¹ I am grateful for the financial assistance which made this field work possible: to Yale University and the American Council of Learned Societies for their support from July 1951 to June 1953; to the Ford Foundation for its support from July 1952 to June 1953; and to the Human Relations Area Files, Inc., for assisting with transportation. I am deeply indebted to Franklin Edgerton, who originally encouraged me to undertake this study and supported me wholeheartedly throughout; to Murray B. Emeneau, who furnished me with numerous materials from his work on the northern dialects; and to Bernard Bloch, Kun Chang, Isidore Dyen, Mary R. Haas, Fang-Kuei Li, and William A. Smalley, with whom I have discussed various problems of the analysis.

A full grammar of the dialect was presented as my doctoral dissertation at Yale University in 1954. This described mainly the speech of Saigonese who had received fairly extensive formal education in Vietnamese (the level of educational attainment in French is not a useful criterion for these purposes), and outlined the phonetic variations of popular speech and the conventions adopted by learned speakers. The present paper constitutes a considerable revision of the section on phonology in the larger work, so far as it pertains to educated speech. The analysis presented here is based on the speech of Mr. Lam-quang-Hong, Miss Le-thi-Bai, Miss Nguyen-thi-Cut, Dr. Nguyen-van-Hien, and Miss Truong-thi-Danh, all of Saigon. I owe thanks especially to Miss Le-thi-Bai and Mr. Huynh Sanh Thong for help with some of the examples. The dialect is henceforth referred to as Saigonese.

² Etudes sur la phonétique historique de la langue annamite: Les initiales, Bulletin de l'Ecole Française d'Extrême-Orient (hereafter BEFEO) 12.1-3 (1912).

³ Even after nearly half a century, this is still true. For the Haut-Annam dialects, forms which Maspéro himself collected appear most reliable; the southern forms that he quotes seem at some variance with those in my material. He also refers to P. Cadière, Phonétique annamite, dialecte du Haut-Annam (Paris, 1902); and Le dialecte du Bas-Annam, BEFEO 11.67-100 (1911). He cites the latter as evidence that Bas-Annam speech (spoken in the southern part of the central coastal strip) is very close to that of the Saigon area. For another early account of the southern dialect, see Maurice Grammont, Recherches expérimentales sur la prononciation du cochinchinois, Mémoires de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 16.69-86 (1909-10). A summary statement of pronunciation of Saigon speech in phonemic terms is presented in R. B. Jones and Huynh Sanh Thong, Introduction to spoken Vietnamese 1-7 (Washington, 1957). A modern phonemic analysis of northern speech is presented in M. B. Emeneau, Studies in Vietnamese (Annamese) grammar 5-43 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1951).

⁴ The nonuniqueness of phonemic solutions of phonetic systems, Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica (hereafter BIHPAS) 4.363-97 (1934).

⁵ I am indebted to Samuel E. Martin for encouragement to discuss at greater length the possible alternative analyses, as well as for specific suggestions concerning certain points in these analyses, and especially for corroboration of the obvious similarities between problems in Saigonese and those in Mandarin which he treated in his Problems of hierarchy and indeterminacy in Mandarin phonology, BIHPAS 29.209-29 (1957).

⁶ A set of postulates for phonemic analysis, Lg. 24.3-46 (1948); Studies in colloquial Japanese IV, Phonemics, Lg. 26.86-125 (1950).

⁷ A manual of phonology (Baltimore, 1955).

⁸ The present analysis of stress is unsatisfactory from several points of view; it is included here because other attempted analyses, while containing germs of a more basic and meaningful description at some points, are impossible to state as overall systems without at other points distorting the phonetic facts or adducing statements which lie at least for the present in the realm of physical indeterminacy. The most significant progress in understanding the accentual system has resulted from a study of the changing rates of speed in allegro speech.

⁹ Jones and Thong treat this feature presumably at a morphophonemic or possibly a morphemic level (Introduction 6-7); they regard it as the fundamental pattern, indicating exceptions as they occur. My material shows vastly more numerous exceptions in the flow of allegro speech; I have therefore not adopted this pattern as the underlying one.

¹⁰ /x/ has an allophone with stop onset.

¹¹ The term simple is used to distinguish these phonemes from dorsovelar phones with coarticulated full labial closure, which belong to dorsal phonemes (cf. §4.4 /k ŋ/).

In the definitions of phonemes, phonetic details which are not essential to the definitions but are of descriptive interest are enclosed in parentheses.

¹² This makes clear that palatalized [v], an allophone of /w/, belongs with the labials, not here.

¹³ Phonetic observation suggests that there may be a morphophonemic alternation in which these sequences of vowel plus homorganic higher semivowel are replaced by simple vowels under weak stress, but the facts are not clear.

¹⁴ In citation forms these vowels are regularly shorter than all other vowels, but in connected allegro speech this difference in length is frequently absent.

¹⁵ This allophone would be expected before /p m/ also, but no examples occur.

¹⁶ This allophone would be expected after /c j ŋ/ before /w/ also, but no examples occur.

¹⁷ Note that here and elsewhere the notation ‘after /?/‘ includes syllabics in initial position in the absence of the glottal stop.

¹⁸ /f/ does not occur before final /∧/ or /∧j/.

¹⁹ In one sense the onset is an optional element; but since the option consists of the occurrence or absence of /?/ and since all syllables without onset have alternates with the onset /?/, it is more economical to consider the presence of an onset as constant.

²⁰ The predictable occurrence of a weakly articulated glottal stop at the end of syllables accompanied by /^ˇ/ is ignored in the statement of phoneme distributions.

²¹ Martin feels that [] should be interpreted /∊k/, parallel to . Note, however, the four occurrences of [∊k] which were recorded (listed below, toward the end of this section).

²² Here Martin favors putting [v] with [b], and presumably [p f] together in another phoneme. This analysis would make a happy correspondence to certain idiolects in which speakers pronounce [bj] in positions where most Saigonese say [vj] or simply [j]; the speakers in question are few, and with many of them this feature disappears in allegro speech. Since these individuals seem always to have had extended affiliations with the Vietnamese educational system, the phenomenon has the earmarks of a hyperurbanizing tendency. It is interesting that Maspéro mentions this pronunciation in quite a different context: ‘... l'inaptitude des populations chames annamitisées à prononcer certains sons annamites a donné naissance, en cochinchinois, à des sons nouveaux: p’ pour f, et b^y pour v' (Etudes 3). It is especially interesting to note that the [b] involved in this cluster is phonetically quite different from the preglottalized phone of the regular educated dialect (my /?p/): it is lenis and never preglottalized or imploded. To return to Martin's suggestion: although presumably this argument would fall into the category of his ‘off-hand notions of “phonetic similarity” ‘ (Problems 229), it seems relevant to point out that [p b] are stops, fortis, bilabial, whereas [b v] have in common only a general labial position and voicing—[v] is lenis, labiodental, and a spirant.

²³ It has not been possible to trace the beginning of this treatment, but it is significant that Vietnamese school texts teach children in spelling to read the printed symbol â (my /∧/) as with high rising tone /‘/, parallel to the reading of ă (for my /a/) as /α‘/. Recent phoneticians, such as Le-van-Ly (Le parler vietnamien [Paris, 1948]) and Le-ngoc-Tru (Chanh-ta Viet-Ngu [Saigon, 1951]), recognize these sounds as related in a way which would suggest that they are short and long varieties of the same phonemes. Jones and Thong (1-2) analyze my /α/ as my /a/ plus length, but do not link the other two vowels; Martin favors extracting either length or shortness in both cases.

²⁴ Les voyelles brèves du vietnamien, BSLP 48.90-3 (1952). For his phonetic information he cites Le-van-Ly 17-44; Emeneau; and Nguyen Bat-tuy, Chu va van Viet khoa-hoc (Saigon, 1951). It should be emphasized that Haudricourt's analysis concerns only an apparent subsystem of the Tonkinese syllabic pattern, and some of his distinctions are exemplified by only a very few forms; it is thus quite a different matter from the reanalysis we are about to consider.

²⁵ Except for the weakly stressed alternate of , which I hear as [∧]; some native speakers have insisted that the vowel here is (phonemically) distinct from /∧/ and should be assigned rather to . It should be noted that the native speaker may be influenced by the orthography, which is based on the stressed form; a similar problem arises with the morpheme /kαj'/, ‘general classifier', under weak stress, which I hear as clearly /°k∧J '/.

²⁶ In addition, tape-recorded materials leave considerable doubt whether the /i·p i·m/ of this analysis always represent vowels which are distinctively longer than /ip im/, even with the louder stresses.

²⁷ Jones and Thong 1-2; Emeneau 5, 10. The phonetic descriptions of Jones and Thong seem to imply different phonetic facts in these cases: diphthongization is specifically ruled out in the case of /e/ and not mentioned in the other cases.