Chữ Nôm

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Chu Nom
Type:	Logographic
Languages:	Vietnamese
Time period:	~1000 A.D. to 1900
Parent writing systems:	Chinese characters Chu Nom

Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key.

Chữ nôm (𡦂喃 lit. "southern/vernacular script") is a classical vernacular script of the Vietnamese language that makes use of Chinese characters (Vietnamese hán tự). The Vietnamese term for Chinese writing is known as Hán Tự (漢字), which was the only available form to express the language until the 14th century, used almost exclusively by Chinese-educated Vietnamese elites. Vietnamese was, from the 14th century to the end of the 19th century, written sporadically with Chữ nôm, which was a modified Chinese script that incorporated sounds and syllables appropriate for native Vietnamese speakers. However, this has now been completely replaced by Quốc ngữ (國語), the current writing system of Vietnamese. Quốc ngữ was developed by Portuguese and French missionaries (who had extensive linguistic training) to record the Vietnamese language. Quốc ngữ incorporates a system of diacritical marks to indicate the tones, as well as modified vowels.

1 Origin
2 Writing system
3 Chữ nôm software
- 3.1 Chữ nôm fonts
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Origin

Chữ nôm, in earlier times known as Quốc âm (國音, lit. national pronunciation), is supposed to have originated around the 10th century. The old name of Vietnam, Đại Cồ Việt (大瞿越, 939), makes use of Quốc âm. The earliest written material in Chữ nôm that has survived until present was found on a stele at a temple at Bảo Ân dating 1209. Another Chữ nôm inscription was found on a bronze bell at the Vân Bản pagoda in Đồ Sơn. It is dated 1076, but there is uncertainty about the correctness of this date.

After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, scholars began their creation of Chữ nôm, a logographic script that represents Vietnamese speech. For nearly the next 1,000 years – from the 10th century and into the 20th – much of Vietnamese literature, philosophy, history, law, medicine, religion, and government policy was written in Nom script. During the 14 years of the Tây Sơn (西山) emperors (1788–1802), all administrative documents were written in Chữ nôm. In the 18th century, many notable Vietnamese writers and poets composed their works in Chữ nôm, among them Nguyễn Du (阮攸) and Hồ Xuân Hương (胡春香). With the 17th century advent of Quốc ngữ(國語) – the modern roman-style script – Chữ nôm literacy gradually died out. In 1920, the colonial government decreed against its use. Today, fewer than 100 scholars world-wide can read Chữ nôm effectively. Much of Vietnam's written history is inaccessible to the 80 million speakers of the language. A few Buddhist monks and the Jing (京), the Vietnamese living in China, can read Chữ nôm to some extent. (Original text provided by the Nom Preservation Foundation, with permission granted to publish this text under the GNU Free Documentation License.)

There are efforts by the Vietnamese government to integrate Chữ nôm into the educational system. Chữ nôm characters have been codified in the Unicode standard. Software has been developed to make the writing system computationally accessible, and fonts that contain Chữ nôm characters have been created only recently.

[edit] Writing system

In Vietnam Chinese characters were originally used to write Chữ nho (classical Chinese) only. In Chữ nôm the use of these characters was extended in many ways. Additionally a vast number of new characters have been invented by Vietnamese writers.

[edit] Cognates

There are many classical Chinese words that have found their way into the Vietnamese language by borrowing. These loanwords are written with the original Chinese character (hán tự). Example: 味 vị "flavour" (Mandarin wèi), 年 niên "year" (Mandarin nián). In addition many naturalised Chinese words are found in Vietnamese, i.e. words that have been borrowed from Chinese before Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam and therefore have preserved a different pronunciation. These words are mapped to the corresponding characters of classical Chinese, too. Example: 味 mùi (equivalent to vị, flavour), 年 năm (equivalent to niên, year).

[edit] Phonetic character borrowing

Many native Vietnamese words are written by using characters emptied of meaning (chữ giả tá, "loan characters"). Such a character is reused for its pronunciation only. Its original meaning is ignored. Thus the character gained a second meaning. Often a character gained many different meanings by phonetic borrowing.

[edit] Character invention

Many new characters were invented for native Vietnamese words (called chữ thuần nôm, proper nôm characters). These new characters are based on the phonetic borrowing and add a semantic component that hints at the new meaning resulting in a new distinct character. In some cases a resulting character has an already existing Chinese look-alike, but with a different meaning.

[edit] Standardization

One of the many ways to write the characters for Chữ Nôm.

In 1867, Nguyễn Trường Tộ proposed a standardization of Chữ nôm, but the new system (Quốc Âm Hán Tự, lit. national pronunciation Han characters) was refused by emperor Tự Đức. To this date, Chữ nôm has never been officially standardized. As a result a lot of variant characters exist for native Vietnamese words. Often a native Vietnamese word could be written either with a phonetically borrowed character or with many distinct characters invented by Vietnamese writers. Many characters have been simplified in different ways. A good example is the word Chữ nôm itself. Chữ can be written with 字 (originally pronounced tự) or with the character 𡨸 (⿰宁字; see picture) that is composed of 宁 on the left and 字 on the right. Additionally the position of 宁 and 字 can be switched forming a variant (⿰字宁; see picture). Another variant is 𡦂 (⿰字字; see picture), composed of two 字, one on the left and one on the right.

[edit] 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 is a Windows-based Vietnamese keyboard driver that supports Hán characters and Chữ nôm.
Vietnamese Keyboard Set enables Chữ nôm and Hán typing on Mac OS X.
WinVNKey is a Windows-based Vietnamese multilingual keyboard driver that supports Chữ nôm.