Talk:ngũ mã phanh thây

ngũ mã phân thi 五馬分屍

This derives from ngũ mã phân thi 五馬分屍. The wiktionary entry for phanh says it comes from 烹 with the definition of (to slaughter, butcher; to dismember), however the actual character definition is more like (to boil). The second character thây is already a Non-Sino-Vietnamese reading of Chinese 屍 (“corpse”, SV: thi). Is it possible that "phanh" is potentially Non-Sino-Vietnamese reading of Chinese 分 (“to divide; to separate”, SV: phân)? Vien.Vu1 (talk) 01:05, 25 October 2023 (UTC)

烹 here is simply a phonogram used for its phonetic value; you can read a bit about how phonograms in historical Vietnamese texts worked at the entry of chữ Nôm; if you want to know about the historical linguistics of Vietnamese, you really should be able to tell whether a character was a phonogram or not (Japanese and Korean also have/had their own usages of phonograms, by the way, so you can also look into them if you want to learn more about how phonograms are/were used in the context of languages in the Sinosphere). If anything, it's more likely to be an aspirated variant of banh (“to open wide; in tattered”) (phỏng vs. bỏng, phứt vs. bứt, etc.). In this case, phanh thây here indeed mimics the usage of 分屍／分尸 (phân thi), but etymologically, it's phono-semantic matching for phanh, as Vietnamese has the word phanh that is coincidentally similar to phân in sound and meaning, hence the substitute of one for the other; you can see stuff like âm li < French amplifier, lê dương < French légion, or even cà phê. PhanAnh123 (talk) 08:29, 25 October 2023 (UTC)