of development of the Chinese language itself.While analyzing the Chinese vocabulary assimilated by the Vietnamese language, according to the historical time when a certain word was borrowed from Chinese, one can identify several historic epochs: old Chinese Vietnamese words (Classical Chinese), Sino-Vietnamese words (Sino-Vietnamese language) and post Sino-Vietnamese words (post Sino-Vietnamese language).From the manner of phonetic assimilation point of view we can also identify two types of vocabulary, that is the Sino-Vietnamese phonetic vocabulary and non Sino-Vietnamese phoneticvocabulary.The French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1916) qualified the word as "the main and central component in the structure of a language". Indeed, vocabulary is any country's and any culture's most sublimated aspect. Within the Vietnamese language Chinese vocabulary has a long history, is largely represented and widely used. Vietnamese language, from its earliest historical beginnings until today, was in continuous contact and under the permanent influence of Chinese language and vocabulary. Chinese has influenced the richness of the Vietnamese language vocabulary and its development and has deeply touched many aspects of Vietnamese culture as a whole. However, due to the influence of linguistic changing patterns, social influences, historic changes, concepts, national mentalities and other factors the Chinese vocabulary now in use in the ModernVietnamese Language has suffered changes in its phonetic corpus, meaning, usage, grammaticalcategori...