Wiktionary:About Muong

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The Muong lects, which might simply be a paraphyletic grouping, exhibit great diversity in phonology and vocabulary. The two important sources of information on the Muong lects: Nguyễn Văn Khang et al.'s Từ điển Mường - Việt (2002), which was chiefly based on the Muong Bi dialect, and Nguyễn Văn Tài's Ngữ âm tiếng Mường qua các phương ngôn, which is a quasi-dialect survey of Muong lects, some minor Vietic varieties that used to be grouped into "Muong", and the Cổ Liêm variety of Nguồn.

Since Nguyễn Văn Khang et al. (2002) is the only book-length dictionary devoted to Muong, it probably would be used for entries in Wiktionary, at least until there is a more comprehensive dictionary. Alternative forms from various dialects are encouraged to be listed, with the variety indicated if possible.

Although it is stated in Nguyễn Văn Khang et al. (2002) that "từ ngữ tiếng Mường Bi làm bảng từ - "xương sống của từ điển." (the Muong Bi forms are used as headwords and are the "backbone of the dictionary"), there might be words from lects other than Muong Bi but there is no way to dissent them from the rest them since there is no indication.

The only detail treatment of the tone system of any Muong dialect is that of the Kim Thượng lect (Nguyễn Minh Châu, 2016), so it is not feasible to represent tones in Mường Bi using tone letters as currently deployed for Vietnamese, instead abstract numbers ought to be used. The Muong Bi dialect in Nguyễn Văn Khang et al. (2002) is described as having 5 tones, which can be conferred to include 5 tones in open syllabes and 2 allotones in checked syllables, similar to the system in Northern Vietnamese (6 tones in open syllables and 2 checked allotones). As in Vietnamese, it is not rare for B1 to shift to B2 and vice verse, so there are a lot of minor tonal discrepancies, but the general correspondences are:

Most Muong lects show certain tonal merger(s). B2 and C2 merged in this variety, both represented by the diacritic ngã. In Kim Thượng lect, B1 and B2 merged. For comparison, in certain North Central Vietnamese varieties, B2 and C2 merged while in Southern Vietnamese, C1 and C2 merged.

It is unclear whether phonetically the phoneme /r/ is the fricative , the approximant or the flap , so it is best to just use the broad phonemic transcription /r/.

Although it is pretty obvious that Muong Bi ⟨b⟩ and ⟨đ⟩ are implosives, I am not sure whether to represent them as plain voiced stops or implosives.

• Using /b d/: bỏi (“salt”) as /bɔj³/ showing the symmetry to the consonantal system
• Using /ɓ ɗ/: bỏi (“salt”) as /ɓɔj³/, brings some transparency to the etymology and does not mislead readers that implosives ever deglottalized in this variety.

On the contratry, graphemes such as ⟨-ich⟩ clearly indicated that there is a glide before palatal finals: . For example, đaích (“crushed”) (cognate with Vietnamese nát) is phonemically /daːc/, phonetically .

Is Muong Bi initial /c/ phonetically before all vowels like Northern Vietnamese or before all vowels like Southern Vietnamese? Or something like before front vowels and before the rest?

Just like Vietnamese, Muong Bi only has length contrast for /a aː/ and /ə əː/ (alternatively, /ӑ a/ and /ə̆ ə/ with short vowels vs. plain vowels). Should chim (“bird”) be transcripted as /cim/ or /ciːm/, although there is no contrast for /i/ vs. /iː/?

Contratry to the usual belief, even discount the loans from Vietnamese (which often can be quite easily picked out), all Muong lects contains a very significant amount of Sinitic loans. Some of these loans are used as standalone words for normal, everyday concepts in Muong Bi but their Sino-Vietnamese counterparts are never used as such, for example, Muong Bi thôn (“grandchild”) vs. Vietnamese tôn, which is only used in literary compounds. It is probably best to just use {{bor}} for loans borrowed during the Common-Viet-Muong stage.

The newspaper Hoà Bình điện tử employs a distinctive orthography. This standard is currently not really widely used, but they may be listed as "alternative forms" if necessary.

Note that the Muong language used in this newspaper belongs to the formal register and so Vietnamesized to the extent that it is easily intelligible to Vietnamese readers, although most Muong lects are completely unintelligible in spoken form and only partly intelligible at best in informal written form to native Vietnamese speakers. Thus, it is not very representative of the usual, everyday language of Muong native speakers.