Talk:Vietnamese pronouns

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From my understanding. the term "cố" is used as an honourific for a deceased person, as in the English "the late..." such and such, and not for a particular family member. This term becomes a title when referring especially to famous persons. ie. Cố Trịnh Công Sơn (the late Trinh Cong Son), or Cố Hồ Chí Minh (the late Ho Chi Minh). Le Anh-Huy 11:17, 10 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not necessarily. That is one of the many meanings of "cố", but is not the main one, and is always followed by a real honorific, such as "Cố Chủ tịch Hồ Chí Minh" (The late President Ho Chi Minh) or cố nhạc sĩ Trịnh Công Sơn (the late composer TCS). See this definition:

1. The person who had borne one's grandmother or grandfather. Example: Cố tôi năm nay tròn một trăm tuổi; Con người có cố, có ông, như cây có cội, như sông có nguồn
2. Roman Catholic priest: Cố Alexandre de Rhodes.
3. An honorific for old people: Em học sinh đưa một cụ cố qua đường.
4. A word placed in front of a high position to indicate that the person holding that high position is deceased Cố bộ trưởng Nguyễn Văn Huyên.
5. As in Cố gắng: to make an effort

DHN 15:44, 10 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I am not an expert in Vietnamese but it seems that the list is incomplete. One thing I noticed that plural marker các (e.g. các anh) is not used. --Anatoli (talk) 05:59, 27 January 2010 (UTC)[reply]

People use the "hỏi" tone (?) to form third-person forms of kinship terms, not the "ngã" (~) tone. This usage only exists in southern dialects. Many people don't distinguish between (?) and (~), hence the mistake. E.g: Anh -> ảnh, cô -> cổ, ông -> ổng. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 117.5.139.230 (talk) 10:30, 22 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The main page of this article could be improved if there were a discussion on where a pronoun starts, and where it ends. If there were an article on Vietnamese word order, half the confusion would disappear. Can pronouns be strung together, one after another, so long as the kinship relationship were made clear from the start? And how may the kinship relationship be modified? For instance, in Classical Latin there are many more pronouns than you might first realize. If Vietnamese were as rich as Classical Latin, you could have a real adventure set out for you, starting with something like ea, ipsa, quaeque, quispiam, idem (i.e. eadem) and so on. Not to mention sentences where idem is mispronounced as item. If the sentence structure in Vietnamese were at all periodic, it might not even be intelligible until it is permitted to unravel itself (when you get to the very last word in the sentence, likely as not a verb). So, if there were a discussion about word order somewhere, I would appreciate it. Dexter Nextnumber (talk) 22:26, 21 April 2013 (UTC)[reply]