Talk:đã

Formal?

@PhanAnh123, can you comment on this word being formal? Fumiko Take wrote, “In most natural contexts, đã is formal”, and I’ve heard highly educated native speakers (all from Central Vietnam) express the same sentiment (used in writing, rarely in speaking). My personal experience, however, is that the word is used all the time in informal contexts as well (by my wife for example, who is from Thanh Hoá), and one of the examples Fumiko herself added (“Tao đã đi Nha Trang bao giờ đâu mà biết!”) is highly informal. (I edited it to make it less vulgar.) Could there be a regional difference? (You’re our dialect expert, so if anyone knows, it’s you. ☺) Or is it something more subtle? MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 03:27, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

I think she mostly meant its usage as a simple past marker transplanted from English or other European languages. I agree that đã is used quite often, but almost never as a simple past marker in informal contexts, in the same way English suffix -ed works, for example. PhanAnh123 (talk) 04:09, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

That makes sense; I removed the "formal" bits for now. I also added one more sense (number 5 at the time of writing) which I felt was not covered by the others. This one would often be equivalent to a simple past and it may see more use in literary works, but I’m not confident of this. One of the references and other articles I found online make mention of something similar (“quá khứ tuyệt đối” they say), but I don’t have access to the book there cited (Hai nhà by Lê Lựu) so can’t check the context. MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 03:50, 20 September 2022 (UTC)