Names of Vietnam
The name Việt Nam, with the syllables in the modern order, first appears in the 16th century in a poem attributed to Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm.
The term "Việt" (Yue) (Chinese: 越; pinyin: Yuè; Cantonese Yale: Yuht; Wade–Giles: Yüeh4; Vietnamese: Việt) in Early Middle Chinese was first written using the logograph "戉" for an axe (a homophone), in oracle bone and bronze inscriptions of the late Shang dynasty (c. 1200 BC), and later as "越".
[5][6] In the early 8th century BC, a tribe on the middle Yangtze were called the Yangyue, a term later used for peoples further south.
[8] In 207 BC, former Qin dynasty general Zhao Tuo/Triệu Đà founded the kingdom of Nanyue/Nam Việt (Chinese: 南越; lit.
[11] In 1054, Emperor Lý Thánh Tông shortened the country's name to Đại Việt ("Great Viet").
[14] "Sấm Trạng Trình" (The Prophecies of Principal Graduate Trình), which are attributed to Vietnamese official and poet Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm (1491–1585), reversed the traditional order of the syllables and put the name in its modern form "Việt Nam" as in Việt Nam khởi tổ xây nền "Vietnam's founding ancestor lays its basis"[15] or Việt Nam khởi tổ gây nên "Vietnam's founding ancestor builds it up".
The word "Nam" no longer implies Southern Việt, but rather that Vietnam is "the South" in contrast to China, "the North".
[18] Researcher Nguyễn Phúc Giác Hải found the word 越南 "Việt Nam" on 12 steles carved in the 16th and 17th centuries, including one at Bảo Lâm Pagoda, Haiphong (1558).
[17] Lord Nguyễn Phúc Chu (1675–1725), when describing Hải Vân Pass (then called Ải Lĩnh, lit.
[27] Minh Mang declared that "We must hope that their barbarian habits will be subconsciously dissipated, and that they will daily become more infected by Han [Sino-Vietnamese] customs.
However, the general public continued to use Annam and the name "Vietnam" remained virtually unknown until the Yên Bái mutiny of 1930, organized by the Việt Nam Quốc Dân Đảng (Vietnamese Nationalist Party).
The 1954 edition of Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary gave both the unspaced and hyphenated forms; in response to a letter from a reader, the editors indicated that the spaced form Viet Nam was also acceptable, though they stated that because Anglophones did not know the meaning of the two words making up the name Vietnam, "it is not surprising" that there was a tendency to drop the space.
[52] However, the spelling of "Viet Nam" is formally recognized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the United Nations (UN) and the Vietnamese Government itself as the official, standardized and "accurate" country name, resulting in the systematic prioritization in the usage of this spelling by the Vietnamese state-powered agencies and official documents such as the nationwide-issued citizen identity cards and the passports.
[53][54][55] Both Japanese and Korean formerly referred to Vietnam by their respective Sino-Xenic pronunciations of the Chinese characters for its names, but later switched to using direct phonetic transcriptions.
