Séminaire de Dr. John PHAN, Crosslinguistics departement of the National Institute for Japanese Language & Linguistics - Date : jeudi 21 février 2013, 14h00 - Lieu : "seminar room", 9ème étage, B1, Institut MICA, Hanoi University of Science and Technology.

Intervenant :
Dr John PHAN, chercheur du "Crosslinguistics department of the National Institute for Japanese Language & Linguistics NIJLL"

Date : jeudi 21 février 2013, 14h00
Lieu : salle "seminar room", 9ème étage, bâtiment B1, MICA Institute, Hanoi University of Science and Technology
Langue : le séminaire sera présenté en anglais

Résumé/abstract:
Around 70% of the modern Vietnamese lexicon comprises words of Chinese origin. The vast majority of these were borrowed from a stage of Chinese linguistic history referred to as “Late Middle Chinese.” However, the nature of borrowing and its consequences on Vietnamese phonological evolution have largely been misunderstood. A phonological examination of these “Late Sino-Vietnamese” words demonstrates that they resulted from bilingual contact between Proto-Viet-Muong (the immediate ancestor of modern Vietnamese and the modern Mường languages), and a form of Late Middle Chinese native to the region of northern Vietnam. The nature of Late Sino-Vietnamese may be determined through a modified application of the “comparative method,” which traditionally analyzes similarities and differences among related languages in order to extrapolate features of their common ancestor. In this case, comparative techniques are applied to a borrowed lexicon (Sino-Vietnamese), against both modern varieties of Chinese as well as reliable, reconstructed features of “Middle Chinese.” However, since reconstructed forms are themselves the product of either comparative or philological analysis, it is critical to trace them back to synchronic or philological evidence, and not to accept these forms as a primary basis of reconstruction. This is so precisely because we have no attestation of the language from which Late Sino-Vietnamese was drawn, and to assume that any general reconstruction of “Late Middle Chinese” can be viewed in this way introduces a circularity to the analysis. This lecture will review the basic procedure of comparative analysis and its modification for the purposes of loanword study through the case-study of Late Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary