Talk:Vietnamese grammar

list of pronominals
The text below (all of it?) needs to incorporated into the kinship term section. – ishwar  (speak)  19:58, 6 February 2008 (UTC)

{start cut&paste}

Other pronouns in use for the most part conform to the European idea of grammatical person. Some are even gender-neutral and relationship-neutral:


 * Hắn, gã, y: (pejorative) he
 * Ả, thị: (pejorative) she
 * Ông ta/Ông ấy: he (see above)
 * Bà ta/Bà ấy: she (see above)
 * Cô ta/Cô ấy: she (see above)
 * Anh ta/Anh ấy: he (see above)
 * Con đó/Con ấy: (pejorative) she, it
 * Thằng đó/Thằng ấy: (prejorative) he
 * Họ: they
 * Bả: south, she
 * Ổng: south, he
 * Ảnh: south, he
 * Quý vị: you (bigger audience--plural, formal)
 * Bạn: friend, you, neutral

{end cut&paste}

Syntactic classification
Is Vietnamese analytic or isolating? These two terms are not identical. (I would edit it and choose the right one, only I don't know much about Vietnamese.) 89.138.151.18 (talk) 10:51, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * the terms are usually synonymous. – ishwar  (speak)  20:31, 27 May 2008 (UTC)


 * Vietnamese is one of the prototypical isolating languages, although as ishwar notes, the terms are not always clearly distinguished. The relevant WP page claims that Mandarin Chinese is analytic but not isolating.  Other linguists might say that Mandarin Chinese is analytic/isolating (synonymous terms) but not monosyllabic. Benwing (talk) 05:34, 1 September 2011 (UTC)


 * Vietnamese is highly analytic, i.e. it has no inflection of any kind. However, since some words are multisyllabic (mostly compounds), it is only moderately isolating. In other words, it could be described in the same terms as Mandarin Chinese. Perhaps some of the confusion lies in the fact that Wikipedia's article about isolating languages seems to imply falsely (even in the lead) that isolating means both analytic and low morpheme-per-word ratio; it in fact only means the latter, but tends to coincide with the former in natural languages. Jake-low (talk) 17:46, 6 March 2017 (UTC)

Suggest move to Vietnamese grammar, merge Vietnamese morphology

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved. Vegaswikian (talk) 02:00, 8 September 2011 (UTC)

Vietnamese syntax → Vietnamese grammar – Nearly all languages have combined morphology/syntax pages, called "X grammar". (See Category:Grammars of specific languages) In this case, the morphology page is only about 25% the size of the syntax page (not surprisingly, since Vietnamese doesn't have much morphology). I suggest merging the two and moving the result to Vietnamese grammar. This will help keep the pages consistent, make the morphology stuff easier to locate, and make it more likely that the stuff as a whole gets edited. Benwing (talk) 05:24, 1 September 2011 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Belonging?
The main page of this article contains a reference to a noun "belonging" to another word, but  it is unclear what the author meant by "belonging."

Does the author mean that in any instance where two words are close to each other, or positioned very close to each other, one word "belongs" to the other?

Since Vietnamese does not use a case system like Latin and Greek, nor anything coming close to the "possessive" case in English or German,  I don't understand what the author means by saying that one word can "belong" to another. Help! Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 22:42, 21 April 2013 (UTC)

Need to cite authorities
The main page of this article could be improved if there were some authorities that could be cited. For instance, who was the first grammarian of Vietnamese? If there are a number of different authorities, some that are more prestigious than others,  who are they? Maybe someone can attribute some of the grammatical rules to authorities who dreamed them up, or otherwise observed them, and wrote them down. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 05:53, 3 May 2013 (UTC)

Possible problem in the "Nouns and Noun Phrases" section
There appears to be an inaccuracy in this section but I'm not qualified to resolve it. In the following text: In contrast, verbs do not co-occur with the copula.

Mai cao. "Mai is tall." The verb cao (as in the sentence above) does not require a preceding copula, and thus the sentence *Mai là cao is ill-formed. Is "cao" really a verb, meaning "to be tall"? Or is it an adjective, meaning "tall", and the sentence simply has an implied verb "to be"? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dan morenus (talk • contribs) 15:20, 2 April 2014 (UTC)
 * It's an adjective, "Mai cao." makes no sense if it stands alone as a sentence though, but if we follow up with other characteristics or some thing related to "cao", then it is acceptable. e.g: "Mai cao, vì vậy nên khó lấy chồng." (Mai is tall, thus it's hard for her to find a husband.", "Mai cao, dáng hơi gầy." (Mai is tall and a little slim.) Squall282 (talk) 17:33, 18 September 2014 (UTC)

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