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Sunday, January 07, 2007

Dictionnary of Vietnamese words borrowed from French

Very exciting news, I have decided to put together a dictionary, a lexicon rather, of Vietnamese words originating from the French tongue. This project is still under development, but just to give a brief idea, it would be trilingual. Words could be looked up in English, French or Vietnamese via Firefox's searching capabilities. I mean, some of the stuff would be common-sense, but many others require a masterful knowledge of Vietnamese etymology. For example, who would guess that caoutchouc is the French origin of the infamous term "cao su," from which we derive another notorious word (one of my favorite actually): "bao cao su"?? Such is the irony of language.

Next good news, the project should be open-sourced. After a while, I will put it on wikipedia for everybody to see, but please keep in mind that the project originates from THIS webpage. Save me some honors. Don't fuck it up by doing immature things (stupid/random addition/removal of words).

Until then, adjustments and suggestions are made via the comment system. Once the project goes under development, feel free to drop me a line if you have a couple of entries to contribute.

As faithfully yours as always,
Jubinell

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