The online journal, Chinese Southern Diaspora Studies, has recently published two articles which deal with the period when “Vietnam” was under “Chinese” rule.
Michael Churchman’s “Before ‘Chinese’ and ‘Vietnamese’ in the Red River Plain: The Han-Tang Period,” looks at the textual evidence for this period and argues none of the people mentioned for this period match our current understanding of the terms “Vietnamese” and “Chinese.” His argument is thus that there were no “Chinese” and “Vietnamese” yet. This is an argument which Charles Holcombe has also made. Churchman’s article, however, looks at this issue in more detail.
Then there is an article on linguistics by John Phan, “Re-Imagining ‘Annam’: A New Analysis of Sino-Viet-Muong Linguistic Contact.” Phan argues that the Vietnamese language emerged when speakers of a local Chinese dialect, what he calls “Annamese Middle Chinese,” switched to speaking a variant of Proto-Vietnamese around the time of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Prior to this point, he argues, there were a variety of languages/dialects which were spoken in the Red River Plain, and many of them had adopted words from Chinese. However, the switch by some Chinese speakers to using one variant of Proto-Vietnamese led to massive changes in that dialect/language. (I’m not a linguist, but I think I have his argument right).
These studies are helpful in deconstructing the myth of the antiquity of the Vietnamese nation.
The articles can be viewed here:
http://csds.anu.edu.au/volume_4_2010/contents.php
This Post Has 10 Comments
Am I missing something here?
There is nothing in Phan’s article, even we take it as face value, to show that the Vietnamese “create a false imagining of its history and evolution” as he claims right at the first paragraph.
So, there were pockets of “Annamese Middle Chinese” speakers, surrounding administrative and commercial centers I assume, in the delta prior to the independent era. Then these Annamese-Chinese elite, for reasons Phan forgot to mention, decided to switch “linguistic allegiance from their own language to Proto-Viet–Muong”.
The modern Vietnamese language is therefore no longer rooted from the Proto-Viet-Muong and the claim that the language survives 1000 years of Han’s dominance is wrong?
And why didn’t the non-Chinese speakers in the delta switch to “Annamese Middle Chinese”, apparently the language of their rulers, instead? I’m curious to know why Phan does not mention that fact that this switch of linguistic allegiance happened right at the end of the colonial era and the beginning of Dai Viet (when the new rulers need something to handle administrative tasks like writing a “sớ” – and make them look neat, too:). Coincident, huh?
The biggest mistake here is Phan has equated the birth of the modern Vietnamese language to the birth of the “nation” (in quote since I don’t have a word for it yet:)
Majority of Vietnamese people (the “bố cu mẹ đĩ” in Lý Đông A’s language) in their daily life use little (or not at all if you live in my home village) of the Han-Viet portion — 60% or whatever the percentage is — in the Vietnamese language. Dissecting this portion of the language says little about them.
Phan’s eagerness to dismantle the Vietnamese modern nationalism has dragged this otherwise a beautiful paper down the level of propaganda type. Anti-nationalism of some kinds is nationalism of others in disguise. “What exactly is the secret in the soup; just who is the man behind the curtain?”, I ask.
And thank you the Le Minh Khai’s Blog!
First of all, Phan is a linguist. His main argument is a linguistic one. Linguists have long known that Chinese words enterred “Vietnamese” in two waves. There were early loan words, like “nha” (home) and “ve” (return) and maybe “com” (rice) which came from a spoken form of Chinese perhaps during the Han. Then there are many more words which came starting around the Tang period. Many linguists have argued that these later words came from exposure to texts.
Phan questions this latter point. In Middle Chinese there was a literary pronunciation and spoken languages. What he says he has discovered is that there are “Chinese” words in “Vietnamese” which do not come from the literary language of Middle Chinese, and do not come from any spoken Chinese language at that time. That is his main finding. As far as I know, no one has argued this before. This is new, and as a linguist, that is his main concern.
What you are criticizing is his hypothesis about how this might have happened. That’s fine, but if you find his explanation unconvincing, then how do we explain the appearance in “Vietnamese” of “Chinese” words around the time of the Tang which did not come from the literary language and did not come from any spoken language in China that we know of?
With all due respect to the scholars who have worked tirelessly on the subject, I find it hard to believe that someone actually writes a 9000-word paper just to nitpick a modern definition such as “Vietnamese”.
I wholeheartedly agree with the author on the foreign nature of the term “Viet/Yue” to the natives of the Red river delta in the Han-Tang era. But this is not new. Nguyễn Duy Hinh, decades ago, had already had a name for it, “tộc danh tha xưng”.
“Việt” and “Lý” are not natively “Vietnamese” (spoken language at the time). Then what? The people in the delta did not see themselves apart from the their rulers?
Both Phan and Churchman have acknowledged that there were some native entities there in the delta during this time period. “Something” (again, I don’t have a name for it yet:) was powerful enough for the “Annamese-Chinese” elite to “switch linguistic allegiance from their own language” and for new people arriving from the north to “adopt the habits and customs of their surroundings” and “eventually sided with the locals”. But they assert that this “something” has nothing to do with the modern Vietnamese people. Amazing logic!
Ops! One more thing. Few hundreds years from now scholars look into the Soviet Union’s archives, “at the clues from historical linguistics”, and find that there is no distinction between Russian and people from other republics. “They were all subjects to All-Under-Communist-Heaven” . Go figure!
I thought that the modern Vietnamese nationalist historians are bad enough. Their opponents, in this case, are …what should I say? Worst? 🙂
Neither of these authors are saying that there is “nothing” in the first millenium AD which has a connection to what eventually became “the vietnamese” people. What they are arguing is that there is no evidence to argue that there is something distinctly “Vietnamese” which was already there and which “inevitably” would have become the Vietnam of today. That is called “teleology.” It is considered a “sin” in the academic world in the West, but it is extremely common in Vietnam and in writings on Vietnamese history.
You are to some extent doing the same thing here. You are arguing that there was something “powerful” which made local Chinese change their language. It could have been simply a “practical” change. It’s more effective to tell someone to pay his taxes in a language he understands than to do so in a language he doesn’t.
If this is what happened (i.e., switching languages), I agree that we need an explanation for why it happened when it did. However, that’s the part which linguists have a difficult time explaining, becuase the “whys” are not in the linguistic evidence, only the “whats.” Right around the same time that Phan is arguing this linguistic change took place, the Southwestern Tai languages (the languages spoken in places like Laos and Thailand today) started to evolve separately and break away from other Tai languages. Why did that happen? I don’t think linguists have a clear answer for that either, even though they have plenty of evidence that it did happen.
And one final point. Phan argues (I think correctly) that there was probably a long history of the local elite in the region being bi-lingual if not multi-lingual. So it’s not that “Chinese” speakers switched to speaking “Vietnamese.” It’s that bi- or multi-lingual “Chinese” speakers switched to using a “Vietnamese” dialect the most.
I read from someone who analysed Phan’s work that the Annamese Chinese speakers in the Red River Delta switched languages to proto Viet-Muong probably started developing around the time when Đinh Bộ Lĩnh became the emperor.
Đinh Bộ Lĩnh came from Ninh Bình (the southern fringe of the red river delta). His name suggested he spoke a proto-Viet-Muong language, according to Phan. He named his country in a bilingual manner “Đại Cồ Việt”. Đại is great in Sinitic. Cồ is great in Vietic (though this word no longer exists in Vietnamese language today, it must have been some ancient Vietic word for “great”). He didn’t place the capital in Hanoi, but in Hoa Lư, Ninh Bình. The reason for choosing Hoa Lư as the capital could be its secure location, surrounding by limestone mountains, hard to invade. Another reason could be, like Ngô Quyền, he didn’t trust the “Sinitic” power, presence and loyalty of the people in Hanoi.
When Lý Công Uẩn was promoted as the new emperor, being from Bắc Ninh (a province in the red river plain), he moved the capital back to Hanoi, and started the first long-lived dynasty in Vietnam – the Lý dynasty. By the time they moved the capital back to Hanoi, the elites in Hanoi probably had all shifted their language and abandoned their Sinitic tie. The speciation of Vietnamese language probably occurred during this time, as one common lowland language developed and distinguished itself from the highland. Chinese script was still the medium of writing, but chữ nôm was being developed to present a different speech.
Thanks for the comments, but I really wonder to what extent we can see a Sinitic-non/Sinitic divide among the elite by this time. My sense is that what made the elite “elite” was that they participated to one degree or another in a cultural world that set them apart from the commoners, and that cultural world was “Sinitic.” “Sinitic” culture at that time (both in “Vietnam” and “China”) was probably more “Buddhist/Daoist” than “Confucian,” but that was something that the elite shared, and the Buddhism was “Sinitic.”
To argue that there was a Sinitic-non/Sinitic cultural divide at that time, I think we would need to see evidence of something significant that was non-Sinitic. Ok, so let’s say “co” is Vietic but “dai” and “viet” are not, and the fact that they named the place “Dai Co Viet” after a kingdom was established in Guangdong called Dai Viet suggests to me much more commonalities in the region at the elite level than any important cultural divides.
My sense is that the only divide was between elite and commoner, and that same divide existed all across the Sinicized world (and everywhere else in the world except for in hunter-gatherer societies).
Also, years ago Victor Mair wrote an article on the emergence of the written form of vernacular languages in East Asia and linked that to Buddhism. The gist is that Buddhist wanted to explain to common people the ideas of Buddhism so that they could transform them, so they made notes of how to do this and this led to things like Nom.
That makes sense to me. I think elites care about themselves, and if they deal with the common people, they try to change them to be more like themselves (although that’s rare, but it does happen in religious contexts).
In other words, I have trouble seeing something “non-Sinitic” in Vietnam that rises up to “challenge” something Sinitic. Before the 20th century, being Sinicized was what made you important in Vietnam. When nationalism took hold in the 20th century and anti-Chinese sentiments developed in the 1970s, the idea that there was something “non-Sinitic” emerged, but what exactly was that? Nom? That was created so that the Buddhist elite could teach common people to be more Sinitic. . . etc. Certainly the vast majority of extant Nom writings fall into that category.
By the time we can see a “Viet” elite in the historical record, they are already “Sinitic.” This is the point that Keith Taylor makes in his A History of the Vietnamese. “Viet culture” was developed over the centuries by a Sinicized elite.
I believe that another language may have evolved in a manner similar to how Phan suggested Vietnamese evolved: English
What we know today as “Old English” has existed for several centuries prior to the Norman conquest of England. But it has virtually no recognizable (to a non-linguist) resemblance to what we today would consider English. Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, Old English did have some Latin/Romance-derived vocabulary (either via the Church or via the Vulgar Latin that was spoken in England prior to the Anglo-Saxon migration). But the bulk of Latin/Romance words in the modern English language did not come about until after the Norman Conquest.
For several generations after William the Conqueror, the Norman elites continued to speak Norman-French whereas the local peasants spoke Old English. But eventually, both the languages of both the elites and the peasants would merge to become what is known today as Middle English, a language with core Old English (Germanic) words but a massive Norman-French (Romance) vocabulary. Middle English is still difficult for modern English speakers to comprehend, but in writing it is clearly recognizable as a form of English.
Today, Germanic words (i.e. ‘folk’) are used in less formal contexts whereas Romance words (i.e. people/populace) are used in more formal contexts… which is similar to the situation between native Vietnamese words and Sino-Vietnamese words.
Now, I am not saying that Phan was 100% correct in his hypothesis, but the evolution of the English language suggests that there is precedence for such a phenomenon (where the foreign ruling elites eventually picked up the language of the locals albeit with a lot of hybridization).
Thanks for the comment. Yes! In an article somewhere (I think in the online journal of the Chinese Southern Diaspora or something like that from Australian National University) John points to English as a comparable phenomenon. That comparison is really help (at least I find it to be very helpful) because it demonstrates a type of language change/evolution that people haven’t been considering for Vietnamese, but which people probably should consider. And while I can’t defend his argument on a linguistic level, historically it certainly makes a lot of sense.
And on a side note, the South Vietnamese scholarship that I’m going to be “highlighting” in videos recognized that the people who emerged on the historical stage in the 10th century as “independent Vietnamese” were very very different from whoever was there 1,000 years earlier. None of them had a convincing explanation for why this was the case, but it is so obvious that there is a radical difference between the world of the elite in the 10th century and the world we see on say bronze drums. Why is that the case? John’s argument, I think, points in the right direction.
I heard , until later , the British royal family hired French – speaking nurses to care for the princes and among themselves spoke French , did the nobility do the same ?
The phenomenon of mixing of the languages is well known , it gives rise to a new tongue called ” creole ” which has a substrate component ( aboriginal language ) and a superstrate one ( conqueror’s )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language
[The terms substrate and superstrate are often used when two languages interact. However, the meaning of these terms is reasonably well-defined only in second language acquisition or language replacement events, when the native speakers of a certain source language (the substrate) are somehow compelled to abandon it for another target language (the superstrate).[21] The outcome of such an event is that erstwhile speakers of the substrate will use some version of the superstrate, at least in more formal contexts. The substrate may survive as a second language for informal conversation. As demonstrated by the fate of many replaced European languages (such as Etruscan, Breton, and Venetian), the influence of the substrate on the official speech is often limited to pronunciation and a modest number of loanwords. The substrate might even disappear altogether without leaving any trace ]
Modern Vietnamese tongue must be such kind of creole . Beside , it would be interesting to compare it to Cantonese ; the two people have much in common