Historical
exonyms include place names of bordering countries, namely Thailand, Laos, China, and Cambodia. During the expansion of Vietnam (
Nam tiến) some place names have become Vietnamized. Consequently, as control of different places and regions has shifted among China, Vietnam, and other Southeast Asian countries, the Vietnamese names for places can sometimes differ from the names residents of aforementioned places use, although nowadays it has become more common for the Vietnamese names of places to simply be Vietnamese transcriptions of the local placenames. Many non-Vietnamese places may have more than one Vietnamese name, as shown below.
Sino-Vietnamese exonyms Before modernity, sources of names of foreign places in Vietnam came from documents that were mostly written in Classical Chinese. So many exonyms derive directly from Chinese pronunciations (see:
Chinese exonyms). This in turn got transliterated into the Vietnamese,
sinoxenic pronunciations of the Chinese characters (also called
Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation). For example, Scotland is rendered as 蘇格蘭 in Chinese. This is pronounced as
Sū-gé-lán in Mandarin Chinese, a somewhat faithful transcription of the original name. However, as applied to all Chinese characters, 蘇格蘭 can be transliterated into Vietnamese as
Tô Cách Lan, which strays a bit further from the native English and Scots name. A major issue using Chinese characters to transcribe words is the fact that Chinese characters can be pronounced drastically differently among all the spoken
languages and
dialects that use them, which include
Mandarin,
Cantonese,
Japanese,
Korean, and
Vietnamese among several others, the majority of which have dramatically different
phonologies and
phonemes from each other. By the nature of the
writing system itself, Chinese characters tend to preserve a word's syllable count, morphemes, and meanings more reliably than they do as an accurate representation of the word's pronunciation, considering that the Chinese character system itself primarily represents
logograms (though some have elements of phonetic information) as opposed to phonemes of the language. The use of Sino-Vietnamese exonyms has become archaic during recent times, and only some countries, such as France, the US, Russia, Australia, India and most European countries, retain the Sino-Vietnamese pronunciations. Even so, many of the aforementioned countries also have exonyms more accurate to the native pronunciations of their respective
endonyms. Currently, the countries still called by their Sino-Vietnamese names are: China, Egypt, India, Japan, Korea, Mongolia, Russia, Thailand, Turkey, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, England, the US and Australia. London and Pyongyang are the only two cities in Europe and Korea known by the Sino-Vietnamese name.
Exonyms from other languages In modern times, Vietnamese has relied less on Sino-Vietnamese-derived exonyms and it has become more common for Vietnamese exonyms to more accurately transcribe the endonym according to its native language. Thus, place names outside of East Asia can often be respelled in a way that Vietnamese can pronounce it using a
transcription method called Vietnamization. For example, although Scotland can be called by its Sino-Vietnamese exonym,
Tô Cách Lan, spellings such as
Xcốt-len and
Scôtlen are also acceptable. This method has more general patterns than steadfast rules, depending on the writer. For example, the name "Saddam Hussein" can be spelled as
Sađam Hutxen,
Sátđam Hutxen, or
Saddam Hudsein. This is similar to native to how English speakers spelled their own names in various and inconsistent ways before English spelling became fossilized. For example, William Shakespeare spelled his own surname at least 3 different ways. However, it has recently become more common for the
English exonym or the
romanization of the
endonym to be written without any changes to spelling, though Vietnamese readers may still pronounce the name using a Vietnamese accent. In some cases, the name may retain an unchanged spelling, but a footnote may appear regarding how to pronounce the name in Vietnamese. For example, in the
Harry Potter series of
novels, the spelling of names for characters "Marge" and "Filch" remains unchanged, but footnotes exist to help Vietnamese speakers pronounce their names, which are written as "Mạc" and "Fít" respectively. There are a few country names borrowed from
French and
Russian as Vietnam's history is closely linked to France and Russia. Countries whose names borrow from French are: Morocco, Cyprus, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Czech. And the countries whose names borrowed from Russian are Georgia and Lithuania.
Vienna (
Viên in Vietnamese) is the only city whose name in Vietnamese is borrowed from French.
Hong Kong and
Macau names are borrowed from
English by direct transliteration into
Hồng Kông and
Ma Cao instead of
Hương Cảng and
Áo Môn in
Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation.
Other cases The names of
Cambodia and
Laos are directly transcribed from
Khmer and
Lao into Vietnamese as
Campuchia and
Lào. The names of
Phnom Penh,
Vientiane and
Bangkok are directly transcribed from Khmer , Lao and
Thai into Vietnamese as
Phnôm Pênh,
Viêng Chăn and
Băng Cốc.
Ivory Coast is translated into Vietnamese as
Bờ Biển Ngà, and at times it is transcribed from French as
Cốt Đivoa. == Afghanistan ==