Alexis Michaud

Keywords:

In addition to the two short vowels ă [ă] and â [ɤ], a young Vietnamese phonetician, Mr. Nguyễn Bạt-Tụy, has discovered four other short vocalic phonemes.

Vietnamese vowels easily lend themselves to an analysis into a system consisting of two subsystems. Two short vowels: close: â

André-Georges Haudricourt 2 However, the detailed phonetic description provided by Dubois 3 (1909) shows that full vowels can become shortened under certain conditions. The short vowels thus obtained are not independent phonemes, but contextual variants of the full vowels.

"-NG final: it causes a shortening of the vocalic part of the syllable, except in the case of the two rhymes ang [aŋ] and ơng [ɤŋ], which contrast with the short rhymes ăng [aŋ] and âng [ɤŋ], respectively, and eng [ɛŋ], which is clearly a rare and exceptional case. The elements iê, 4 ươ, uô [iə, ɯə, uə], which by themselves are long, can combine with -ng, yielding the long sounds iêng, ương, uông [iəŋ, ɯəŋ, uəŋ]." (Dubois 1909: 54) "-NH final: …is inseparable from the brevity of the sound…" (Dubois 1909: 59) At first blush, it seems that the palatal final -nh [ɲ] neutralizes vowel length contrasts, but the distribution of vowels before velar finals is more difficult to explain.

In fact, all vowels do not combine freely with palatal and velar finals.

There are only three vowels, i [i], ê [e] and a [a], that can be followed by a palatal final, yielding the combinations inh [iɲ], ênh [eɲ], and anh [aɲ]; two of these vowels, i [i] and ê [e], cannot be followed by the velar nasal. Table 2 presents the distribution of vowels with palatal and velar nasal finals.

3. Dubois indicates that ơng [ɤŋ] is a rare rhyme; Lê Văn-Lý and Emeneau ignore it altogether. All that matters for the purpose of the present analysis is that this combination is potentially allowed by the system of the language.

4. [Dubois's mistaken spelling of iê as ie was corrected in the present

translation.]

The short vowels of Vietnamese (1952) 3

[Table 2. Palatal and velar nasal-final rhymes in Vietnamese 5 ]

longiêng

[iəŋ]

eng [ɛŋ] ang [aŋ] ơng [ɤŋ] ương [ɯəŋ] uông

[uəŋ] - - - - short inh [iɲ]
ênh

[eɲ]

anh

[aɲ] - - - - - - - short - - - - ăng [aŋ] âng [ɤŋ] - - ưng [ɯŋ]
ung [uŋ] ông [oŋ] ong [ɔŋ] This distribution is best analyzed as a case of neutralization between velar and palatal finals. From a phonological point of view, this is to be interpreted in the following way: in Vietnamese, a short vowel is never observed in absolute final position, 6 and the following consonant is "firmly linked" (in Trubetzkoy's words : Trubetzkoy 1939: 234-236) to the vowel. In this position, final velars assimilate to short front vowels to such an extent that they are heard as palatal by foreigners. Thus, the final nh In dictionaries, we find that words ending in eng [the long rhyme] are either expressive or onomatopoeic: eng-éc 'pig grunting', leng-keng 'to trot', pheng 'noise of cymbals', xeng 'metallic noise', or recently borrowed words, such as seng 'sapeque' 8 [START_REF] Hue | Dictionnaire annamite-chinois-français[END_REF]. half-open: e

[ɛ] ă [a] o [ɔ]

Comments

This article is an exercise in synchronic phonological analysis, which at the time (early 1950s) was still a relatively new tool. Haudricourt gives credit to a young colleague for the discovery of four short vowel phonemes in Vietnamese: /e/, /ɛ/, /o/ and /ɔ/. From a synchronic point of view, since an opposition of length is found for the sounds at issue in one context (before a final velar nasal), the four short vowels must be granted phonemic status; and this length opposition must be considered to be neutralized in all other contexts. These length oppositions were not present in the state of the language reflected in Written Vietnamese (mid-17th century): they were introduced by recent evolutions whereby onomatopoeics and loanwords came to occupy structural slots left empty by the phonetic evolution of certain rhymes. A phonological analysis of the rhymes of Written Vietnamese is shown in table form at the end of this section; it does not include the new combinations eeng, êêng, oong, ôông (/ɛŋ/, /eŋ/, /ɔŋ/, /oŋ/) which Haudricourt mentions in the article.

This aspect of the Vietnamese phonological system is open to several analyses: while the length difference is phonetically robust, "the fact that such pairs are also distinguished by differences in the articulation of the coda segment has led to some debate on the proper phonological treatment of the vowel system" (Kirby 2011: 384). Many authors choose to consider these length oppositions as exceptional (e.g. Cao Xuân Hạo 2007a, b), partly due to a reluctance to adopt an analysis that departs from that encapsulated in Written Vietnamese. On the other hand, Haudricourt's analysis draws attention to ongoing evolutions, which gradually lead to restructuring of the system.

Among other useful perspectives for research, the article draws attention to the special situation of final velar nasals. Final /ŋ/ caused a general vowel shortening, whereas vowels were long in front of final /m/ and /n/ (while leaving the length contrasts for /ɤ/ and /a/ unaffected). Then, a second development took place: onomatopoeics and loanwords filled the gaps created by the absence of long vowels followed by final /ŋ/. The pressure towards gap-filling must have been increased by the high frequency of long vowels in front of the other two nasals, /m/ and /n/.

The asymmetry between final /ŋ/ and other final nasals is not peculiar to Vietnamese: it seems that, in the entire Austroasiatic family, more vowel contrasts are observed before /ŋ/ than before other nasals.

Michel Ferlus and Alexis Michaud

[Appendix: Table of the rhymes of Written Vietnamese (M. Ferlus)]

This table was created by Michel Ferlus in 1991 and revised in 2015 (see [START_REF] Michaud | Strata of standardization: the Phong Nha dialect of Vietnamese (Quảng Bình Province) in historical perspective[END_REF]. It provides a phonemic interpretation of all the rhymes of Written Vietnamese. This constitutes a form of reconstruction, abstracting away from two related sources of asymmetries: (i) the phonetic distance between sounds analyzed as allophones of the same phoneme; and (ii) the complexities introduced by expressive or onomatopoeic words and relatively recent loanwords from Western languages. Thus, the phonemic combinations /oŋ/, /ɔŋ/ and /ɛŋ/ have undergone a phonetic evolution to [ɤoŋm], [ʌɔŋm] and [ɛɲ], leaving the phonetic slots [oŋ], [ɔŋ] and [ɛŋ] empty, and the rhymes written as ôông, oong and eng, introduced by loanwords and expressive forms, filled these structural gaps, as explained in Haudricourt's article. Under a flatly synchronic approach, all of the six pairs of length contrasts among Vietnamese vowels presented in Table 5 in Haudricourt's paper should be present in the table of rhymes, as these pairs contrast in front of a nasal velar final: ênh /eŋ/ vs. êng /eŋ/, anh /ɛŋ/ vs. eng /ɛŋ/, ông /oŋ/ vs. ôông /oŋ/, and ong /ɔŋ/ vs. oong /ɔŋ/. The choice made when drawing up the table of rhymes below was to abstract away from these phenomena to provide a bird's eye view of the origin of the rhymes of Written Vietnamese. The analysis is thus essentially the same as that proposed by Cao Xuân Hạo (2007b: 102).

The choice of IPA symbols for vowels is based on [START_REF] Kirby | Vietnamese (Hanoi Vietnamese)[END_REF]. It is not a narrow notation aiming at the greatest synchronic phonetic precision.

For instance, the vowels ơ and â are transcribed as /ɤ/ and /ɤ/ respectively, reflecting their interpretation as a vowel pair distinguished by phonemic length, and overlooking the slight difference between them in terms of vowel quality (a difference which led René Gsell to adopt a transcription by /ɤ/ and /ʌ/ respectively: see [START_REF] Gsell | Remarques sur la structure de l'espace tonal en vietnamien du sud (parler de Saïgon)[END_REF].

The hyphen (-) in the top row (in -k, Cʷ-m, etc.) materializes the position of the vowel within the consonantal structure of the syllable. Medial rounding is transcribed as a superscript ʷ to the right of the symbol C (for Consonant). Thus, the rime uê, as in the word quê 'countryside, home village', is located in column Cʷ-, line e. A dash (-) indicates that the combination at issue is not found in the language. Some of the complexities of the orthography are not reflected in the table, such as the encoding of the contrast between the rhymes /ʷa/ and /uə/ by the use of different consonant symbols (and identical vowel symbols) in qua /k w a/ vs. cua /kuə/.

-

  [ɲ] is simply a 5. [An approximative phonetic value has been added by the editors. The length of the vowel is indicated by Haudricourt's line headings.] 6. [As mentioned earlier, except for the context before /ŋ/, short vowels are limited to close â [ɤ] and open ă [ă], which do not occur in open syllables. All other phonetically short vowels are found before /ŋ, ɲ/.] contextual variant of ng [ŋ] after a front vowel, whether phonologically short or phonetically shortened. 7 The i in inh is a [phonetically] shortened variant of a full vowel, since all close vowels are shortened when they are followed by the velar nasal final. (Thus the vowels in ưng [ɯŋ] and ung [uŋ] are realized as short vowels.) This short i [i ̆] is simply a contextual variant of the full i [i]. In contrast, the ê [e] in ênh [eɲ] and the a [ɛ] in anh [ɛɲ] are phonologically short vowels, constituting independent phonemes, since the corresponding full vowels are attested in the rhymes êng [eŋ] and eng [ɛŋ].

  Table 1 in Vietnamese orthography. 1 [Table 1. The twelve full vocalic phonemes of Vietnamese 2 ] The IPA equivalents of the Vietnamese orthography have been added by the editors. They are based on the table of rhymes by Michel Ferlus: see the Appendix to this article. Short vowels are marked by the breve; long vowels are unmarked.]

	front	central	back
	i [i] iê [iə] [allograph: ia] ê [e] e [ɛ]	ư [ɯ] ươ [ɯə] [allograph: ưa] ơ [ɤ] a [a]	u [u] uô [uə] [allograph: ua] ô [o] o [ɔ]
	1. For details, see Lê Văn-Lý (1948: 17-44). 2. [

  The three rhymes ang, anh and ăng are the only proof of the phonemic status of final nh [ɲ] distinct from ng [ŋ].

	Emeneau, in his recent description of Vietnamese, mentions that he has found a word containing the rhyme êng [eŋ] (Emeneau 1951: 15 note 1), and that the vowel of the rhyme written as anh must belong to the phoneme /ɛ/, written as e in the orthography [hence /ɛɲ/ instead of the /aɲ/ of Table 2] (1951: 9 §1.3.1.1). He concludes that palatal and velar finals are to be distinguished phonologically, on the basis of the opposition of anh [ɛɲ] to eng [ɛŋ], and of ênh [eɲ] to êng [eŋ].
	A self-taught Vietnamese linguist, Nguyễn Bạt-Tụy, adopting a phonetic point of view, considers that the vowel in anh

is indeed an e [ɛ], and that its final nh [ɲ] is identical with the ng [ŋ] in ăng [aŋ] (Nguyễn Bạt-Tụy 1949).

  This is a clear instance of what is called gap-filling in phonology.Concerning the corresponding back rhymes ong and ông, the most common dictionaries do not provide any indication [about length]. I asked Mr. Nguyễn Bạt-Tụy for examples, and he gave me the following information. But the final palatal of the Burmese script, which occurs only after a, must be due to the same mistake as the final palatals of the Vietnamese romanized script. [We could observe that in the case of final stops, it is not necessary for the front vowel to be short for the final consonant to be palatalized, since final /k/ which does not shorten the vowel, is also palatalized and written ch [ç] after /i, e, ɛ/ and is written c [k] after the other vowels.]8. [The sapeque was a coin introduced in the second half of the 19th century with the aim of replacing earlier Vietnamese coins.][Table3. Examples of contrasts between oong and ong]In the case of this rhyme, oong, it is clear that the systemic gap-filling process initiated by onomatopoeia has continued with loanwords from French.The ôông [oːŋ] rhyme is still rare. It is exemplified by bôông 'sound of a gong' vs. bông 'cotton'.

	boong 'bell sound' boong 'deck (of a boat)' (<Fr. pont) bóong 'to live at someone else's expense'	bong 'to detach itself (paper, poster…)' bóng 'shade, shadow'
	coong 'sound of a small bell'		cong 'bent, curved'
	loong-toong 'sentinel' (Fr. planton), ba-toong 'stick' (Fr. bâton)	long-tong 'to trot around, to walk about (e.g. in fear)' tong 'lost without a trace'
	xoong 'cooking-pot' (Fr. casserole)	xong 'finished, completed'
	To sum up, with a final velar nasal there are six pairs of rhymes
	distinguished by quantity:
	vowel type short long	e ênh /eŋ/ êng /eŋ/	ɛ anh /ɛŋ/ eng /ɛŋ/	ɤ âng /ɤŋ/ ơng /ɤŋ/ ang /aŋ/ a ăng /aŋ/	o ông /oŋ/ ôông /oŋ/ oong /ɔŋ/ ɔ ong /ɔŋ/
	This demonstrates the existence of six phonologically short vowels:
			half-close:		ê [e]	â [ɤ]	ô [o]

He mentioned that some recent dictionaries, such as Đào

Văn-Tập (1950)

, distinguish oong

[ɔːŋ]

, as in gòong 'trolley' (< Fr. wagon) or buloong 'bolt' (< Fr. boulon), from ong [ɔŋ] as in gọng 'frame, framework' or long 'disjointed'. He added further examples (Table 3) which had not been reported previously. 7. Palatal finals, which are absent in Chinese and Tai, exist in Mon-Khmer languages, and also in Muong dialects, which are related to Vietnamese (e.g. Muong /moč/ [moc] 'one', corresponding to Vietnamese một [mot⁸]).

C-n Cw-n ___________


definitely a Tai language, in my opinion; I think the Annamese language must be related to the Tai family." (Maspero 1912: 117) If we accept that there is no such thing as "fusion" between languages, and that genealogical relatedness must be assessed on the basis of core vocabulary and grammatical structure, we are led to consider that the modern form of a language is not determined by its genealogical origin, but by the influences to which it is subjected in the course of its history. For a thousand years, from the first or second centuries B.C. until the 10th century, the Tai and Vietnamese peoples lived under Chinese domination; to me, this is a sufficient explanation for the converging evolution of the Tai and Vietnamese languages.

The Tai languages located to the west of the Red River (Siamese, Shan, Lao, White Tai, Black Tai) are extremely close to one another, whereas to the east of this river the languages diverge to a greater or lesser extent: Dioi [a.k.a. Yoy, Buyi 布依, Zhuang 壮], Cao Lan, Mak, Sui, and the lessclosely related Gelao, Tulao [土老], Lati (La Chi) and Laqua. It therefore seems that the Tai languages originate in southern China, and only crossed the Red River around the 10th century.

The Muong languages, archaic languages belonging to the same branch as Vietnamese, are spoken from the Red River down to the latitude of the city of Vinh to the south.

Likewise, the Austroasiatic languages proper do not extend beyond the Red River to the east. The Palaung-Wa group (see [START_REF] Shafer | Etudes sur l'austroasien [Studies in Austroasian[END_REF] extends into Laos, with the Lamet and Khmu languages. 2 The Phong dialects 3 are 2. The sources used here are [START_REF] Shafer | Etudes sur l'austroasien [Studies in Austroasian[END_REF] and an unpublished Riang vocabulary collected by G.H. Luce. As for Lamet, I have used unpublished vocabulary collected by K.G. Izikowitz, who has published some words and texts (1951); there is also a short vocabulary list in Doudard de Lagrée & Garnier (1873, vol. 2, p. 510). The Khmu data come from an unpublished vocabulary list collected by W.A. Smalley in Luang Prabang (Laos); from [START_REF] Roux | Les Tsa Khmu [The Tsa Khmu people[END_REF] (data on "Tsa Khmu", spoken in the neighbourhood of Dien Bien Phu, Vietnam); from the entries "Mi of Xieng cang" and "Khmous of Louangprabang" in Doudard de Lagrée & Garnier (1873); and from the "Kha khao des Houa phan" vocabulary in Macey (1907b: 871-874). The following two varieties must also be considered part of the Khmu language group: (i) the dialect spoken by the Phu Theng in Cammon (Laos), for which we have a word list collected by the cao müöng [district chief] of Kham Keut; and (ii) the dialect of Nghe-An (Vietnam) documented by H. [START_REF] Maspero | Etude sur la phonétique historique de la langue annamite. Les initiales [Studies in Annamese historical phonetics. Initial consonants][END_REF], under the name "Kha".

The place of Vietnamese in Austroasiatic (1953) 3 spoken in an area located between the Khmu and Muong areas; to the south, the Kuy dialects [a.k.a. Kui, Kuai, Suai, Souei] 4 extend along the Mekong river down to Cambodia. The other languages that will be used in the present study are Bahnar (the best-preserved of the South-Eastern Austroasiatic languages), Mnong (Biêt, Gar, Köho), 5 Khmer, Samre (spoken by the Chong, Por and Pear), 6 Mon, and Khasi.

3. On Phong, see Macey (1907aMacey ( : 1407)); the variety described is the language of Muong ċam (spoken in Cammon, Laos). This language is very close to Hung and Khong-kheng, two dialects of Nghe-An (Vietnam) described by [START_REF] Guignard | Vocabulaire Hung et Khong-kheng [Hung and Khongkheng word lists[END_REF]. [START_REF] Maspero | Etude sur la phonétique historique de la langue annamite. Les initiales [Studies in Annamese historical phonetics. Initial consonants][END_REF] used these two dialects, considering them as Muong dialects. See also the Kha muong ben vocabulary in Fraisse (1950a), and the manuscript vocabulary list of the Tum-on-phong and the Kha tong-luong collected by the cao müöng [district chief] of Kham Keut. [Haudricourt sometimes cites the language as Phong (the more commonly used name), and sometimes as Pong, following Macey (1907a). In the translation, this has been standardized to Phong.] These articles also contain vocabularies of more divergent dialects, such as P. Macey's Kha Phong and Kha Pou-Hok vocabularies; the language of the Harèmes [Arem] has been documented by A. Rivière (Pavie 1902: 285-290).

I have not taken into account the Sek language: it is insufficiently well documented. One may wonder whether the Sek dialect collected by L. Cadière in Quang-Binh [START_REF] Cadière | Les hautes vallées du Sông-Gianh [The upper reaches of the Gianh river[END_REF] and classified by H. Maspero among the Muong languages belongs to the same language as that spoken by the Sek of Laos, who live along the banks of the Mekong river and whose vocabulary is documented by Rivière [START_REF] Pavie | Voyages au centre de l'Annam et du Laos, et dans les régions sauvages de l'Est de l'Indo-Chine [Report of the 1879-1895 Pavie mission -Geography and travel routes, volume 4: Journeys to the centre of Annam and Laos, and into the wild regions of eastern Indo-China[END_REF], Macey (1907a), Fraisse (1950a), and in the manuscript of the cao müöng of Kham Keut cited above). More than half of the vocabulary collected by Cadière appears to be of Thai-Tay stock, and some of it is even more archaic than Proto-Thai-Tay in some respects, calling to mind the Tai dialects spoken to the east of the Red River: for instance, 'house' is ran; compare Proto-Tai *rɯən, Dioi ran, Cao Lan lan, Mak zan, Sui ɣan. 4. On Kuy, see (i) the Kuy O and Kuy Ntra vocabularies in [START_REF] Lévy | Recherches préhistoriques dans la région de Mlu Prei [Cambodge], accompagnées de comparaisons archéologiques et suivies d'un vocabulaire français-kuy[END_REF]; (ii) the Kha Tairi, Kha Mong-Khong and Sô vocabularies in Macey (1907b); (iii) A. Rivière [START_REF] Pavie | Voyages au centre de l'Annam et du Laos, et dans les régions sauvages de l'Est de l'Indo-Chine [Report of the 1879-1895 Pavie mission -Geography and travel routes, volume 4: Journeys to the centre of Annam and Laos, and into the wild regions of eastern Indo-China[END_REF]); (iv) the So and Nanhang vocabulary in Doudard de Lagrée & Garnier (1873); (v) Fraisse (1950b), and the Kha Tiali and Kha Salang vocabulary in Fraisse (1950a). Lastly, I have also used a manuscript vocabulary list of Kha Bourou.

The Mnong data are based on unpublished documents by Georges Condominas

about the Gar dialect [see also Condominas (1952)]. On other dialects (Biet and Köho), see [START_REF] Hoeffel | Lexique franco-biat [A French-Biat lexicon[END_REF], [START_REF] Cassaigne | [END_REF][START_REF] Dournes | Dictionnaire sré (köho) -français [A Sre[END_REF]. 6. On Samre, see Brengues (1905:41-46) [Haudricourt's attribution to Fr. Petit-Huguenin is an error]; [START_REF] Isarangura | Vocabulary of Chawng words collected in Krat province[END_REF]; and [START_REF] Baradat | Les dialectes des tribus sâmrê [The dialects of Sâmrê tribes[END_REF].

Looking at grammatical similarities, there are so many parallels between all of these languages that one cannot tell which of them is closest to Vietnamese. However, if one examines the remnants of earlier morphology, one finds, among other examples, a causative relationship between 'to die' and 'to kill', which is absent from Proto-Thai (Table 1).

[Table 1 Several of the Vietnamese-Tai cognates proposed by H. Maspero need to be revised. For instance, the Vietnamese word provided for 'calf (body part)', bi, is not found in standard Vietnamese dictionaries such as [START_REF] Hue | Dictionnaire annamite-chinois-français[END_REF], 14 and there is no word for 'calf' in Proto-Thai-Tay; bụng [buŋ] 'belly' has cognates in Kuy and Samre: puŋ, and in Khmu: buŋ, whereas the Proto-Thai-Tay word for 'belly' is *dɔŋ. Siamese and Lao are the only two Thai-Tay languages that have borrowed the form buŋ. Muong has a different word for 'belly': trộng [ʈoŋ B2 ], which has cognates in Phong and Riang: kluŋ.

Another case in point is 'rice': there is a word in Proto-Thai-Tay, *kʰaw, which shows some phonetic similarity with Vietnamese gạo [ɣaw B2 ]; but it is misleading to say that there are "two words" for rice in Vietnamese [Maspero 1912: 115]: these two words refer to two different concepts, which are found in all Austroasiatic languages. These are shown in Table 2.

[Table 2 The agreement both in content and in form between Khasi, Palaung-Wa (Khmu and Riang), Samre, and Khmer clearly shows that the origin of Vietnamese gạo 'husked rice' is to be sought in Austroasiatic. Progress in our knowledge of the northern Austroasiatic languages reveals that some words considered as Tai by H. Maspero are in fact borrowed by Siamese and Lao from an Austroasiatic substratum; these words constitute as many additions to the list of Vietnamese words of Austroasiatic origin. Furthermore, we may question whether the words that are common to Vietnamese and Tai really are borrowings from Tai into Vietnamese, or whether there may not be some borrowings from Vietnamese into Tai; at present, the languages related to Thai are too poorly documented for this issue to be resolved. Lastly, the argument whereby Vietnamese, having six tones, should be separated from the toneless Austroasiatic languages is not valid. As early as 1913, Blagden pointed out that, under such a hypothesis, one would have to place the Scandinavian languages, which have tones, in a different language family from the rest of the Germanic languages. And indeed, on the basis of the unpublished documents of Luce on Riang and Izikowitz on Lamet, we now know that these undoubtedly Austroasiatic languages have two tones. 15

Comments

Over a decade after the publication of his 1953 article, Haudricourt noted that the conclusion that Vietnamese must belong in the Austroasiatic language family was still far from being widely accepted. "Since writing 15. [In his later research, Haudricourt sensed that the tones of Riang and Lamet may in fact be register oppositions rather than tone oppositions (Haudricourt 1965: 169-170, translated in this volume, p. xyz). This was confirmed since: on Riang, see Shorto and Luce (2013) and Shintani (2014); the synchronic facts for Lamet are more complex [START_REF] Lindell | Two dialects of the Rəmeet (Lamet) language[END_REF]) because some dialects have become predominantly tonal (Ferlus, p.c. 2016).]

The place of Vietnamese in Austroasiatic (1953) 9 my article, of the writers on this subject that I have seen, only N.D. [START_REF] Andreev | K voprosu o proishozhdenii v'etnamskogo jazyka (К вопросу о происхождении вьетнамского языка) [On the origins of the Vietnamese language[END_REF] agrees with me" (Haudricourt 1966: 51). For instance, [START_REF] Pinnow | Versuch einer historischen Lautlehre der Kharia-Sprache [Towards a historical phonology of the Kharia language[END_REF] takes up Maspero's point of view that Vietnamese must be related to Tai. Specialists had a hard time recognizing Vietnamese as an Austroasiatic language because of specific evolutions that made it an outlier within this language family. "Vietnamese is the outcome of a millenium of Chinese influence over a language of the Viet-Muong group of the Austroasiatic family" (Ferlus 1992: 111). The variety of Chinese spoken in Annam (present-day northern Vietnam) during the first millenium was a southern dialect [START_REF] Hashimoto | Current developments in Sino-Vietnamese studies[END_REF], rather than the standard variety of the time (the language of the Chinese capital). This Chinese superstratum was much richer phonetically than the Proto-Viet-Muong inherited layer. At the beginning of the second millenium, Proto-Vietnamese also underwent a spirantization of medial obstruents, as shown by [START_REF] Ferlus | Histoire abrégée de l'évolution des consonnes initiales du vietnamien et du sino-vietnamien [A short history of the evolution of Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese initial consonants[END_REF], building on an observation by Haudricourt (see "Consonant shifts in Mon-Khmer initial stops", this volume). When the language became phonologically monosyllabic, medial spirants were phonologized as an additional series of initial consonants; the resulting system contained many more phonemes than are commonly found in Austroasiatic.

A further factor that complicates the establishment of sound correspondences between Vietnamese and other Austroasiatic languages, and could have delayed acceptance of Haudricourt's conclusion, is the existence of irregular correspondences among initial consonants. 'Foot' is in tone category A1 in Vietnamese: cɤn A1 (orthographic chân), reconstructing to an unvoiced initial consonant *c at the stage preceding the tone split (about which see Haudricourt 1961). But Austroasiatic cognates of 'foot' either retain a voiced initial, as in Khmu ɟɨaŋ, or belong in the low/breathy phonation-type register (e.g. Khmer cəŋ, Mon càŋ, Lamet cèŋ), reconstructed as originating in voiced initials. Both Maspero and Haudricourt list 'foot' among the Vietnamese words of Austroasiatic origin, but in detail the correspondence seems unconvincing. The solution proposed by [START_REF] Ferlus | Les disharmonies tonales en viet-muong et leurs implications historiques [Irregular tonal correspondences within Viet-Muong (Vietic) and their historical implications[END_REF] is that, when Proto-Viet-Muong spread into the Red River delta from a homeland located further south, it replaced earlier Austroasiatic languages which lacked voiced initial stops, hence the sporadic loss of initial voicing (nineteen examples, including 'foot', are listed by [START_REF] Ferlus | Les disharmonies tonales en viet-muong et leurs implications historiques [Irregular tonal correspondences within Viet-Muong (Vietic) and their historical implications[END_REF].

In light of these and other advances in understanding Vietnamese historical phonology, its Austroasiatic affiliation is no longer a subject of dispute among specialists. Haudricourt's article, together with his 1954 article "The origin of tones in Vietnamese" (this volume), is now recognized as a landmark offering "compelling empirical and theoretical bases" for relating Vietnamese to Austroasiatic (Sidwell 2009: 37; see also Gage 1985: 493-494).

  . 'To die' and 'to kill' in Vietnamese and selected Austroasiatic languages vs. Proto-Thai.] Words of Mon-Khmer origin are undeniably very numerous in Annamese[Vietnamese], and they are among the most common words: the numeral system is entirely Mon-Khmer (…) However, there is not a single complete set of Mon-Khmer words in any semantic field: words of Mon-Khmer origin are blended with words of Tai origin, to an extent that varies across word sets. For instance, the words trăng 'moon', mưa 'rain', gió 'wind' and nước 'water' are of Mon-Khmer origin, but the words mọc 'fog' and mùa 'season' are Tai; rú 'mountain, forest' and sông 'river' are Mon-Khmer, but đồng 'field', rẫy 'dry ricefield' and mỏ 'spring' are Tai; mắt 'eye' and chân 'foot' are Mon-Khmer, but lưng 'back', bụng 'belly', ức 'chest', cằm 'chin', 7. [International Phonetic Alphabet transcriptions: cet B1 and ʒet B1 , respectively.] 8. [Under the influence of Lao, the old clusters C+h in Khmu have become aspirated consonants.] bi 'calf (body part)', 9 cổ 'neck' are Tai. The word for 'clothes', áo, is Mon-Khmer, but 'to sew', nhíp, is Tai. Of the two words for 'rice', lúa and gạo, the first is Mon-Khmer, the second is Tai. The word for 'bird', chim, is Mon-Khmer, but the names of the two domestic birds, 'chicken' gà and 'duck' vịt, are Tai, etc." 10 (Maspero 1912: 115) The list of body part names could be Maspero's most convincing argument: two Austroasiatic words as opposed to seven Tai words. But an examination of the most common words, such as those cited in the questionnaire of the École Française d'Extrême-Orient 11 (questions 178 through 189), reveals the following facts: 'Head': the word đầu [ɗɤw A2 ] comes from Chinese; the older Vietnamese word is trốc [ʈok D1 ], which is also found in Muong and in Phong: klok. The other Mon-Khmer languages have different words for 'head': Kuy plew, Bahnar kol, Mnong bok, Samre tos, Riang kiŋ, Khmu kampoŋ, Mon k'düp, as against Proto-Thai-Tay *hruo. 'Hair': Vietnamese tóc [tɔk D1 ], Muong tʰak, Phong and Samre suk, Kuy, Mon, Bahnar, Mong sok, Riang huk, Khmu gləʔ, Khasi sniuh, Khmer sa'k. Vietnamese mắt [mat D1 ], Muong, Phong, Kuy, Khmu, Bahnar, Mnong, Samre, Mon mat, Khasi kʰmat, Khmer bnêk… as opposed to Proto-Thai-Tay *ta~tʰa. (The form tʰa is observed to the north of the Red River: in Dioi: ta, in Mak and Sui: da, in Laqua: te; Benedict suggests that these words are related to Western Austronesian mata.)

	have a Mon-Khmer origin. Indeed, earlier on in his article, H. Maspero
	(1912: 22) had provided a Mon-Khmer origin for Vietnamese 'chin'. To
	sum up, the twelve Vietnamese words in the above list fall into three
	categories:
	(i) Words that are common to almost all Austroasiatic languages: 'hair',
	'eye', 'nose' and 'hand';
	(ii) Words that only have cognates in Phong; however, for these words, the
	other languages differ from one another: 'hair', 'eye', 'nose', and 'hand';
	language (iii) Words that have cognates neither in Muong nor in Phong, but which 'to die' 'to kill' Vietnamese (orthography) c hết are observed in Mon-Khmer: 'neck' and 'chin', or in Palaung-Wa (Khmu, giết Vietnamese (pronunciation) 7 čet Riang): 'tooth'. ʒět Phong cet Lexically, Vietnamese thus behaves like any other Austroasiatic pøcet Khmu han Lamet yam Kuy Ntra kcet Khmer slap Mon khyüt as against Proto-Thai-Tay: *pʰrom. pacüt samlap komcet pyam phan 8 language.
	Proto-Thai 'Eye': 11. [This questionnaire was created and printed as a leaflet by the École Française d'Extrême-Orient (1938) for a broad enquiry, which was interrupted by the war in 1940. It contained 484 entries arranged by semantic fields. These leaflets, filled in by civil servants of the colonial administration, constituted one of the main bases of Haudricourt's comparative linguistic research during his stay at the Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi at the end of the 1940s.]

*tay *qa

Of course, one could object that 'to die' and 'to kill' might have been borrowed into Vietnamese together from a language such as Phong. The decisive evidence comes from basic vocabulary. H. Maspero discussed the origin of Vietnamese vocabulary in the following terms: "'Ear': Vietnamese tai [tay A1 ], Muong tʰai, Phong sai, Kuy ktor, Bahnar ɗon, Mnong tor, Samre prlaŋ, Khmer traciek, Riang ktiek, Khmu rmwəy, Khasi skor. Proto-Thai-Tay: *r̥ u~kʰru, Dioi rwə, Mak eha, Sui qʰa, Laqua rə, Lati (La Chi) lu, Kelao rao. 9. [Haudricourt points out further below that the form bi is not found in Vietnamese dictionaries. The usual word for 'calf' is bê [ɓeA1].] 10. [Throughout the present article] Vietnamese words are given in the common orthography, Mon and Khmer are provided in transliteration, and the other languages are transcribed phonologically. The Proto-Thai-Tay words all have the level tone, except for 'tooth', 'belly' and 'rice' which have a rising tone.