North Vietnamese
28
4.2
- adjective
- Kien, the protagonist of Bao Ninh's novel The Sorrow of War, is the sole survivor of a North Vietnamese Army scout platoon.
- North Vietnamese Army
- North Vietnamese and Viet Cong
Examples
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Years later, Henry Kissinger still confessed surprise that his North Vietnamese counterparts were fanatics.
Academic text (1991) -
There are 50,000 North Vietnamese there at the present time.
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Weapons were sold to the North Vietnamese during our war there.
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On the other side of the stream was a North Vietnamese base camp.
Fiction book (1995) -
But going around the country promising peace at any price is exactly what the North Vietnamese want to hear.
Fiction book (1995) -
At the present time, we are concerned by the North Vietnamese move into Laos.
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At that very spot, after the camp had been overrun, the North Vietnamese had gathered to celebrate.
Fiction book (2000) -
Marines were fighting to reopen the road in order to break the North Vietnamese siege of the provincial capital.
Blog text (27) -
Khe Sanh had been subject to increased rocket and artillery attacks from the North Vietnamese troops in the area.
Blog text (27) -
During the Vietnam War, many North Vietnamese citizens faced great hardships.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'relating to North Vietnam, its people, or its culture' is directly and compositionally derived from 'north' (the northern part) + 'Vietnamese' (connected with Vietnam or its people). The compass-direction + nationality/adjective pattern is cross-linguistically common and follows standard modifier + noun/adjective composition, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents will readily understand it.
Etymology
The adjective North Vietnamese comes from the words North and Vietnamese; when Vietnam was split into a north and a south, people and things from the north were called North Vietnamese. That's why it means 'relating to North Vietnam' today.