Ponderings on Chinese influence on the Vietnamese Language
I am still around and learning Vietnamese. It has been an ON and OFF affair, getting busy with life and other distractions. Slowly but surely I am making progress. The more I study the history and try to analyze etymologies of the words, the more I see the similarities with a lot of Chinese words. It should be obvious knowing the history of Vietnamese that Chinese would have a huge influence on the language. Heck Chữ Nôm was a thing and Chinese and hybrid(newly formed) Chinese characters were used to write Vietnamese. Tale of Kieu (Truyện Kiều) was written using that system, which is one of my favorite literary works. I will go more in depth about that later. I cant help but think that knowing Mandarin and reading Hanzi would be a huge advantage for anyone learning Vietnamese, Japanese or Korean. Once you know some rules of vowel and consonant shifts that usually happen when a word is borrowed from another language, there is quite a ...
