Jean-Louis Taberd’s Treatise on Vietnamese Function Words and Its Historical Context

Abstract

This paper presents a critical, linguistically annotated English translation of the prefatory materials in Jean-Louis Taberd’s Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum (Serampore 1838), focusing especially on the appended “Treatise on Various Particles and Pronouns Most Useful for Elegant Expression in the Annamite Language.” Situated within the history of early quốc ngữ and missionary language description, Taberd’s treatise constitutes an unusually systematic inventory of Vietnamese functional items (broadly construed), including negation and interrogation markers, clause linkers, comparatives and degree/focus expressions, classifiers, and discourse particles. Our edition preserves Taberd’s order and metalinguistic framing while providing minimal, targeted notes to clarify early modern Latin categories, dialectal/orthographic remarks, and diachronic shifts relative to present-day Vietnamese. Where Taberd explicitly flags a form as “of Chinese origin” (or restricts it to Sino-derived compounds), we supply Chinese character(s) and Sino-Vietnamese readings for cross-checking. The result makes a key nineteenth-century source accessible to a wider readership and offers new empirical material for the history of Vietnamese grammatical description, quốc ngữ development, and Sino-Vietnamese grammatical vocabulary.