Vietnamese Syllable #2: Spoonerism and The "Dark Side" of Vietnamese Syllables
An in-depth exploration of the phenomenon of mono-syllabification in modern Vietnamese, using the example of nói lái (spoonerism), which led to an attempt to redesign the Vietnamese keyboard.
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Vietnamese is perfect for spoonerism
Spoonerism is common in Vietnamese folk, often resulting in sentences that exhibit both elegance and vulgarity, revealing the speaker's humor or encrypting the actual message. This ground of wordplay is considered the timeless charm of the Vietnamese language; every generation can burst at one same transposed word, phrase, or sentence.
There are 2 built-in elements of Vietnamese syllabic structure that make Vietnamese one of the most suitable languages for spoonerism:
• Firstly, the Vietnamese language features a distinct demarcation between syllables (or words), allowing one to finish a word and then progress to the next. In other words, no slur nor liaison. This characteristic of Vietnamese facilitates the rapid and intuitive analysis of component syllables by both speakers and listeners. It also explains why speakers can perform spoonerism in their heads without the need for tabulation or explicit phonemic decomposition.
• Secondly, the majority of syllables in Vietnamese carry semantic value. Given the structure of Vietnamese phonology, combined with its "what-you-see-is-what-you-read" orthography, this process is remarkably straightforward and offers greater flexibility compared to other languages. Most consonants can pair with virtually any rhyme that carries a tone, and in most cases, the resulting syllables form meaningful words. While this might give the impression that Vietnamese is inherently "well-designed" for such manipulations, there are still numerous instances that can leave even native speakers thoroughly perplexed.
Vietnamese has around 6,000 single words that can be extracted from the dictionary (please refer to my “Vietnamese Syllable #1: Deconstructing Mother Tongue”.) Hence, when we transpose words’ vowel and consonants in spoonerism, the words we get often have meanings, or we would get a syllable that is pronounced similar to another word that has meaning.
In other cases, we would get a syllable that does not exist in Vietnamese orthography. In “Vietnamese Syllable #1: Deconstructing Mother Tongue,” when processing the syllables, we regconized a syllable structured as follows:
consonant + vowel + consonant
From Vietnamese Syllable #1's dataset, we developed an app to explore Vietnamese syllables using that structure of consonant + vowel + consonant instead of typing.
The app is built with p5.js. Everyone can access via this link.
By dividing 6,000 words in the dictionary into 3 groups: initial consonants, vowels, and final consonants, and then combining these consonants and vowels, we created 82,250 words. These newly created words include both 6,000 words in the dictionary as well as words with the correct structure but not yet in the dictionary. Shall we explore them with the “Random” button?
The “dark side” of Vietnamese language and how to shed light on it
In spoonerism, we often encounter words that are not in this dictionary.
In Vietnamese orthography, certain word formations like “thuyềt” or “vổt”, do not exist. Specific sounds with final consonants like “c”, “ch”, “t”, and “p” (voiceless consonants) are exclusively accompanied by ◌́ (acute accent) and ◌̣ (underdot).
In the corpus of 82,000 reconstructed syllables, we filtered out 24,000 syllables with final consonants that cannot be pronounced naturally. When encountering these syllables, we usually find an alternative one that has natural pronunciation, which is also known as phonological change.
Phonological change is a common phenomenon throughout the life of modern Vietnamese. Beyond structural issues within phonology, as shown in the aforementioned example, these changes often emerge in tandem with the ebb and flow of historical, societal, geographical, and geopolitical background. For instance, we observe variations such as bớt and ngớt; đớp, tợp, hớp, and đợp; bẹp, xẹp, lép, khép, nép, and nẹp; khan, khàn, and khản; xẻ, chẻ, bẻ, and xé; or không, hông, hỏng, hem, and khum. Each of these sets would require an in-depth study on the relation between the demography and language.
While phonological and orthographic rules do exist, the structure of Vietnamese syllables demonstrates considerable flexibility, allowing for the articulation and adaptation of sounds not (or not yet) represented in the written system.
But isn’t Vietnamese a monosyllabic language? Indeed, it is. However, for much of its history, Vietnamese exhibited disyllabic tendencies, although these features are no longer preserved in the modern form. Additionally, the origins of contemporary Vietnamese orthography lie in phonetic transcription. Interestingly, syllables with light final consonants demonstrate a remarkable capacity to approximate sounds from other languages and even mimic elements found in nature.
Vietnamese Syllable is the initial research trilogy that fueled the “Our Vietnamese Project,” hosted by CodeSurfing.
Other parts of Vietnamese Syllable:
For full content about “Our Vietnamese Project” by CodeSurfing, please visit here.
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