The Vietnamese grammar by A. De Rhodes (1651) and its impacts on the description of modern Vietnamese grammar

Abstract

Dictionarium annamiticum, lusitanum et latinum composed by A. De Rhodes was published in Roma in 1651. This work was a collection of several researches on the Vietnamese language carried out by Portugal missionaries who spoke Vietnamese well. Among them, Francisco De Pina and Cristoforo Bori were the first teachers of Vietnamese to foreign missionaries in Vietnam. In this work, A. De Rohdes reserved six of eight chapters to talk about the definition of parts of speech in Vietnamese. He described the Vietnamese parts of speech on the basis of Latin grammar. It’s this Latin grammar-based description which resulted in later opposing points of view on grammatical categories in Vietnamese some of whose issues are still strongly engraved in the heart of linguistic discussions.