The Preservation And Evolution Of Middle Chinese Tone System In Sino-Vietnamese

Vietnam is a member of the ancient East Asian Han Cutural Circles or “Sinosphere”.The use of Chinese characters has a huge impact on Vietnamese language characters.I am an international student from Vietnam and am very interested in Chinese language and its charaters.Taking a master's degree in China has became a great opportunity for me to learn Chinese language and its characters.I was very intrigued to investigate the relationship of Sino-Vietnamese and Middle Chinese phonetic system by deepening my knowledge on this aspect.Vietnam shares a land border with China in the north,Vietnamese and Chinese remained a long term friendship.After a long-term interaction between the two countries,Vietnam absorbed various influences from China in many aspects including culture,history,custom etc,especially in the area of language.Nowadays,Vietnamese language adopted a large quantity of loanwords from Chinese language.According to statistical data released by Vietnamese lisguitician Nguyen Van Khang(Loanwords in Vietnamese,Vietnam Education Press,2007),there is more than 60% of the total Vietnamese words borrowed in Chinese(Sino-Vietnamese words).They account for 70% to 80% in specialized fields such as economics,law,politics.It could prove that Sino-Vietnamese words are an important element of Vietnamese language as,they are an integral component part of Vietnamese vocabulary system.As an earlier point,Sino-Vietnamese words are the elements in the Vietnamese language derived from the Chinese language.It has been more than a thousand years of history since China influenced the Vietnamese language.Chinese pronunciations are vietnamized by Vietnamese people as,it formed a phonetic system that is called Sino-Vietnamese phonetic system.Vietnam is now using Latin alphabet as national language script,therefore SinoVietnamese and purely Vietnamese words both are a kind of phonogramic character which represent a word or phoneme in speech without indicating meanings.Although SinoVietnamese words are derived from Chinese,but under the influence of dialect,Sino-Vietnamese words completely seperated from Chinese phonetic system and are covered by a new phonetic shell: Sino-Vietnamse,but Sino-Vietnamese is able to reflect Middle Chinese phonetic system,because its phonological characteristics have been preserved in SinoVietnamese intactly.The researches of tone system has played an important role in the researches of Vietnamese and Chinese.This thesis mainly discusses the preservation and evolution of Middle Chinese tone system in Sino-Vietnamese.This study may provide some available reference materials for Vietnamese and Chinese languages studies including Vietnamese and Chinese phonemics.It is also useful for Vietnamese or Chinese students teaching a foreign language in the future and helping to promote a mutual cooperative relation between Vietnam and China.This thesis includes five chapters.Chapter one is introduction part.It mainly mentions the reason and significance of topic selection,the object and method of study,then simply introduces the material.In addition,this chapter also summarizes the current status of researching Sino-Vietnamese,and mainly focus on tones.Besides that,it introduces the achivement and deficiency of our predecessors as well.Chapter two introduces the background of forming Sino-Vietnamese in Vietnam,then introduces the Sino-Vietnamese phonetic system and its features.Chapter three and four are the main chapters of this study.Chapter three discusses the preservation of Middle Chinese tone system in Sino-Vietnamese.Firstly,it discusses Middle Chinese tone system.Then by using comparison,statistics and analytic methods,we investigate the initials of Guangyun so that we could find out the corresponding pronunciation and tone category of them in Sino-Vietnamese.Next,we indicated the matching rule of Middle Chinese initial system and Sino-Vietnamse tone system and pointed out the relation of Middle Chinese and Sino-Vietnamese as well as the preservation of it in Sino-Vietnamese in tones.Chapter four mainly discusses the evolution of Middle Chinese tone system in SinoVietnamese,including the origin of eight tones in Sino-Vietnamese and the sound altering phenomenon.This chapter also indicates the beginning and ending time as well as causes of sound changes.In the author's opinion,these three aforementioned aspects are the most significant point of the study.Chapter five is the conclusion.This part summarizes the main points of each chapter,then points out the deficiency and development space of this study.We also have an appendix at the end of the study.It includes tables of investigating the initials of Guangyun and the corresponding pronunciation and tone category of them in SinoVietnamese.This is for reference.