Home Gudgeon and gist Language Log The Sinitic Word for "million" in Southeast Asian Mandarin, part 2

The Sinitic Word for "million" in Southeast Asian Mandarin, part 2

Language Log 2024-08-13

[This is a guest post by Liam Kelley.]

Looking up "triệu" in this Nom dictionary brings up an example from a line in a work that appears to date from the early twentieth century that states: "The soul of the 4,000-year-old country has yet to awaken. The 25 million [triệu兆 ] people are still deep in slumber."
 
There was definitely modern Mandarin terminology that entered classical Chinese in Vietnam at that time (I haven't looked at many Nom texts from that period so I can't say about Mandarin terms in the spoken language, but it would make sense that some would be there too), and the topic here (soul of a country/nation, awakening from sleep) is the type of new nationalist concepts that spread from Japan/China to Vietnam at that time.

So, I don't know where exactly triệu comes from, but between what the author of this post wrote and this tidbit of information here, I would bet my money on it being a term that was in circulation in Mandarin/Southeast Asian circles in the nineteenth century.

 

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