| Summary: | 博士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 國文學系 === 99 === Sino-Vietnamese refers to pronunciations of Chinese characters in Vietnamese borrowed from Chinese. The contact between the Chinese and Vietnamese languages dated back before the Qin Dynasty in China (221-207 B.C.) and intensified through the Han and Tang dynasties. Historical records and linguistic evidence show that these loaned pronunciations were imported into Vietnamese in several waves. Variant pronunciations that entered the language at different stages frequently possess different phonological characteristics. According to a commonly-held view, Sino-Vietnamese was imported into Vietnam around the Late Middle Chinese period. However, the many irregular correspondences between Sino-Vietnamese and middle Chinese indicate that it is necessary to recognize several strata of Sino-Vietnamese.
This dissertation proposes that the study of Sino-Vietnamese should take into account both Chinese loanwords and loaned pronunciations of Chinese characters. The main data sources of this dissertation are the two appendices of Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations coupled with their Middle Chinese phonological attributes. Appendix 1 lists all the Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations from SVD (Sino-Vietnamese Dictionary) which have been accepted by scholars as standard Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations. Appendix 2 lists the pronunciations not included in Appendix 1, comprising Chinese borrowings suggested by other scholars, as well as those discovered independently by this author. Phonological strata of Sino-Vietnamese are distinguished on the bases of phonological histories of Chinese and Vietnamese evidenced by the materials contained in these databases.
This dissertation departs from traditional methods in Sino-Vietnamese studies in utilizing current research results on Chinese and Vietnamese diachronic phonology to propose new criteria for positing Sino-Vietnamese phonological strata. These criteria, which integrate initial, rime, as well as tone patterns, permitted the setting up of four such strata---Old, Early Middle, Late Middle, and Pre-Modern. The diagnostic traits of each of these stratum are proposed. It is observed that Old and Early Middle strata are less frequently instantiated in the data than Late Middle and Pre-Modern, which may be due to the massive overlaying of the older strata by the newer ones. Findings of this dissertation also reveal that the characteristics of southern Chinese dialects often overlap with those of other strata. Since the southern Chinese dialects tend to retain conservative features, caution must be exercised to determine whether an observed conservatism in an apparently old pronunciation stems from recent borrowing from a pre-modern southern dialect. Also noteworthy is the discovery that many instances of suspected borrowings from Old Chinese may actually be adapted after Early Middle Chinese in the light of our criteria founded on phonological integration.
It is claimed that the formation and evolution of Sino-Vietnamese is the result of both the imposition of the Chinese philological knowledge on Vietnamese and prolonged contact of the language with various Chinese dialects. This artificial system of philological knowledge, which served as a standard for poetry-making and civil examinations in Vietnam, approximates the phonological structures of rime books and rime tables of China. According to the results of this research, Sino-Vietnamese readings constitute a system based largely on Late Middle Chinese but also incorporating certain archaic and some pre-modern Chinese dialect features. Through competition and compromise between philology and real linguistic systems, some language phenomena may get overridden but important linguistic information may partially survive, resulting in an amalgam of both linguistic and non-linguistic phenomena, and hence the importance of properly stratifying Sino-Vietnamese. Instead of treating the present-day Sino-Vietnamese readings as reflexing the phonological system from a certain location and time, this study focuses on extracting elements that reflect linguistic realities, in combination with Chinese loanword data which are less prone to artificial linguistic fabrication. Variations in both Chinese loanword and character readings are examined one by one to ascertain the origins of each Sino-Vietnamese variant with an aim to excluding deceptive superficial phenomena caused by non-linguistic factors. These linguistic realities will ultimately make clear the validity and limitations of evidence from Sino-Vietnamese for the reconstruction of Chinese phonological history.
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