AN ANALYSIS OF THE HOMOPHONES “HONG” IN CHINESE AND “HỒNG” IN VIETNAMESE

Abstract

Chinese and Vietnamese are analytic languages and thus homophone is a common linguistic phenomenon. Over the course of history, Vietnamese language has interacted with Chinese language and borrowed a great number of Chinese characters that gradually become Sino-Vietnamese words. Those words are Vietnamized to some extent and are subject to semantic change. The combination of Sino-Vietnamese elements and purely Vietnamese words has created Sino-Vietnamese words and makes homophone in Vietnamese become more and more complicated. This linguistic phenomenon causes many difficulties in note taking, explanation, Vietnamese usage and Chinese learning for Vietnamese people. In the article, such methods and techniques as statistics, analysis, compare-contrast are used along with the materials collected from some dictionaries and everyday language to analyze the homophones of ‘hóng’ in Chinese and ‘hồng’ in Vietnamese with an aim to distinguishing between their meanings. This hopes to contribute as a reference for Vietnamese teaching and Chinese teaching in Vietnam.