Lexicon of French Words Used in Vietnamese
Being an interpreter with a passion for languages, have you ever thought about the “purity” of your languages? Or what is the purest language in the world? Actually, there is barely any language without any loanwords (also called borrowings or borrowed words). Rare exceptions are languages of isolated people who have never had any, or only limited, contact with the rest of the world. The Sentinelese can be one example of a pure language.
Vietnam is not an isolated country, and the Vietnamese language is known to have been influenced by foreign languages throughout the country’s colonial past. These languages are namely French, Chinese and English.
In this article, Freelensia introduces the lexicon of French words used in Vietnamese (in other words, French loanwords in Vietnamese or Vietnamese words of French origin). The Vietnamese language contains a significant number of French loanwords that are often spelled and pronounced a bit differently. Unless you speak both French and Vietnamese, many of them don’t seem particularly obvious. Through this article, we hope to give you valuable insight into how closely the two languages are related, and help grow and reinforce your existing Vietnamese and French vocabulary.
1. The format of the lexicon
It is in table format. The Alphabet column is for easy navigation, the next 3 columns are Vietnamese word, Original French word and English meaning, respectively. The Vietnamese word column denotes the Vietnamese word of concern, followed by the French word from which the Vietnamese word derives its existence, followed by the English definition of that Vietnamese word. Therefore, please keep in mind that the French word is not necessarily the translation of the Vietnamese word, and the English word is not necessarily the translation of its French counterpart. The source of a word may be provided in the last column if we think you should know it.
Sometimes, words in brackets are added for clarification purposes.
When multiple Vietnamese entries share the same French root, this sign : => will be displayed at the second entry onward, redirecting you to the first entry.
2. Usage of the lexicon
The lexicon is alphabetized by Vietnamese entries. You can use your browser’s Find function to look up words in the three languages available. When you are not able to find a word, try a combination of the following methods:
1) Input a different spelling.
2) Eliminate the usage of — (dash). The dictionary is built on the principle that these words are now a part of the Vietnamese language, hence are not transcribed with dashes in the way that recent foreign words have.
3) Simply do not look for scientific terms, especially chemical names, as they are not in this lexicon.
3. The lexicon
Above are only the first few entries of the lexicon. We are not able to publish the entire lexicon in this article as there are nearly 300 entries, but you can visit it at f.ls/vi-fr-lexicon.
If you spot any errors or would like to add new words and their translations, feel free to email us at support@freelensia.com. Your contribution would be much appreciated.
See Also
· COVID-19 Multilingual Terminologies
· What Is a highly Paid Language for Interpreters?
