| Chữ Nôm |
|
|---|---|
| Type | Logographic |
| Languages | Vietnamese |
| Time period | circa 1200–1949 |
| Parent systems | |
| Sister systems | Simplified Chinese, Kanji, Hanja, Khitan script, Zhuyin |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols. | |
Chữ Nôm (字喃/𡨸喃/𡦂喃 [cɨ̌ˀnom]) is script formerly used to write Vietnamese (㗂越; tiếng Việt). It makes use of Chinese characters; known as Hán tự or Hán Nôm (漢喃) in Vietnamese, as well as other characters coined following the Chinese model. It was used almost exclusively by the elite, mostly for literature while formal writing was done in classical Chinese. Nôm was replaced by quốc ngữ (alphabetical Vietnamese) beginning in the 1920s and is now almost entirely obsolete.
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Using Chinese characters to represent the Vietnamese language can be traced to 布蓋, part of the posthumous title of Phùng Hưng, 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.[1]
For many years, it was believed that the oldest surviving piece of Vietnamese writing was a stone inscription dating from 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 that dated from 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 that was thrown into the Red River to chase away a crocodile.[2]
Usually only the elite had 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.[3]
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 Dynasty (1428-1788), which led to its being banned in 1663, 1718, and 1760. There was a final attempt during the Tây Sơn Dynasty (1788–1802) to give the script official status, but this attempt was reversed by the rulers of the subsequent Nguyễn Dynasty (1802-1945). Gia Long, 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).[4]
From the latter half of the 19th century onwards, the French colonial authorities 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.[5] During the early half of the 20th century, chữ Nôm gradually died out as quốc ngữ grew more and more standardized and popular. In an article published in 1935 by Cordier he stated that quốc ngữ is rapidly dethroning Chinese characters and is replacing chữ Nôm so that now (as of 1935) out of one hundred literate persons 70 knew quốc ngữ, 20 knew chữ Nôm and 10 knew Chinese characters.[6]
The chữ Nôm characters can be divided into two groups: those borrowed from Chinese and those coined by the Vietnamese.
In chữ Nôm, the characters borrowed from Chinese are used to:
To draw an analogy to the Japanese writing system, the first category is similar to the on reading of Japanese kanji. The second has its parallel in the Man'yōgana script that became the origin of hiragana and katakana. Hannas (1997:81) says that he cannot find any example similar to kun reading, i.e., of using a Chinese character semantically to represent a native Vietnamese word. However, Zhou (1998:223) gives some example of kun reading in chữ Nôm.
The coined characters can be divided into:
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.[8] 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), 𡦂 (invented character, "compound-semantic") or 𡨸 (invented character, "semantic-phonetic"). For another example, the word béo ("fat", "greasy") can be written either as 脿 or . Both characters are invented characters with a semantic-phonetic structure, the difference being the phonetic indicator (表 vs. 報).
There are a number of software tools that can produce chữ Nôm characters simply by typing Vietnamese words in quốc ngữ:
Chữ Nôm fonts include: