Sino-Vietnamese morphemes: Their grammatical behaviour and implications for semantics and phonetics

This paper shows that Sino-Vietnamese morphemes combine not only with other Sino-Vietnamese morphemes but also with non-Sino-Vietnamese morphemes, such as native Vietnamese and even Indo-European elements, particularly French loanwords. This phenomenon is not unique to Vietnamese: similar hybrid words can also be found in other Sino-xenic languages (Japanese and Korean) as well as Indo-European languages.