Talk:Monosyllabic language
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Vietnamese Shouldn't be Considered Monosyllabic[edit]
Vietnamese is not really a monosyllabic language. Monosyllabic implies that each individual word that represents, say, an animal, object, etc. is only made up of one syllable. In the case of Vietnamese, this is incorrect; many words are disyllabic (having two syllables), and some have three or four syllables. Vietnamese words are just written syllable by syllable, a legacy of the writing system of Chinese (which is also not "monosyllabic"). Anyone can "test" this point by looking in a dictionary. For example, in a Vietnamese text, each and every syllable is separated by a blank space (sometimes, although this has faded recently, by hyphens). However, that does not necessarily mean that each syllable in and of itself is a word. For example, the name of the former capital of the Republic of Vietnam is Saigon; however, when you write it out in Vietnamese, one would write: Sai Gon, even though it represents only the one word and one name of "Saigon." The syllables, which are, in this case, Sai and Gon, do not necessarily mean anything in and of themselves, and are not two separate words. Essentially, the two "blocks of letters" Sai and Gon are separated because they are syllables of ONE word, and that's just how it's written, not because the language is necessarily monosyllabic itself. The same applies to the Chinese dialects which are sometimes falsely considered as monosyllabic due to the way they are converted from drawn characters to spelled out letters.
If Vietnamese were still written in characters (Chu nom), one could more easily see why the language itself is not monosyllabic. However, the written way in which Westerners decided to convert Vietnamese makes the language seem as though it's monosyllabic, just because it appears that way on paper (for a reason that is not clearly established and is continually debated).
This is only one link, of many, that addresses the issue with Vietnamese and certain Chinese dialects being falsely considered monosyllabic:
"On paper, the Vietnamese language fools those not familiar with it into thinking that the language is monosyllabic, and I don’t blame them — not one Vietnamese word appears to stretch farther than a single syllable.
Looks are deceitful, however, as whole Vietnamese words are actually broken into smaller, monosyllabic morsels, seemingly to make them more palatable for the reader. The word Vietnam is an example. In English, Vietnam is written as a three-syllable word. In Vietnamese, it becomes Viet Nam, hacked in half, as if someone had found the joint between the syllables and butchered them cleanly apart. The syllables are meant to be read together even though space forces them apart." from: http://www.fureyandthefeast.com/?p=725