Talk:do thám

Wrong etymology

Its actually a morphed form of a standalone syllable-word dò in vietnamese, which may or may not derived from old classical chinese. 2A02:3033:711:2D8C:7CE1:6BC1:9CF2:EE87 12:16, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

Sorry but no, that just sounds like typical ad hoc bull. I simply don't find it persuasive that dò, a free morpheme ("standalone syllable-word") with no obvious Sinitic connection (it's attested written in Nôm texts with graphs containing the phonetic 徒 (MC du), pointing to the lenition of an alveolar stop *-d/t-, thus had a very typical word shape for a native word) would become a "SV-like" bound morpheme in a typical two morpheme SV compound with an unexpected change in tonal register ("morphed form"). Even I don't want to sound that confident as to straight up declare something "wrong" or "correct" if I'm not 100% sure what I'm talking about. Can you tell me what makes you so confident that the etymology here is "wrong"? PhanAnh123 (talk) 13:01, 31 January 2025 (UTC)

@PhanAnh123 I've known that "dò" in Nghe An-Ha Tinh dialects read pretty much similar to "do" in compound words. https://chunom.net/Tu-Dien.html 's two entries of 'Từ điển - Lê Văn Đức' and 'Đại Từ điển tiếng Việt' also lists "dò thám", "dọ thám" (various dictionaries on the page also lists dọ as alternative form of dò) so I think those two morphemes (do, dò) are related?

(PS: Correction: "dò thám" is listed on other websites, not chunom.net) HungKhanh0106 (talk) 08:42, 2 February 2025 (UTC)

Certainly at least some contamination and hypercorrection going in there, I do wonder how much of this is due to the faulty perception of tones in the diverse North Central dialects by speakers of other dialects though. You know, the usual "people from Nghệ An say every word with nặng tone", which is totally nonsense. As far as I know, conservative speakers from Vinh preserve the 6 tones, while in the city of Hà Tĩnh and some other areas, ngã-nặng are merged, and at least some merged hỏi-ngã too (I'm not sure to what extent these two mergers overlap). PhanAnh123 (talk) 09:00, 2 February 2025 (UTC)