Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary

More recent loans from southern Chinese languages, usually names of foodstuffs such as lạp xưởng 'Chinese sausage' (from Cantonese 臘腸; 腊肠; laahpchéung), are not treated as Sino-Vietnamese but more direct borrowings.

[6] As a result of a thousand years of Chinese control, a small number of Sinitic words were borrowed into Vietnamese, called Old Sino-Vietnamese layer.

Furthermore, a thousand years of use of Literary Chinese after independence, a considerable number of Sinitic words were borrowed, called the Sino-Vietnamese layer.

[9] The northern Vietic varieties ancestral to Vietnamese and Muong have long been in contact with Tai languages and Chinese as part of a zone of convergence known as the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area.

[12] The Old Sino-Vietnamese layer was introduced after the Chinese conquest of the kingdom of Nanyue, including the northern part of Vietnam, in 111 BC.

[14] It has also been theorised that some Old-Sino-Vietnamese words came from a language shift from a population of Annamese Middle Chinese speakers that lived in the Red River Delta, in northern Vietnam, to proto-Viet-Muong.

[18][19] Some of these were re-introductions of words borrowed at the Old Sino-Vietnamese stage, with different pronunciations due to intervening sound changes in Vietnamese and Chinese, and often with a shift in meaning.

[16][20] Wang Li followed Henri Maspero in identifying a problematic group of forms with "softened" initials g-, gi, d- and v- as Sino-Vietnamese loans that had been affected by changes in colloquial Vietnamese.

For example, the Chinese mathematician Li Shanlan created hundreds of translations of mathematical terms, including 代數學 ('replace-number-study') for 'algebra', yielding modern Mandarin dàishùxué, Vietnamese đại số học, Japanese daisūgaku and Korean daesuhak.

Such as: Some Sino-Vietnamese compounds are entirely invented by the Vietnamese and are not used in any Chinese languages, such as linh mục 'priest' from 靈 'soul' and 牧 'shepherd',[39] or giả kim thuật (假金術 'art of artificial metal'), which has been applied popularly to refer to 'alchemy'.

For example, Portugal is transliterated as 葡萄牙 (pinyin: Pútáoyá; Cantonese Yale: Pòuhtòuhngàh) and becomes Bồ Đào Nha in Vietnamese.

For example, while the Sino-Vietnamese Luân Đôn remains in common usage in Vietnamese, the English equivalent London is also commonplace.

One interesting example is the current motto of Vietnam : "Cộng hòa Xã hội chủ nghĩa Việt Nam / Độc lập – Tự do – Hạnh phúc", in which all the words are Sino-Vietnamese (獨立 – 自由 – 幸福).

However, the homograph/homophone problem is not as serious as it appears, because although many Sino-Vietnamese words have multiple meanings when written with the Vietnamese alphabet, usually only one has widespread usage, while the others are relegated to obscurity.