Talk:Names of Vietnam

Việt-Nam Đế-Quốc or Đế-Quốc Việt-Nam

The document contains the name Việt-Nam Đế-Quốc both in Latin script and in Traditional Chinese characters (written from right-to-left).

Perhaps best for when a list of official name is added to this article, but I have seen the Empire of Vietnam be referred to as both the Đế-Quốc Việt-Nam (using Vietnamese grammar) and in this document uploaded by Greenknight DV as Việt-Nam Đế-Quốc (using Chinese grammar). Now, if this were to be listed here should the list only include the Vietnamese grammatical version or also the Chinese version? --Donald Trung (talk) 22:01, 11 December 2021 (UTC)

Southern Dynasty

A document using the term Chánh-phủ Nam-Triều (政府南朝).

I found a number of documents issued by the Nguyễn Dynasty's Ministry of Economic Affairs which are marked as coming from the "Government of the Southern Dynasty", I can't seem to find any more information when this name was first used, but it appears that during the Bảo Đại period the country was officially known as the "Southern Dynasty" (南朝, Nam-Triều), at least between 1936 and 1938.

But as the country was still officially called Đại-Nam quốc I'm not sure where to put this name in the article. I don't think that it fits "unofficial names" well because it appears that it was the name officially used by the government of the Nguyễn dynasty itself. Note that Nam Quốc (Southern Country) and Nam Triều (Southern Dynasty) aren't mutually exclusive as Triều was historically used to refer to the domain of the Son of Heaven as opposed to other lands which were Quốc. --Donald Trung (talk) 20:45, 2 February 2022 (UTC)

@Donald Trung: Note that Nam Quốc (Southern Country) and Nam Triều (Southern Dynasty) aren't mutually exclusive as Triều was historically used to refer to the domain of the Son of Heaven as opposed to other lands which were Quốc. So every Triều is a Quốc but not every Quốc is a Triều. I think the Nguyễn government was alluding to the notion of 外王内帝 Ngoại Vương Nội Đế as well. To me, this is analogous to:

(1) the Xiongnu title 撐犁孤塗單于 Chēnglí Gūtu Chányú < OC *treng-ri kwa-la dar-ɢwā being analyzed as "Son of Heaven, Ruler of the North" (Vovin 2000; 2007) in contrast to the Han emperors, the Han Chinese Tianzi who ruled "the South". Vovin's analysis is somewhat supported by Chinese sources. In his 2015 article contending that Xiongnu was the "dynastic name" and Hu was the "subordinate ethnonym" of the ordinary mass, Christopher Atwood PhD quoted Hulugu chanyu's statement "南有大漢，北有強胡。胡者，天之驕子也" Atwood's translation: "In the south are the Great Han, in the north are the Powerful Hu; the Hu are the proud children of Heaven" (Hanshu 94A; mistakenly sourced to 94B by Atwood).

(2) The notion, that China was just the Bắc quốc "Northern country", implied in the poem Nam quốc sơn hà's 1st line 南國山河南帝居 Nam quốc sơn hà nam đế cư "The Southern country's mountains and rivers the Southern Emperor inhabits", or explicitly stated in Đoàn Thị Điểm's counter 北國大丈夫皆由此途出 Bắc quốc đại trượng phu, giai do thử đồ xuất "Bắc quốc đại trượng phu đều bởi chỗ ấy mà ra - The Northern country's great men all came out from that place".

As always, I'm impressed with your diligence and skills and abilities which have landed us wikipedians valuable primary source materials. Regards! Erminwin (talk) 14:35, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

@Erminwin:, I actually found a variety of names, for example in the Tràng An newspaper I see references to the Great South being called Quốc-gia An-nam, Quốc-gia Đại-Nam, and Nước Nam (example article), in some cases the people of what is now Vietnam were called the people of "Việt-Nam", but the Nguyễn Dynasty was often explicitly referred to as either Trung—Bắc Kỳ or the South (Nam) in some way, while French Cochinchina was called "Nam Kỳ". So my guess is that "Việt-Nam = Đại-Nam + Nam Kỳ" during the 1930's. There are several articles talking about the South in the Tràng An newspaper and the Nguyễn Dynasty (Annam & Tonkin) is referred to by half a dozen different names.

Thank you for all the wonderful information above, by the way. --Donald Trung (talk) 15:07, 6 May 2022 (UTC)

Some notes, I actually think that the term Nam-Triều (南朝) can be translated as both "Southern Dynasty" and "Southern Court", namely because the term "Triều đình Huế" often refers to the imperial court (today, the term "Triều đình Huế" is commonly used to refer to the Nguyễn Dynasty's imperial court in Vietnamese sources, but contemporary sources simply refer to it as the "Triều đình"). So my guess is that "the government of the Southern Dynasty" could also mean "the government (of / in service to) the Southern Court". Reading through various Tràng An newspaper articles I find the term "Nam-Triều" exclusively being used in reference to the imperial government.

Generally speaking I tend to look at Vietnam during the French domination period through what I call the "Tam Quốc" (三國) Theory, namely that Tonkin, Annam, and French Cochinchina were essentially three (3) different countries and that the French colonisation had a different effect on the Nguyễn Dynasty (Annam & Tonkin) as it had on French Cochinchina. Through this lens (which I mainly use as "a research lens") I find that there are many different names that were used in this period. In the case of European languages I find that there's a difference between "the Protectorate of Annam" and "the Empire of Annam", namely the latter refers to the Nguyễn Dynasty (Annam and Tonkin), the term "Annamese people" just referred to what we today call "Kinh people". Interestingly enough, I remember somewhere on Wikipedia being a phrase that claimed that contemporary Vietnamese people hated the term "Annam" and that it was considered a pejorative, but I can't find this in the contemporary sources at all, this may have been true for a handful of nationalists, but before 1945 the term was the main name used.

The Vietnamese concept of the Nguyễn Dynasty state as the French protectorate of Annam and the French protectorate of Tonkin was mostly that as a continued Quốc-gia Đại-Nam and later I find the term Nước Nam. The terms "Trung Kỳ" and "Bắc Kỳ" are also occasionally used. Some nationalists continued using the term "Đại Việt", so I don't find a clear name that was considered to be the standard.

Interesting side-note enough I see both the Huế dialect term Chánh-phủ and the Hanoi dialect Chính-phủ being used in newspapers from Huế indicating that the Hanoi dialect was already more influential (likely due to Hanoi being the capital city of French Indochina and being the home of many intellectuals).

This reminds me of a YouTube I saw about the name of the Roman Empire and how the people saw themselves, where a large number of names were used and "Romania" was only used after the split of the Empire. Later during the age of nationalism terms like "Roman people" and "Romania" were done away with by Greek nationalist as they started to claim "Romans are docile cowards who submit to Muslim rulers, while Greeks produced many powerful military heroes and conquers", so the Greek nationalists tried to eradicate the terms "Roman" and "Romania" to "revive the ancient Greek nation", Vietnamese nationalism follows similar trends where an imagined ancient past was glorified and the name "Việt-Nam" refers to the ancient 100 Việt (though the actual name means "South of the Việt").

The Nguyễn Dynasty at the time mostly just called itself "the south" and all sources I can find almost always include a variant of "Nam" (南) in the name. This article very commonly refers to "Việt-Nam" which makes me think that it was already the name that most people used to refer to their country and during the 1930's. My guess is that multiple names were in use at the same time like how the Roman Empire had multiple names.

Excuse me for the above, when I started writing I had a clear idea in my head but got distracted and ended up with a mess of different topics haphazardly put together. What I was trying to say was that the name "Việt-Nam" was already popularly in use during this period, in fact I have been able to find it in Nguyễn Dynasty works from the early 20th (twentieth) and possibly even the late 19th (nineteenth) century (example). My guess is that the name that was used under the Gia Long never lost popularity, even after the official name changed.

That is still to say that I think that the different names of the Nguyễn Dynasty government should be included, I just don't know how to add it in as it's not clear what type of name this is. The official government used it, yet it's also kidn of "a romantic name" not meant to really refer to the country in an official context, it sits right on official and unofficial in this weird limbo. --Donald Trung (talk) 20:44, 6 May 2022 (UTC)