Why is Lạc Long Quân “Lạc” Long Quân?

/ leminhkhai

Why do we call Lạc Long Quân “Lạc” Long Quân? The character in his name which we transcribe as “lạc” is 貉. In Chinese today this character is pronounced as “hao,” “he,” or “mo.”

Edwin G. Pulleyblank’s Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late Middle Chinese, and Early Mandarin (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991) indicates that this character probably originally ended in the sound “ak.” However, the initial “l” has nothing to do with the “h” or “m” with which this word begins. I don’t fully understand the symbols which Pulleyblank uses, but the “x” is supposed to be some form of an “h” or maybe a bit of a “kh.”

In Pulleyblank’s work, the older pronunciations are on the right. So the current pronunciation of “hao” could have evolved from “yak” to “hfiak” to “haw” to “hao.”

In any case, as far as I know, there is no linguistic connection between “h” and “l” or “m” and “l.” So how can Lạc Long Quân be “Lạc” Long Quân? Shouldn’t he be something like “Hạc Long Quân”? Why is this character pronounced this way? Do we know when people started to pronounce it this way? What evidence do we have about the linguistic history of this term?

10 thoughts on “Why is Lạc Long Quân “Lạc” Long Quân?”

  1. Yea, I really wonder if referring to Lac Long Quan as “Lac” Long Quan predates the 20th century. If you call him “Lac” Long Quan, then people make a connection with the “Lac” Viet. However, his name is not the same. But if people can’t read Han, they can’t see this.

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    • Aha, now I discover that your question was unique. If you search by google with the key word as “Lạc vương,” you then will find a load of ideas of “VNese nationalists.” However, they all talked about why people did call “Hùng vương” instead of “Lạc vương.” Moreover, they anxiously argue for the title of the Vietnam nation (quốc hiệu) which should be Lac vuong or Hung vuong. … I don’t think of any possibility right now to check if people also called “Lac Long quan” (not Hac) before the 20th century.

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  2. In the Dai Viet Su Ky Toan Thu, “Lac” Long Quan is “Hac” Long Quan and the officials who served the Hung kings are called “Hac hou” and “Hac tuong.”

    In the Cuong Muc, “Lac” Long Quan is called “Hac” Long Quan and the officials who served the Hung kings are called “Lac hou” and “Lac tuong.”

    Why is this information not consistent, and why do we refer to everyone as “lac” today?

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  3. Unbelieveable!! I just looked at Ngo Thi Si’s “Viet su tieu an” and it is different from the above two texts.

    The Viet su tieu an has "Hac" Long Quan, Hac hou, and Lac tuong. What is more, the "lac" (雒) in "Lac tuong" in this text is different from the character for "lac" in the Cuong Muc (駱).

    If this information is so important for the Vietnamese, why were they historically so inconsistent in writing about it??

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  4. Have you pinpointed the first appearance on text of “Lạc Long Quân” in Latin alphabet? I think European missionaries hadn’t written that name down, at least not in that particular way. So, perhaps the intellectuals in early 20th century did that first. However, my little deduction is based on an assumption that the story of Lạc Long Quân is among Vietnamese pre-modern folklore. Have historians confirmed that as a fact, or at least probably a fact? If so, the inconsistency might arise from attempts of many authors to record the story and reconcile phonetics and Chinese texts. And then, 20th-century intellectuals just “inertially” translated the word to “Lạc Long Quân” because of their phonetic memories of “bedtime stories”.

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