Chữ Nôm ( ; 字喃/𡨸喃/𡦂喃) is an obsolete
writing systemA writing system is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
of the
Vietnamese languageVietnamese , formerly known under French colonization as Annamese , is the national and official language of Vietnam...
. It makes use of
Chinese characterA Chinese character, also known as a Han character , is a logogram used in writing Chinese , Japanese , less frequently Korean , and formerly Vietnamese , and other languages...
s (known as Hán tự in Vietnamese), and characters coined following the Chinese model. The earliest example of chữ Nôm dates to the 13th century. It was used almost exclusively by the Vietnamese elites, mostly for recording Vietnamese literature (formal writings were, in most cases, not done in Vietnamese, but in
classical ChineseClassical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
). It has now been completely replaced by quốc ngữ, a script based on the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...
.
Using Chinese characters to represent the Vietnamese language can be traced to 布蓋, part of the posthumous title of
Phùng HưngPhùng Hưng was a military leader who briefly reigned over Vietnam during the 8th century.According to Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư , Phùng Hưng, a native of Đường Lâm , was rich and possessed prodigious physical strength. In 791, Phùng Hưng and his brother, Phùng Hải, led a rebellion against the ruling...
, a national hero who succeeded in temporarily gaining back the control of the country from the hands of the Chinese during the late 8th century.
Chữ Nôm ( ; 字喃/𡨸喃/𡦂喃) is an obsolete
writing systemA writing system is a type of symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that one must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
of the
Vietnamese languageVietnamese , formerly known under French colonization as Annamese , is the national and official language of Vietnam...
. It makes use of
Chinese characterA Chinese character, also known as a Han character , is a logogram used in writing Chinese , Japanese , less frequently Korean , and formerly Vietnamese , and other languages...
s (known as Hán tự in Vietnamese), and characters coined following the Chinese model. The earliest example of chữ Nôm dates to the 13th century. It was used almost exclusively by the Vietnamese elites, mostly for recording Vietnamese literature (formal writings were, in most cases, not done in Vietnamese, but in
classical ChineseClassical Chinese or Literary Chinese is a traditional style of written Chinese based on the grammar and vocabulary of ancient Chinese, making it different from any modern spoken form of Chinese...
). It has now been completely replaced by quốc ngữ, a script based on the
Latin alphabetThe Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, and was initially developed by the ancient Romans to write the Latin language.During the...
.
History
Using Chinese characters to represent the Vietnamese language can be traced to 布蓋, part of the posthumous title of
Phùng HưngPhùng Hưng was a military leader who briefly reigned over Vietnam during the 8th century.According to Đại Việt sử ký toàn thư , Phùng Hưng, a native of Đường Lâm , was rich and possessed prodigious physical strength. In 791, Phùng Hưng and his brother, Phùng Hải, led a rebellion against the ruling...
, a national hero who succeeded in temporarily gaining back the control of the country from the hands of the Chinese during the late 8th century. These two characters may represent bố cái, "father and mother" (i.e. as respectable as one's parents), or vua cái, "great king". During the 10th century, the founder of the Đinh Dynasty (968-979) named the country Đại Cồ Việt (大瞿越). The second character of this title is another early example of using Chinese characters to represent Vietnamese native words, although which word it represents is unknown (DeFrancis 1977:21-23).
Until the 1970s, it was thought that the oldest surviving piece of Vietnamese writing was a stone inscription of 1343 in which Chinese characters were used to represent the names of some 20 villages. In 1970, however, a Vietnamese scholar reported the discovery of a stele at a temple at Bảo Ân dating 1209, on which 18 Chinese characters were used to record the names of villages and people who had donated rice land to the pagoda. The first piece of literary writing in Vietnamese appeared in 1282, when the then Minister of Justice Nguyễn Thuyên composed a charm in verse which was thrown into the Red River to chase away a crocodile (DeFrancis 1977:23-24).
Usually only the elite had the knowledge of chữ Nôm, which was used as an aid to teaching Chinese characters (DeFrancis 1977:30). After the emergence of chữ Nôm, a great amount of Vietnamese literature was produced by many notable writers, among them Nguyễn Trãi of the 15th century, who left us the first surviving collection of Nôm poems. Vietnamese literature flourished during the 18th century, which saw the production of Nguyễn Du's
Tale of Kieu and Hồ Xuân Hương's lyrics. These works were circulated orally in the villages, so that even the illiterate had access to the Nôm literature (DeFrancis 1977:44-46).
On the other hand, formal writings were still mostly done in classical Chinese. An exception was during the brief Hồ Dynasty (1400-1407), when Chinese was abolished and Vietnamese was made the official language. However, the subsequent Chinese invasion put an end to that. The Vietnamese language, and its written form chữ Nôm, became a preferred vehicle for social protest during the
Lê DynastyThe Later Lê Dynasty , sometimes referred to as the Lê Dynasty was the longest-ruling dynasty of Vietnam, ruling the country from 1428 to 1788, with a brief interruption....
(1428-1788), which led to its being banned in 1663, 1718 and 1760. There was a final attempt during the
Tây Sơn DynastyThe name of Tây Sơn is used in many ways referring back to the period of peasant rebellions and decentralized dynasties established between the eras of the Later Lê and Nguyễn dynasties in history of Vietnam...
(1788–1802) to give the script official status, but this attempt was reversed by the rulers of the subsequent Nguyễn Dynasty (1802-1945).
Gia LongEmperor Gia Long , born Nguyễn Phúc Ánh , was an emperor of Vietnam...
, founder of the Nguyễn Dynasty, supported chữ Nôm before becoming the emperor, but reverted to classical Chinese soon after seizing power (Hannas 1997:83-84).
From the latter half of the 19th century onwards, the
French colonial authoritiesCochinchina is a region encompassing the southern third of Vietnam whose principal city is Saigon. It was a French colony from 1862 to 1948. The later state of South Vietnam was created in 1954 by combining Cochinchina with southern Annam. In Vietnamese, the region is called Nam Bộ...
discouraged or simply banned the use of classical Chinese. They decreed the end of the traditional Civil Service Examination, which emphasized the command of classical Chinese, in 1915 and 1918-1919. The decline of the Chinese language (hence that of the Chinese characters) meant at the same time a decline of chữ Nôm, since the Nôm and the Chinese characters are so intimately connected (DeFrancis 1977:179). During the early half of the 20th century, chữ Nôm gradually died out as quốc ngữ grew more and more standardized and popular.
Classification
The chữ Nôm characters can be divided into two groups: those borrowed from Chinese and those coined by the Vietnamese.
Borrowed characters
In chữ Nôm, the characters borrowed from Chinese are used to:
- represent Chinese loan words. Sometimes the character would have two pronunciations, one more assimilated into the Vietnamese phonological system, another reflecting more the original Chinese reading (that of Middle Chinese
Middle Chinese , or Ancient Chinese as used by linguist Bernhard Karlgren, refers to the Chinese language spoken during Southern and Northern Dynasties and the Sui, Tang, and Song dynasties...
). For example, 本 ("root", "foundation") can be pronounced as either vốn or bản, the former being the more assimilated "Nôm reading", while the latter the so-called "Sino-Vietnamese reading". A diacritic may be added to the character to indicate the "indigenous" reading. When is meant to be read as vốn, it is written as , with a diacritic at the upper right corner.
- represent native Vietnamese words. For example, to use to represent the word một ("one"). In this case is only used phonetically, regardless of the meaning of the word it represents in Chinese. Hannas (1997:81) says that he cannot find any example of using a Chinese character semantically to represent a native Vietnamese word, i.e., there is only on reading, but no kun reading, for the Chinese characters in Vietnamese, to draw an analogy from Japanese kanji reading. However, Zhou (1998:223) gives some example of kun reading in chữ Nôm.
Invented characters
The coined characters can be divided into:
- semantic-phonetic, which are composed of two parts, one (a borrowed character or radical
The term radical is most commonly used to refer to the section headers of a Chinese dictionary , also known as index keys or classifiers. These are used to index Chinese characters in Chinese dictionaries. The indexing system supports Chinese characters throughout the ages, from Shuōwén Jiézì...
) indicating the semantic field to which the word (that the character represents) belongs or simply the word's meaning, another (a borrowed or invented character) the approximate sound of the word. For example, (ba "three") is composed of the phonetic part and the semantic part. This type of character is the most common one among the invented characters.
- compound-semantic characters, which are composed of two Chinese characters which represent words of similar meaning. For example, (trời "sky", "heaven") is composed of ("sky") and ("upper").
- modified Chinese characters, which can be related either semantically or phonetically to the original Chinese character. For example, the Nôm character (ấy "that', "those") is a simplified form of the Chinese character , their relationship being a phonetic one; the Nôm character (làm "work", "labour") is a simplified form of the Chinese character , their relationship being a semantic one.
Standardization
In 1867, the reformist Nguyễn Trường Tộ proposed a standardization of chữ Nôm (along with the abolition of classical Chinese), but the new system, what he called quốc âm Hán tự (國音漢字 lit. "Han characters with national pronunciations"), was refused by Emperor Tự Đức (DeFrancis 1977:101-105). To this date, chữ Nôm has never been officially standardized. As a result, a Vietnamese word can be represented by variant Nôm characters. For example, the very word chữ ("character", "script"), a Chinese loan word, can be written as either 字 (Chinese character), (invented character, "compound-semantic") or 𡨸 (invented character, "semantic-phonetic"). For another example, the word béo ("fat", "greasy") can be written either as or
. Both characters are invented characters with a semantic-phonetic structure, the difference being the phonetic indicator (表 vs. 報).
Chữ Nôm software
There are a number of software tools that can produce chữ Nôm characters simply by typing Vietnamese words in quốc ngữ:
- HanNomIME, a Windows-based Vietnamese keyboard driver that supports Hán characters and chữ Nôm.
- Vietnamese Keyboard Set which enables chữ Nôm and Hán typing on Mac OS X.
- WinVNKey, a Windows-based Vietnamese multilingual keyboard driver that supports typing chữ Nôm in addition to Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
Chữ Nôm fonts include:
- VietUnicode, a Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard allowing computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...
font including chữ Nôm characters. It is hosted at SourceForgeSourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaborative revision control and software development management system. It provides a front-end to a range of software development lifecycle services and integrates with a number of free software / open source software applications .While originally itself...
. The project's main page is http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/. Downloadable TrueTypeTrueType is an outline font standard originally developed by Apple Computer in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript....
fonts are available at http://sourceforge.net/projects/vietunicode/ (download hannom.zip file).
- Mojikyo
Mojikyo is a set of computer software and fonts for enhanced logogram word-processing. , it collected 126,560/142,228 characters . Among them, 101,936/128,573 characters belong to the extended CJK family...
Further reading
- Chen, Ching-ho (n. d.). A Collection of Chữ Nôm Scripts with Pronunciation in Quốc-Ngữ. Tokyo: Keiô University.
- Nguyễn, Đình Hoà (2001). Chuyên Khảo Về Chữ Nôm = Monograph on Nôm Characters. Westminster, CA: Institute of Vietnamese Studies, Viet-Hoc Pub. Dept.. ISBN 0971629609
- Nguyễn, N. B. (1984). The State of Chữ Nôm Studies: The Demotic Script of Vietnam. Vietnamese Studies Papers. [Fairfax, VA]: Indochina Institute, George Mason University.
- O'Harrow, S. (1977). A Short Bibliography of Sources on "Chữ-Nôm". Honolulu: Asia Collection, University of Hawaii.
External links