vietnameselanguage / syllable

List of the current Vietnamese syllable

Vietnamese syllables

List of the current Vietnamese syllables: 6674. Noted that "tí" and "tý" are seen as two different words. Their sounds are the same.

References:

1. 6653 syllables @https://luom.tv/2015/11/01/danh-sach-am-tiet-tieng-viet-xep-theo-van/

2. 7184 syllables @https://gist.github.com/hieuthi/1f5d80fca871f3642f61f7e3de883f3a

3. 7884 syllables

@https://github.com/BambooEngine/ibus-bamboo/blob/master/data/vietnamese.cm.dict

syllable's Issues

Is 'nghiêng' the only seven-letter Vietnamese word?

(Original source: Reddit)

After examining automatic language detectors and longest words, the case for Vietnamese is special, mainly due to that this language is composed almost entirely of short words no more than 6 letters in length. Occasional longer are almost exclusively seen in loanwords.

According to Wikipedia, the longest word (in this definition), is nghiêng, meaning 'inclined'. What strikes me is the wording of this statement, as it implies that nghiêng is the only native Vietnamese word with 7 letters, and that there are no native Vietnamese word with 8 or more letters. There are hundreds of different Vietnamese words with 6 letters, suc as Nguyễn (much more common than Smith), trưởng (chief), khuynh (inclined). Is it true that nghiêng and its tonal counterparts the only seven-letter native Vietnamese words?

Research

Technically, Vietnamese separates strings of letters at a morpheme level, and each morpheme is a syllable in Vietnamese. To the uninitiated, it seems that every native Vietnamese word is of one syllable.

There is an online resource which lists all native Vietnamese words (technically, single-syllable morphemes) of the Vietnamese language. I ran a simple Python program that sorts and categorizes each Vietnamese word by length. I used three lists that are used in actual programs or research projects (7184-source, 7884-source, all syllables). Here are my results:

Length	7184-source	7884-source	All syllables
1	48	74	60
2	855	1028	1216
3	2937	3172	5708
4	2372	2560	6872
5	832	887	3442
6	139	157	670
7	1	6	6
8+	0	0	0

There is clear evidence that nghiêng is the one 7-letter native Vietnamese word. In the 7884-source, the seven-letter words are 'kilôgam', 'kilômet', 'nghiêng', 'nghiênh', 'nghuếch', 'đpctntư'. The first two are clearly loanwords, the fourth and fifth are probably misspelt. The last is nonsense. In the all syllables list, the six seven-letter words are all tonal equivalents of nghiêng.

Another seven-letter Vietnamese word

After browsing through various chu nom dictionaries, I finally spotted a second example of a native Vietnamese word with seven letters. It is again a tonal equivalent of _nghiêng_, this time with the _ngã_ tone: _nghiễng_. It is sourced from _Tam Thiên Tự_, and _nghiễng_ even has its chu nom counterpart: 覡 (meaning 'wizard'). I found this source from Facebook.

Conclusion

As of now, I found another word, along with its chu nom counterpart, composed of seven letters. I thought nguyêng, nghiêch, thuyêng, seem plausible, but I don't see any evidence of their existence. Please comment if you believe that nghiêng are the only seven-letter native Vietnamese words, or if there are evidence of the contrary.