© koninklijke brill nv, leiden,  | doi: ./- Cahiers de Linguistique Asie Orientale East Asian Languages and Linguistics  () – brill.com/clao Does Vietnamese have evidence for oc *-r? Mark J. ALVES Montgomery College mark.alves@montgomerycollege.edu Abstract Specialists in Chinese historical phonology have claimed that some Vietnamese words with final /-j/ come from Old Chinese words with final *-r. This is reasonable to spec- ulate as Proto-Austroasiatic finals *-r and *-l became final /-j/ in Vietnamese, parallel to the case in Sinitic. However, these Vietnamese words offer little evidence for oc *-r. Vietnamese did borrow a number of Late Old Chinese or Early Middle Chinese words reconstructed with final *-r after *-r merged with *-n in Eastern Han or later, and thus these words also have /-n/ in Vietnamese. Several other Vietnamese words with final /-j/ which are possibly from Old Chinese words having *-r were borrowed earlier in the bc eperiod, likely before large migrations of Sinitic speakers arrived. Those words include verbs and an adjective, words less likely than nouns to be borrowed without large bilingual communities. The small number of words and general uncertainty sug- gests some Vietnamese words with /-j/ purportedly from Old Chinese words with *-r may be chance similarities. Few are probable Chinese loanwords from that period. Keywords Vietnamese – Austroasiatic – Old Chinese – final consonants Résumé Des spcialistes de phonologie historique du chinois ont propos que certains mots vietnamien à finale /-j/ proviennent de mots qui avaient une finale *-r en chinois archaque. C’ est une ide raisonnable dans la mesure o les finales proto-austroasia- tiques *-r et *-l sont devenues des finales /-j/ en vietnamien. Toutefois, ces mots vietnamiens ne sont permettent pas de conclure à la prsence d’un *-r en chinois archaque. Le vietnamien a emprunt un certain nombre de mots du chinois archaque