Vietnamese

London Oriental and African Language Library #9

by Nguyẽ̂n Đình Hoà, Nguyen Dinh Hoa

An essential descriptive introduction to a South-East Asian language with over seventy million speakers, this book provides a conservative treatment of the phonology, lexicon and syntax of Vietnamese, with comments on semantics and history, with particular reference to writing systems, loan words and syntactic structures. All example texts are transcribed and glossed.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1997

Reviews

[Tuan Do · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book give nice treatment on Vietnamese grammar and have a concise introduction to Vietnamese language in the larger group of Viet-Muong languages. For native speakers, while you could just skim through the parts dealing with the language typology, noun/verb phrases, and sentence constructions, some other parts could really give you a wondering feeling of how literate are you in your mother tongue. The phonetic system is briefly but thoughtfully mentioned, imparting a sounder phonetic basics than the standard method given at Vietnamese schools. A short historical account of Vietnamese language, its relations and interchange with other Asian languages are also provided. Another interesting part is the elaboration on reduplicative words system, giving some appealing observance on the correlation between the rhythmic pattern of reduplicative words and their semantic aspect. It is a recommendation for Vietnamese people who want to review the grammar and want to grab some first impression on the larger picture of the language.

[Hai Nhi]

great