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...
