Preliminary Etymological Notes on Vietnamese Words for Pottery

This is an etymological study of Vietnamese words for pottery, with notes on related words for ceramic production. Over 60 monosyllabic words have been assembled, and of these, fewer than half are loanwords or words with undetermined regional sources. Over half are either native Viet-Muong words or words without identifiable outside sources, and thus possible lexical innovations in Vietnamese. I explored relative chronologies of the words based on (a) historical phonological features, (b) historical texts, and (c) archaeohistorical information. While pottery has a several-thousand-year history in the region, besides a Proto-Vietic word vung ‘lid of a pot’, the earliest period to which the almost all the words can be safely dated is the early 1st millennium CE. The several early Chinese loanwords related to ceramic production (e.g., lò ‘kiln’ and thó ‘potter’s clay) highlight the influence of Chinese ceramic production practices from the Han Dynasty onward. However, the two dozen words of potential native Vietnamese origin may be related to the growth of ceramic production in Vietnam in the 2nd millennium. Many questions remain about the histories of these words, which will require attention from Hán-Nôm researchers, archaeologists and ethnohistorians specializing in Vietnamese ceramics