Early Sino-Vietnamese Lexical Data and the Relative Chronology of Tonogenesis in Chinese and Vietnamese

Abstract

Vietnamese has numerous early-era Chinese loanwords with ngang and huyền tones, which in Middle Chinese loanwords correspond to the pingsheng level tone category, for words that should have sắc or nặng tones, corresponding to the Middle Chinese non-level qusheng departing tone category. 1 It is proposed that this layer of Early Sino-Vietnamese represents borrowing of Chinese words in the period after which Old Chinese had lost final *-s and prior to tonogenesis in Viet-Muong, thus leading to words with the level-tone category when tones emerged in Viet-Muong. This paper provides 60 items of Early Sino-Vietnamese that exemplify this phenomenon of ngang/huyền tones in qusheng words, but also 120 items exemplifying the previously noted reversal of sắc/nặng and hỏi/ngã tones between Early Sino-Vietnamese and later Sino-Vietnamese (the formalized readings of Chinese characters). Altogether, this allows for an overall relative chronology of the development of tones in both Sinitic and Vietic.