VIETNAMESE LEXICOGRAPHY
1. missionary Period
In traditional Vietnam, when the learning of chinese classics dominated the intellectual scene, schoolchildren were taught basic written chinese by means of locally authored texts entitled the book of 1000 Characters, 3000 Characters, 5000 Characters, etc., all of which are glossaries from chinese to Vietnamese. these volumes use verse as mnemonic devices to provide native equivalents of chinese lexemes in the so-called sino-vietnamese pronunciation with the head words listed notionally in the manner of the sauri and the native terms transcribed in the demotic script called nom, i.e. the southern script - as opposed to Chinese, referred to as the scholars' writing system (Nguyen d-h 1981).
As the product of vietnamese romanization called quoc-ngu - an international and collective undertaking - made its shy debut in the 17th century, western missionaries began to compile bilingual dictionaries going from vietnamese to latin and from latin to vietnamese and used to facilitate their religious purpose of converting the native population to Christianity. the period of 1651-1884 was marked by the epoch-making pioneer efforts of alexandre de rhodes (1591-1660), who in addition to writing a latin-vietnamese Catechism, authored a trilingual volume, dictionarium annamiticum lusitanum et latinum (Rhodes 1951). this first dictionary printed in the roman script gives some 8000 vietnamese entries with glosses in portuguese and Latin. inspired by two earlier works, since extinct, a vietnamese-portuguese dictionary and a portuguese-vietnamese dictionary authored by gasparal de amoral and by antoine Barbosa, respectively, dall is important for two reasons: it includes a brevis declaratio on vietnamese grammar, and it records among othe things some consonant clusters /bl- ml- mnh- tl-/ that reflect the pronunciation of the time, thus constituting a valuable document in historical linguistics(Nguyen d-h 1986a, b; K. gregerson 1969). alexandre de Rhodes' role as codifier of the novel script was later capably emulated by several generations of catholic priests, all eager ro perfect quoc-ngu into a convenient tool in the evangelization of the country. among those there was even the bishop of Adran, msgr pigneau de behaine 1772, upon whose manuscript bishop taberb 1838 later built his excellence bidirectional vietnamese-latin and latin-vietnamese dictionary, which mirrored changes in the language in the second half of the 17th century as foundation of a later work by theurel 1877.
2. the colonial Period
Following the french conquest, completed in 1884 with the capture of Hanoi, as the colonial administration encouraged both the teaching of french in local schools and the learning of vietnamese by its civilian and military officers, there occurred an accelerated production of dictionaries going in both directions, with those going from vietnamese (then called annamite) to french out numbering those going the other way. petrus truong vinh ky 1887 wrote one of the earliest vietnamese-french volumes, to be followed by several execellence works authored by genibrel 1898, bonet 1899, vallot 1901, barbier 1922, etc.
Works produced since 1931 have been mostly authored by native scholars. the policy of cultural assimilation by the french not only did not succeed, but unexpectedly led to reactions that were conductive to the development of the vietnamese language; as a new press in the vernacular heralded by the two reviews nam-phong and dong-phuong tap-chi contributed to the dissemination of knowledge and as political pamphlets, translations and textbooks also appeared in increasing numbers, previously published dictionries failed to fulfill the needs of western-oriented intellectuals. thus cordier 1930 (Dictionnaire annamite-francais) required a supplement two years later, after a petit passe-partout de la presse indigene wascontributed by G. hue 1931.
In order to keep up with the newly enriched and cultivated language and also to assist in the learning of western languages, modern bilingual volumes had to be compiled. three native scholars with the same family name brought forth their contributions: dao duy and 1936, author of an excellent french-vietnamese dictionary, in which chinese characters are provided for those vietnamese equivalents that are loan compounds, dao van Tap, 1950, who produced the well-known french-vietnamese and vietnamese-french pair, and dao dang vy 1952, whose french-vietnamese volume distinguished itself in thoroughness and accuracy. d-a dao meant his french-vietnamese volume to be a supplement to his han-viet tu dien 1932, a list of chinese-borrowed words and expressions. v-t Dao's more selective corpus included only those sino-vietnamese terms that had been thoroughly integrated into the recipient language, and d-v dao later even tried to publish an encyclopedic dictionary, of which only three volumes had appeared in print 1960-61.
A second category included those monolingual dictionaries which aim at standardization vietnamese through meaning discriminations as well as clarifications of synonyms and antonyms, and even explanations of literary allusions used in works of poetry and prose. a third category, that of spelling dictionaries, numbers a dozen or so volumes, the most scholarly of which is certainly le ngoc tru 1959, which won a literary prize and was reissued in a revised edition 1973. the fourth group consists of what can be termed "cultural dictionaries" since they all include lexemes and graphemes borrowed from Chinese, a language often considered the latin of Vietnam, having served for centuries as the language of education and government at least in its written from.
3. the independence and partition Period
more to come...
