"Lac" Is A Phonetic Word


Lê Quí Đôn (1726-1784), a renowned researcher of ancient history in the eighteenth century, noted the following in his book Vân đài loại ngữ “... I searched through the period ruled by Hồng Bàng and Hùng Vương and I could not find any trace of the 15 districts supposedly existing at the time, as well as other districts confusingly-named by the rulers under the Han Dynasty and the Wu Dynasty. I suspected that the scholars collected and recorded these confusingly-named names of the districts; it is difficult to believe them...”.(7) The “scholars” referred to, are not only Vietnamese scholars but Chinese scholars as well.

The above suspicion was originated from two facts. First, before Zhao Tuo imposed the Chinese domination in ancient Vietnam in 198 BC, the proper nouns such as land titles, people names were written in the ancient indigenous Vietnamese language. When the Chinese dominated the ancient Vietnam, they transliterated and rewrote ancient Vietnamese their way; that is, they phonetically rewrote ancient Vietnamese land titles and people names in (Han) Chinese. Surely the word “Lac Viet” is one of such transliterated words.

Next, although Ngô Quyền claimed military victory over the Hans to gain independence for Vietnam in 938 , it was not until 1272 that Vietnam had its first official history book Đại Việt sử ký, during the ruling of King Trần Thánh Tông (reign: 1258 and 1278). That is, Vietnamese history book did not exist prior to 1272. Vietnamese historians subsequently had to rely on Chinese history books, mythical legends and tales to write Vietnamese history from the ancient times to the time of the Tran Dynasty. That is why Lê Quý Đôn wrote .... I suspected that the scholars collected and recorded these confusingly-named names of the districts; it is difficult to believe them...

In Vietnamthời khai sinh, historian Nguyễn Phương translated an article by Claude Madrolle entitled Le Tonkin Ancien in Tập san Viễn Đông Bác Cổ (Bulletin de l'École Française d'Extreme-Orient), in which Claude Madrolle speculated that the word “Lac” as in “Lac Viet” is a transliterated word “In Chinese books, the familiar word (Lac) refers to the kings, the generals and the people in (North) Vietnam, meaning the Annamites, and we follow suit. However, something is not correct in such generalization because the transliteration “law” is also found to refer to “Hok-law”, the ancestor of Hai Hau peoples ... This coincidence sheds some lights in our study. In fact the (Lac) people living in the (river) delta are not the Annamites, but they are the Hok-law Vietnamese, known as the Hải Hậu...”.(8)

After Claude Madrolle, in Duy văn sử quan, author Hoàng Văn Chí also advocates that “Lac” is a transliterated word. He reveals that the Chinese transliterate the word “Lac” in many different ways, but according to him “any Lac words [in Chinese], written in whatever ways, referring to camels, sea birds, or four-legged animals, are all meaningless. The fact that these words are meaningless and written in different ways led us to suspect that the Chinese transliterate certain word used by the local people, our ancestors... “(9)

In general, a transliterated word must be pronounced with its proper sound. Not only that one must pronounce the transliterated word properly, one also needs to understand its meaning in the source language, which, in this case, is the ancient Vietnamese before one can really understand it. So, one must pronounce the transliterated word (Lac) as a Chinese word, not a Chinese (Han) Vietnamese word. The word “Lac” in Chinese Vietnamese sounds like “Lac”, but in Chinese it sounds like “law, lawah, loh”. For example, Luoyang (Lạc Dương in Vietnamese), the capital of China in the Chou Dynasty is written in Latin as Loyang. Clearly, phonetically “Loh” corresponds to Lac.

With regard to the pronunciation of this word, Hoàng Văn Chí further clarifies “The Chinese call oven “lò”, we mimic them and call oven “lò”, but the Chinese Lò now in Chinese Vietnamese is Lac. In short, those Chinese words that sound like “law”, “lò” all become “Lac” in Vietnamese. Since originally the Chinese used only the word “Lac” to mean “law” in the language of the Giao Chi people, they later write words that are compounded with Lac such as Lạc đà (camels), Lạc điểu (sea birds) to sound like “lawah”(9)

Next, when we pronounce “law, lawah, loh”, we must first try to understand their meanings in the ancient Vietnamese. If we simply pronounced them as “Lac” as in Chinese Vietnamese, and tried to find out their meanings in Chinese, then we would be misled to something else.

For example “Canada” is pronounced “Cah Nah Tah” in Mandarin Chinese, which is phonetically transcribed into Chinese. The Vietnamese pronounce such Chinese name as “Gia Nã Đại”. Washington (DC) is the name of the U.S. capital. The Chinese pronounce it as “Wah shin toen”, and phonetically transcribe it into Chinese. The Vietnamese pronounce it in a Chinese Vietnamese way as Hoa Thạnh Đốn. If the Vietnamese try to explain “Gia” as “family” or “Hoa” as “flowers” based on reliable dictionaries, then all such explanations are meaningless because the words “Gia” and “Hoa” are simply phonetically transcribed words.

The word “Lac Viet” falls into this same category. The word “Lac” is a transliterated word from the indigenous ancient Vietnamese. Research on the word “Lac” based on great Chinese classical books(10), famous Chinese dictionaries such as Khang Hy, Từ hải, Từ nguyên, can only find the meaning of a Chinese word, pronounced as a Chinese Vietnamese word, not a transliterated word from ancient indigenous Vietnamese. (11)

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