Talk:飪

Vietnamese readings

Here is an example of a Vietnamese reading of a Chinese character which is not used in Vietnamese: 飪, which has two readings: nhẫm and nhẩm [1]. I'm not sure how the two readings are obtained. Based on Middle Chinese phiên thiết, the reconstructed reading is nhậm (如(như)甚(thậm)切). A query of "nhẩm" using the service provided [2] indicates the meaning of 飪 to be identical to its usage in Chinese. KevinUp (talk) 11:07, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

@Wyang Any thoughts on this? My main concern is the distinction between actual readings that have been absorbed into the Vietnamese language and those that are listed in Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt to help native Vietnamese readers understand Chinese characters. KevinUp (talk) 11:07, 30 August 2018 (UTC)

Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt is a poorly composed resource in terms of Hán/Nôm distinction and Vietnamese etymology. It confuses many Sinitic (Hán) readings with non-Sinitic ones as it overconservatively assigns valid Hán readings and senses as Nôm. For phấn, it realises "Bột tán" is a Sino-Vietnamese meaning, but still erroneously treats the senses "Bột tán", "Có dạng bột tán" as Nôm, thus the split into two entries in the dictionary. Similar examples can be seen in bao (Lo liệu trước sau (như Bao Hv): Mọi việc cứ để tôi bao; Lớp vây bọc: Bao thư; Bao gạo; Bao lơn; Cụm từ: Bao tử (*thai ở bụng mẹ; *dạ dày)), cân, dẫn, thương, nhận, etc. Also many of its readings are outright wrong: for example Hán-Việt of 空 should be không and khống, whereas the dictionary just has không and conflated khống with không.

For 飪, the regular Hán-Việt reading is nhẫm. The character was a rising-tone character in MC, which is realised as the ngã tone in Hán-Việt when the character initial is a sonorant. Note that 甚 had two readings in MC: 常枕切 and 時鴆切. The 如甚切 fanqie for 飪 is based on the former reading of 甚, the Hán-Việt reading of which is actually thẫm. In Modern Vietnamese, however, the former reading has merged into the latter, leaving only thậm as the SV for 甚. Generally speaking fanqie is still a reliable and handy method to use, but there are a number of caveats. Apart from choosing the correct MC reading, it is important to also bear in mind that fanqie was meant for MC, not Modern SV readings, and quite a number of rules often have to be applied in order to convert the "raw" fanqie to the correct SV reading.

Wyang (talk) 10:37, 31 August 2018 (UTC)

@Wyang: Thanks for the reply. In view of this we should stop using readings provided by Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt. There are indeed a significant number of erroneous readings in it. For Nôm readings, Tự Điển Chữ Nôm Dẫn Giải would be a better resource as it is very well cited ([3]). As for Hán Việt readings, we can use Vietnamese dictionaries such as Từ Điển Hán Việt (Trần Văn Chánh, 1999) where the phiên thiết readings are available. There is also WinVNKey [4], although it tends to be slightly outdated in terms of character support. KevinUp (talk) 18:15, 31 August 2018 (UTC)