Vietnamese is sino-tibetan ?

[Hoang Nhat]

AlexNg,

The Mon-Khmer origin was not in India. Speakers of Mon-Khmer languages once lived in a large region covering most of South-eastern China, Northern Vietnam, west all the way to India, and south to the southern tip of Malaysia. Due to wars, invasions, and migrations of other groups into the region, these people have been scattered all over the entire region. Only Vietnamese and Khmers developed into nationhood. The Thai people who created Thailand and Laos were only newcomers in this region. They moved down there from Yunnan, southwestern China during the 13th century when the Mongols destroyed their kingdom. But even today, the majorities of ethnic minorities in Thailand and Laos are still the people of Mon-Khmer languages.

On the Vietnamese ancestral question, Vietnamese believe their ancestors originated from Northern Vietnam. Judging by the physical appearances of the Vietnamese and Yuet people in China, it's highly probable that their ancestors were the same people or pretty closely racially related. Most Vietnamese believe their ancestors lost Guang Xi and Guang Dong to the Han two thousand years ago. Some Chinese people for unknown reason argued that the original Yuet people in this region were wiped out and replaced by the Han population. I think this assumption is wrong because if that's to be true, the people of Guang Xi and Guang Dong today must have looked exactly like the Han Chinese of Central and Northern China, but they don't, not even close; however, they look indistinguishable when compared to the Vietnamese. I think what happened was they lost their own language due to so many years under sinocization and assimilation efforts by the Han, and the essential part of those efforts were to force the Yuet population to learn and speak Chinese and as time surpassed, that language turned into the modern Cantonese language, a Sino-Yuet dialect. This assimilation and sinocization were also imposed on the Viet in Northern Vietnam, but it failed from the start due to the unyielding resistance from the Viet population. As a result, Vietnam was only semi-sinnocized, and unlike their counterparts in China they were able to retain their own language, culture and identity. I think even though the Yuet lost their language, but it's highly possible that one can still find some of its relics in the Cantonese language itself such as certain words and some strange word order or sentence structures that are unique compared to other Chinese dialects.

Many people find it unreasonable to put Vietnamese into the same language category with Khmer because Vietnamese and Khmers are so racially different . But as we all know from history, language and race is not necessary a one-to-one correspondence, like someone already mentioned the case of blacks in America, and to a lesser extent the Yuet people and their language is also an example of that. And don't you know that Hindi language is considered part of the Indo-European language family. Khmers and Vietnamese although are not related in terms of race, but pretty close in terms of geography and Southeast Asian culture of wet-rice agriculture, and we have strange custom in common like eating betel and areca and using them in wedding ceremony.

[AlexNg]

Hoang Nhat ,

I have to disagree on several points.


1. "language and race is not necessary a one-to-one correspondence".

A race is identified by its language ! We are excluding those races whose languages are totally submerged by another dominant language like the blacks in united states.

Language families evolved because the earliest ancestors originated from the same tribe many thousands/million years ago ie they are of the same race ! Take the case of tibetan and han. The han migrated east whereas the tibetan migrated south, that is why these two languages have so much in common. Their original ancestral place is somewhere in middle china (can't remember exactly where).

Another example is korean and japanese, both of them originated from the altaic mountains in central asia and both of them migrated east. But due to separation of the sea, it developed differently but the main language elements are similar.


2. Hindi is part of indo-european but they are not indians !

The northern indians are not the original inhabitants of india if you care to read their history. The dravidians (south indians) are the original inhabitants, that is why they look so different from the north indians of today.

The northern indians look very similar to southern europeans and have european features albeit darker hair. In fact, they are considered the caucasoid race. Their race and the european races are related, originated from the same place thousand/million years ago (read about it somewhere)

3. Khmer and vietnamese are of different race.

Obviously, khmer and vietnamese look so different from each other that they cannot have the same ancestral races. In fact, I heard that the khmer empire was formed by an indian prince from india. Why is it that eastern indian contains people who are khmer speakers ?

Eating betel seems to be an indian culture. Can anybody confirm ?

There is still some doubt in this area.

1. Khmer and vietnamese are of different races, obviously physically and genetically.

2. Southern vietnam was part of the khmer empire whose culture and language might have influenced pure vietnamese culture.

[Hoang Nhat]

AlexNg,

The statement I made about language and race was with regard to language affiliation – that’s what we were talking about. Let’s have a try and take Chinese and Koreans and compare them to Italians and Norwegians. Apparently, Chinese and Koreans are much closer in terms of physical appearance/race than Italians and Norwegians are for we all know Italians with their black hair and brown eyes and Norwegians with their blond hair and green eyes, so they are much more different obviously. The point here is Italian and Norwegian languages are in the same language family but Chinese and Korean are not. If there is one-to-one between race and language affiliation, then it should be true in both of these cases, but it’s not. On the same note, when we compare Hindi speakers and Norwegians to Chinese and Koreans, we would reach the same conclusion: there’s not necessarily a one-to-one correspondence between race/physical appearance and language affiliation.

I don't know whether Khmer Empire was formed by an Indian prince or not. I'm also not sure whether Eastern India contains people who speak Khmer or not, but I know for sure that India has people of Mon-Khmer languagues and many other people of Munda languages that made up the other sub-family of the Austroasiatic language family. I think we should keep in mind the difference between a language and a language family. A language family is a group of more or less related languages. Mon-Khmers is a language family which contains hundreds of different languages; Khmer and Vietnamese just happen to be part of this group. Khmer is not a synonym for Mon-Khmer.

As for the custom of eating betel and areca and using them in wedding ceremony, it's as old as the Vietnamese mythology itself, just like other Vietnamese customs such as body tattooing (abolished in the 13th century), and turban wearing (no longer practiced in the early 20th century). I agree with you that the Khmers and Vietnamese are different people, but geography could play a more important role here. Mon-Khmer speakers once lived all over the entire southeastern Asia peninsula.

The region of southwestern Vietnam where the Vietnamese encountered the Khmers more than three hundred years ago was pretty sparsely populated. Even now the entire Cambodian nation has only a population of 10 or 11 million people, so you can imagine what the population must have been like in remote regions of Khmer Kingdom such as the southwestern region of Vietnam hundreds of years ago. Actually within the last 250 years, the ethnic Chinese population in this region were even larger than the Khmer, so the argument that Khmer language greatly influenced Vietnamese language during these periods is very flawed, and the other way around is more probable. Also contrary to your belief, anyone who knows both Vietnamese and Cantonese would tell you that the Southern Vietnamese accent, not the Northern Vietnamese, sounded more “similar” to Cantonese. Southern accent has no “v” sound and high-pitched ~ tone, and neither does Cantonese.

I think I’m going to stop this discussion here since you’re not familiar with Vietnamese and Vietnamese culture/facts. I can only help you thus far.

[Hoang Nhat]

Correction: ...Norwegians with their blond hair and blue (not green) eyes...

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[AlexNg]

It seems that the vietnamese themselves doesn't know the origin of their own people. There are so many different accounts of their origin from both outsiders and vietnamese.

How can you believe the words and research of a french linguist who is not even vietnamese or one of the sino-tibetan language speakers to accurately group a family?

There is still a lot of doubt as to the origin of the vietnamese and which words are loan and which words are original words as the vietnamese does not seem to have a written language form prior to adopting the chinese characters. So the only records would be in china archives itself.

[Dylan Sung]

AlexNg,

I for one, would trust Haudricourt and Maspero. They at least have some linguistic qualification.

You on the other hand in the statement above, shows that you are not an objective inquirer, and nothing but your own pet theories would satisfy you.

Dyl,

[qrasy]

To Find out the answer, may be we can just come back to the definition.

I want to know the definitions of Austroasiatic and Mon-Khmer.

My definition of Sino-Tibetan:

1. Tonal. If a syllable is read in different tones, it would have different meanings. The tones are "fixed" (not affected by punctuation marks)

2. Simple grammar structure (no imflection)

3. Most (but not all) words is monosyllabic

4. Has noun classifiers. Most languages has many noun classifiers.

Is my definition true?
Please, don't say anything about race and geography, because they seem unrelated to language classification.

Also, Maspero and Handicourt seems to contadict each other, Maspero thinks that Viets should be grouped inside Tai.

It is stated in http://www.vny2k.net/vny2k/SiniticVietnamese5.htm that:

"In the past Vietnamese had been formerly believed to belong to the Mon-Khmer group of the Austroasiatic linguistic family. In 1911, 1912 and 1952, however, Maspero reclassified Vietnamese with the Thai (T’ai, Tai, Dai, Tay) languages, members of the Daic division of the Sino-Tibetan linguistic family, with which Vietnamese shares, among other things, a tonal system on the Chinese model. "

[Dylan Sung]

With regard to Maspero 1952, this work was a posthumous publication. Henri Maspero died in Buchenwald concentration camp during the latter years of the second world war. An obituary can be found here,

http://www.umass.edu/wsp/sinology/persons/maspero.html

Dyl.

[AlexNg]

Dylan,

I think grasy is a more scientific and more refined person than you. I have put out my doubts in my previous postings and so far nobody seem to have disproved my doubts.

what are the characteristics of sino-tibetan and what are the characteristics of mon-khmer ?

If you had bothered researching more into the vietnamese origins, you will know that there are so many different accounts from so-called linguists which contradicts with other historic sources.

These so-called linguists are trying to make everything suit into their so-called theories. Saying such thing as the vietnamese is originally non-tonal etc without solid proof just because they cannot fit into the model of mon-khmer group.

If these linguists are so perfect as you claim them to be, then why is it that it was originally placed under sino-tibetan ? and then moved to mon-khmer ? Or is it just another mistake as they cannot determine the true origins of the vietnamese people ?

[Dylan Sung]

Take a look at "What's so Chinese about Vietnamese" by Mark J. Alves at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

http://www.geocities.com/malves98/publications.html

Dyl.