Tai-Viet linguistics question (LONG RESPONSE)

[Liam C. Kelley]

Dear Joe and list,

Thank you for the information. It confirms what I suspected. I’m still at a 
total loss about this term ke. I am aware of that Chinese book on Zhuang 
place names and have already requested it through ILL. Hopefully that will 
shed some light. In any case, in response to your interest in this issue, I 
have here a (long) discussion of what I know about this issue so far. The 
weak at heart should delete this message now. For the brave/foolish, please 
forge on!

The issue of this place name, ke, was first looked at closely by a scholar 
from Taiwan by the name of Chen Jinghe. Chen Jinghe was educated in Japan 
(Keio), and then went to Vietnam to do research in the 1940s at the EFEO. 
His main project was to try to determine the origins of an ancient term for 
“Vietnam,” Giao Chi/Jiaozhi 交趾. In the process he came across this term, and 
then wrote a separate article about it.

Chen Jinghe 陳荊和, “Yuenan Dongjing difang zhi techeng ‘Kẻ’” 越南東京地方之特稱“Kẻ” 
[The unique name “Kẻ” in the Tonkin region of Vietnam], Guoli Taiwan daxue 
wen shi zhe xuebao 國力臺灣大學文史哲學報 1 (1950): 201-235.

Since the time of the Chinese conquest of northern Vietnam in the final 
century of the BC period, place names in Vietnam have historically been 
written with 2 Chinese characters. However, they also had demotic names 
which consisted of a single “word” preceded by a term for some physical 
marker like ho (lake), cho (market) or chua (temple). These demotic names 
which follow a physical marker can be categorized in one of three ways:
 1. At times a word which has the same or similar sound as one of the 
Chinese characters is used.
 2. At times a word which has the same meaning as one of the Chinese 
characters is used.
 3. At times a word which is unrelated in sound and meaning to the 
Chinese-character name is used.

While many demotic names are preceded by some physical marker, like ho, or 
cho, or chua, many are preceded by this term ke. The most famous example is 
the demotic name for Hanoi = Ke Cho (Cho = market). However, Chen Jinghe 
found other examples from the writings of French scholars in the 20th 
century, as well as French missionaries in the 17th and 18th centuries (He 
had to find examples there because the Vietnamese did not write these names 
themselves. They recorded the Chinese versions of village names.). Place 
names that began with ke were found all over northern Vietnam, but as you 
moved into the center they started to lessen in number, and disappeared in 
the south. So it is by no means the case that these were only in the 
“borderlands.” Some examples (diacritics not provided in the article) from 
northern Vietnam include:

Ke Loi, Ke Tuom, Ke Noi, Ke Mai, Ke Chinh, Ke Bac, Ke Mle, Ke Som, Ke Blou, 
Ke Thap Tuc, Ke Dou Tri, Ke Vac, Ke Rua, Ke Coi, and on and on. . .

Most early Vietnamese dictionaries simply say that ke means “person.” 
However, Gustave Hue’s Dictionnaire Annamite-Chinois-Francais (Saigon: Trung 
Hoa, 1937) also says that it is a numeral for villages, and that it precedes 
the name of Vietnamese villages.

This doesn’t satisfy Chen, so he keeps looking for answers. Here he makes an 
interesting discovery. In the 17th century there were four large 
administrative units around Hanoi, which more or less corresponded to the 
four directions the official names of which were as follows: Son Nam 山南 
[mountain + south], Son Tay 山西 [mountain + west], Kinh Bac 京北 [capital + 
north], and Hai Duong 海陽 [sea + sun/solar??]. A work published in France in 
1653 (Divers Voyages et Missions du P. Alexandre de Rhodes), however, refers 
to these four administrative regions as Kenam [nam = south], Ketay [tay = 
west], Kebac [bac = north], and Kedom [“dom” = dong (pronounced like “dom” 
in Viet.) = east]. Then below each of these names, the map has in French “or 
the residents of the south/west/north/east” etc. So it says, for instance, 
“Ketay ou Habitans (sic.) a l’Occident." These were probably the colloquial 
names of these regions, and they were somehow translated as meaning 
“residents” rather than places.

While this may have just been a case of something getting lost in 
translation, it gets Chen Jinghe onto the topic of looking at ke as meaning 
“person” or “people.” He finds that European travelers around the same time 
recorded that the Vietnamese referred to the “savages” in the mountains as 
“ke moi.” The meaning in Vietnamese of moi on its own is “savage,” and is a 
derogatory term for the peoples in the Central Highlands.

He also notes that ke is used in limited ways in spoken Vietnamese to mean 
person/people. There are expressions like ke giau nguoi ngheo [person rich 
person poor = “some are rich, some are poor”] where ke is combined with the 
more common Vietnamese word for person, nguoi.

He then goes off on a long digression about premodern Vietnamese social 
structure and argues that Vietnamese lived in compact, specialized villages, 
and that ke could mean not “person” but “a group of people” in such a 
setting. And indeed, in its limited modern usage, ke is sometimes used like 
that, to refer to a group of people of a certain type (ke cho = people who 
live in a lively town environment).

Turning to a related topic, Chen Jinghe then also points out that there are 
many official Chinese place names in Vietnam that start with a k sound. Here 
he lists many village names which start with characters like gu 古. In 
Vietnamese today this is written like “co” and pronounced like “go.”

He cites the work of a Chinese scholar -- Xu Songshi 徐松石, Taizu, Zhuangzu, 
Yuezu kao 泰族徨族粵族考 [Research on the Tai, Zhuang and Yue (i.e., Cantonese)] 
(Yongning, Zhonghua shuju, 1946), 208-9 -- who says that the character gu 古 
used in place names comes from Zhuang and that is has been interpreted in 
many ways, from meaning “I” to a classifier (個), to meaning a mountain with 
no vegetation on it (which he says is “khaw,” from where we get the common 
term in Central Thai for mountain, “khao”). He also mentions that such place 
names can be found from Anhui all of the way to Guangxi, an area where he 
argues Tai speakers historically inhabited.

Xu Songshi also cites a work which was published in 1877 – Xu Yanxu’s 徐延旭 
Yuenan jilue 越南輯略 [Brief compilation on Vietnam] – which contains a map of 
the districts in Vietnam when it was under Chinese control in the early 15th 
century. You had district names such as the following:

Gubang 古榜, Gulao 古老, Guli 古禮, Guyong 古勇, Gunong 古農 (and many more names that 
begin with gu), Na’an 那岸, Duojin 多錦, Sirong 思容, Diao’an 調安. According to Xu 
Songshi, gu, na (field), duo, si, and diao are all Zhuang words. But he 
doesn’t say what these other words mean.

Xu Songshi also did not say that gu 古 was related to khon. Chen Jinghe, 
however, did. He argued that ke and khon came from a common source, and that 
gu 古 was one of the ways that it was transcribed in Chinese.

He then lists the word for person in several Tai languages. In addition to 
the various cases of kon, kun, can, he also has the following:

White Tai: Ke (adult, for peoples around 25-40 – and for this he cites 
Georges Minot, “Dictionnaire Tay-blanc Francaise,” BEFEO 40 (1940), 92.) 
[This is not very convincing because they also have the word kun for 
person/people (p. 102).]

Red Tai: Po ke (male person) and Me ke (female person) -- R. Robert, Notes 
sur les Tay Deng de Lang Chang, Thanh-hoa, Annam (Hanoi: Impr. d’Extrême-Orient, 
1941), 128. I checked this and saw that there is also the term ke mo, 
“sorcerer” (p. 129).

Finally, I have found Vietnamese scholars talking about this issue in the 
1960s. And in their frustrating tendency of not backing up their arguments 
with citations, they simply say that ke is written in Chinese as co/gu and 
that it means “person/people.” However, they do provide the names of some 
villages which make the connection seem a perfect fit: the spoken name Ke 
Trai is written Co Trai; Ke Net is Co Niet; Ke Nua is Co Ninh, etc.

In conclusion, all of the above information can be boiled down to the 
following:

You apparently have place names stretching from central Vietnam to Anhui 
province in China which were written starting with the Chinese character gu 
古, or other similar sounding characters. Some have argued that this 
represents a Tai word.

You also have all of these spoken place names that start with ke in northern 
and north-central Vietnam. Scholars also argue that this word can mean 
person/people, and Chen Jinghe believes it is related to the Tai word khon.

The big questions: Are these names somehow related? Are they derived from a 
Tai language? What do they mean in place names?

Liam Kelley
University of Hawaii

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