viết

See also: viet, Viet, Viet., and Việt

Vietnamese

Etymology

This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.
Particularly: “Does this even make sense phonologically? As noted in 說文解字, 筆/聿 had many divergent forms at early date, these forms point to a *rut with labial presyllable at an even earlier stage, with the modern forms of 筆 inherited from *prut. If so, what caused lenition in Vietnamese? The nucleus, also, is questionable, but still more accountable.”

Contra Alves (2017), the relationship between this word and 筆 (OC *p.[r]ut) (B-S) is very tenuous. He proposed the existence of a prefix to interpret both the discrepancy in part-of-speech and lenition. However, there was no such verbalizer prefix in Vietic, and among verb-noun pairs, the general direction for semantic extension in Vietnamese is verb > noun.

Attested as Northern Middle Vietnamese ꞗiét, viét in the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (1651).

Pronunciation

(Hà Nội) IPA^(key): [viət̚˧˦]
(Huế) IPA^(key): [viək̚˦˧˥]
(Saigon) IPA^(key): [viək̚˦˥] ~ [jiək̚˦˥]
Homophone: giết (Southern Vietnam)
Audio (Saigon): (file)

Verb

viết • (曰)

to write
Synonyms: ghi, chép

Noun

viết (classifier cây)

(Southern Vietnam) non-chalk handheld writing instrument
Synonym: bút

một cây viết chì ― a pencil

Derived terms