Chữ nôm

Chữ Nôm
Type	Logographic
Languages	Vietnamese
Time period	13th to early 20th centuries
Parent systems	Chinese characters Chữ Nôm
Sister systems	Kanji, Hanja, Sawndip, Khitan large script

Chữ Nôm (字喃/𡨸喃/𡦂喃 [cɨ̌ˀnom]) is a logographic script formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. The script uses the standard set of classical Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, while other words are represented using locally created characters based on the Chinese model.

Although all formal writing in Vietnam was done in literary Chinese until the early 20th century, Nôm was widely used from the 15th to 19th centuries by Vietnam's cultured elite, including women, for popular works, many in verse. One of the best-known pieces of Vietnamese literature, The Tale of Kiều, was composed in chữ Nôm.

Nôm was displaced by the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet in the 1920s. Although it is no longer taught in the education system, the characters, alongside original Chinese characters, are still used for decorative, historic and ceremonial value and symbols of good luck. The task of preservation and study of texts in both Hán (Chinese) and Nôm is conducted by the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi.

Terminology

• chữ nôm often capitalized chữ Nôm (𡨸喃 "characters for talking") is a transcription system for the Vietnamese language that uses original and newly made Chinese characters to represent Vietnamese sounds. The initial word chữ is itself a newly made nôm character unknown in China. It is a compound of 宁 (for sound, an approximation to Vietnamese sound "chữ") and 字 (for meaning "character") written together as 𡨸.^[1] The character set for chữ nôm is extensive, up to 20,000, arbitrary in composition and inconsistent in pronunciation.^[2][3]

• chữ Hán (漢 "Han script") and chữ nho, sometimes capitalized chữ Nho (儒 "Confucian script") are the native Vietnamese names for the form of classical Chinese used by Vietnamese court officials and scholars in pre-modern Vietnam from the end of the Chinese domination of Vietnam until the loss of sovereignty to French Indochina. The term chữ Hán is also used in Vietnam in reference to modern Chinese. The term chữ nho is more restricted to local Vietnamese Confucian use of Chinese.^[4] Again the nôm ideogram for chữ (𡨸 "script") is not found in Chinese and is a local invention to represent the same Vietnamese native word now written "chữ" in the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet.^[5]

• The term Hán tự ([hǎːn tɨ̂ˀ] 漢字, "a Chinese character") is the Vietnamese pronunciation of the same Chinese word hanzi, as Korean hanja, and Japanese kanji. The term is mainly used in typographic, calligraphic and lexical contexts to describe Sino-Vietnamese Chinese and Japanese characters.^[6]

• The term Hán Nôm (漢喃) in Vietnamese, designates the whole body of premodern written materials, both Hán and Nôm.^[7] Hán and Nôm could also be mixed in texts^[8] and given parallel Hán and Nôm readings, particularly in the case of translations of Chinese medicine books.^[9] The Buddhist history Cổ Châu Pháp Vân phật bản hạnh ngữ lục (1752) gives the story of early Buddhism in Vietnam both in Hán script and in a parallel Nôm translation.^[10] The Jesuit Girolamo Maiorica (1605–1656) had also used parallel Hán and Nôm texts.

• The term quốc ngữ (國語 "National language") refers to texts written in the modern romanized Vietnamese alphabet.

History

A page from Tự Đức Thánh Chế Tự Học Giải Nghĩa Ca (嗣德聖製字學解義歌), a 19th-century primer for teaching Vietnamese children Chinese characters. The work is attributed to Emperor Tự Đức, the 4th Emperor of the Nguyễn Dynasty. In this primer, chữ Nôm is used to gloss the Chinese characters, for example, 𡗶 is used to gloss 天.

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han Empire conquered the country in 111 BC. Independence was achieved in 939, but the Literary Chinese was adopted for official purposes in 1010.^[11] Until the early 20th century, formal writings were, in most cases, done in Literary Chinese, while vernacular Vietnamese was used only for less serious literature. These writings are indistinguishable from contemporaneous classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, or Japan.^[12]

Unlike Han, Nom was not studied or classified systematically for most of its history.^[13] Instead, authors who had studied Chinese applied the principles of Chinese writing to their native language. Although official records were generally kept in Han, Nom was used under two short-lived dynasties, the Hồ Dynasty (1400-07) and the Tây Sơn (1778–1802).^[13]

Earliest evidence

A system of modified and invented characters modeled loosely on Chinese characters called chữ nôm, which, unlike the system of chữ Nho (or chữ Hán), allowed for the expression of purely Vietnamese words, was created in Vietnam at least as early as the 13th century.^[14]

The use of Chinese characters to write the Vietnamese language can be traced to an inscription with the two characters "布蓋", as 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 literally mean "cloth" + "cover" but are evidently used for phonetic value not the Chinese meaning. They may represent (archaic) Vietnamese bố cái, "father and mother" (i.e., as respectable as one's parents), or Vietnamese 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.^[15][16]

The oldest examples of Chữ Nôm are a stele at a temple at Bảo Ân (1209) containing 18 characters naming villages and people, and a stele at Hộ Thành Sơn in Ninh Bình Province (1343), listing 20 villages.^[17][18] The first claimed literary writing in Vietnamese is said to have been an incantation in verse composed in 1282 by the then Minister of Justice Nguyễn Thuyên and thrown into the Red River to expel a menacing crocodile.^[17] The oldest surviving Nom text is the collected poetry of Emperor Trần Nhân Tông written in the 13th century.^[19]

Hồ dynasty (1400–07) and Ming (called Minh in Vietnam) conquest (1407–27)

During the seven years of the Hồ Dynasty (1400-07) Chinese script was discouraged in favor of chữ Nôm which became the official script. This was reversed with the subsequent fourth Chinese domination and twenty years in which use of the vernacular language and demotic script were suppressed.^[20]

During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam, chữ Nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were destroyed; as a result the earliest surviving texts of chữ nôm post-date the occupation.^[21] Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442) wrote both Han and Nom literature in the 15th century.^[22] Trinh Thi Ngoc Truc, consort of King Lê Thần Tông, is given credit for a 24,000 character bilingual Han-to-Nom dictionary written in the 17th century.^[23]

While intended to record Vietnamese, chữ Nôm paradoxically required the user to have a fair knowledge of chữ Hán, and thus chữ Nôm was used primarily for literary writings by cultural elites (such as the poetry of Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương), while almost all other official writings and documents continued to be written in chữ Nho (or chữ Hán) as Hán Văn (classical Chinese) until the 20th century.

Lê (1428–1788), Tây Sơn (1788–1802) and Nguyễn dynasties (1802–1945)

A page from the bilingual dictionary Nhật dụng thường đàm (1851). Characters representing words in Hán (Chinese) are explained in Nôm (Vietnamese).

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. There was a flowering of popular literature written in Nom during the late 18th century and early 19th century, which saw the production of Nguyễn Du's Tale of Kieu^[24] and the poetry of Hồ Xuân Hương. Although only 3 to 5 percent of the population was literate,^[25] nearly every village had someone who could read Nom aloud for the benefit of other villagers.^[26] Thus these works were circulated orally in the villages, so that even the illiterate had access to the Nôm literature.^[27]

In 1838, Jean-Louis Taberd wrote a Nom dictionary that eventually gained wide acceptance and circulation.^[28] In 1867, Catholic scholar Nguyễn Trường Tộ petitioned King Tự Đức to replace Han with Nom. The king did not consent to this, but he did respond with various efforts to promote Nom. A decree was issued which praised the script as Quốc Âm (the national voice), as opposed to chữ Nôm (chattering).^[29]

On the other hand, formal writings were still mostly done in classical Chinese.^[30]

French Indochina and the Latin alphabet

From the latter half of the 19th century onwards, the French colonial authorities discouraged or simply banned the use of classical Chinese, and promoted the use of the Vietnamese alphabet, which they viewed as a stepping stone toward learning French. Language reform movements in other Asian nations stimulated Vietnamese interest in the subject. Following the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan was increasingly cited as a model for modernization. The Confucian education system was compared unfavorably to the Japanese system of public education. According to a polemic by writer Phan Châu Trinh, "so-called Confucian scholars" lacked knowledge of the modern world, as well as real understanding of Han literature. Their degrees showed only that they had learned how to write characters, he claimed.^[31]

The popularity of Hanoi's short-lived Tonkin Free School suggested that broad reform was possible. In 1910, the colonial school system adopted a "Franco-Vietnamese curriculum", which emphasized French and alphabetic Vietnamese. The teaching of Chinese characters was discontinued in 1917.^[32] On December 28, 1918, Emperor Khải Định declared that the traditional writing system no longer had official status.^[32] The traditional Civil Service Examination, which emphasized the command of classical Chinese, was dismantled in 1915 in Tonkin and was given for the last time at the imperial capital of Huế on January 4, 1919.^[32] The examination system, and the education system based on it, had been in effect for almost 900 years.^[32]

The decline of the Chinese script also led to the decline of chữ Nôm given that Nôm and Chinese characters are so intimately connected.^[33] 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 by 1935 out of one hundred literate persons 70 knew quốc ngữ, 20 knew chữ Nôm and 10 knew Chinese characters.^[34]

Nom texts

A page from The Tale of Kieu by Nguyễn Du. This novel was first published in 1820, and it is the best-known work in Nom. The edition shown was printed in the late 19th century.

• Đại Việt sử ký tiệp lục tổng tự.^[35] This history of Vietnam was written during the Tây Sơn Dynasty. The original is Han, and there is also a Nom translation.
• Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kieu (1820)
• Nguyễn Trãi, Quốc âm thi tập ("National Language Poetry Compilation")
• Phạm Đình Hồ, Nhật Dụng Thường Đàm (1851). A Han-to-Nom dictionary for Vietnamese speakers.
• Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Lục Văn Tiên (19th century)
• Đặng Trần Côn, Chinh Phụ Ngâm Khúc (18th century)
• Hồ Xuân Hương (18th century) female poet

Syntax

The syntax of nôm naturally follows Vietnamese grammar not Chinese grammar. For example in nôm texts the Trịnh lords (1545–1787) are Chúa Trịnh (chữ Nôm 主鄭) not as in Sino-Chinese Trịnh vương (chữ Hán: 鄭王). Here the character used (lord in Vietnamese, king in Chinese) is also different, but the difference in syntax is that in Vietnamese the noun "lord" precedes the name, whereas in Chinese "king" follows the name.

A similar example, in Vietnamese Truyện Kiều (傳翹, lit. "Tale of Kiều") the word "tale" precedes the name, but in Chinese syntax "tale" (truyện 傳) should follow the name Kiều. The nôm term "Chữ Nôm" itself is an example of this. In Vietnamese nôm syntax the noun "script" (𡨸) precedes "common" (喃), whereas in chữ Hán the order is reversed and a purely Chinese chữ Hán character used instead of the locally created Chữ (chữ Hán 喃字). Similarly with gods and heroes; the syntax of the popular name Thánh Gióng differes from his chữ Hán name Phù Đổng Thiên Vương (chữ Hán: 扶董天王); the nôm name Mẫu Thoải, has a Vietnamese syntax while her chữ Hán name Thủy cung Thánh Mẫu (水宮聖母) exhibits Chinese syntax. The official Chinese Tên chữ and vernacular Tên nôm for village names may also have different syntax as well as different characters.^[36]

Chinese poems translated into Nôm could retain more Chinese syntax and poetic forms than those translated into Korean or Japanese.^[37] Though as literature in Nôm developed it increasingly freed itself from Chinese syntax.^[38]

Characters

"My mother eats vegetarian food at the temple every Sunday", written in the modern Vietnamese alphabet (blue) and Nom. Characters borrowed unchanged from Chinese are shown in green, while invented characters are brown.

In Chữ Nôm, each monosyllabic word of Vietnamese was represented by a character, either borrowed from Chinese or locally created. There was no development of a syllabary like Japanese kana or Korean hangul; in part to the analytic nature of Vietnamese as opposed to the agglutinative morphology of Japanese and Korean.^[39]

Borrowed characters

Unmodified Chinese characters were used in chữ Nôm in three different ways.

A large proportion of Vietnamese vocabulary had been borrowed from Chinese from the Tang period. Such Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary could be written with the original Chinese character for each word, for example:^[40]

• 役 dịch ("service", "corvee"), from Early Middle Chinese (EMC) /jwiajk/^[41]
• 本 bản ("root", "foundation"), from EMC /pən'/^[42]
• 頭 đầu ("head"), from EMC /dəw/^[43]

To represent a native Vietnamese word, one method was to use a Chinese character for a Chinese word with a similar meaning. For example 本 may also represent vốn ("capital, funds"). When a character would have two readings, a diacritic may be added to the character to indicate the "indigenous" reading. Thus when 本 is meant to be read as vốn, it is written as 本㆑, with a diacritic at the upper right corner. In this case the word vốn is actually an earlier Chinese loan that has become accepted as Vietnamese; William Hannas claims that all such readings are similar early loans.^[40]

Alternatively, a native Vietnamese word could be written using a Chinese character for a Chinese word with a similar sound, regardless of the meaning of the Chinese word. For example, 沒 (Early Middle Chinese /mət/^[44]) may represent the Vietnamese word một ("one").^[45]

To draw an analogy to the Japanese writing system, the first two categories are similar to the on and kun readings of Japanese kanji respectively. The third is similar to ateji, in which characters are used only for their sound value, or the Man'yōgana script that became the origin of hiragana and katakana.

Locally invented characters

This is the Nom character for phở, a popular soup made from rice noodles. It is scheduled for inclusion in an upcoming extension of Unicode.^{[lower-alpha 1]} The radical 米 on the left suggests that the meaning of the character is linked to rice. The remainder 頗 is a phonetic, a Chinese character used to indicate pronunciation.

In contrast to the few hundred Japanese kokuji and handful of Korean gukja, which are mostly rarely-used characters for indigenous natural phenomena, Vietnamese scribes created thousands of new characters, used throughout the language.^[46]

As in the Chinese writing system itself, the most common kind of invented character in Nom is the phono-semantic compound, made by combining two characters or components, one suggesting the word's meaning and the other its approximate sound. For example,^[47]

• 𠀧 (ba "three") is composed of the phonetic part 巴 (EMc /paɨ/^[48]) and the semantic part 三 "three". "Father" is also ba, but written as 爸 (⿱父巴), while "turtle" is con ba ba (昆蚆蚆; ⿰虫巴).
• 媄 (mẹ "mother") has 女 "woman" as semantic component and 美 (EMC /mi'/^[49]) as phonetic component.^{[lower-alpha 2]}

A smaller group consists of semantic compound characters, which are composed of two Chinese characters representing words of similar meaning. For example, 𡗶 (giời "sky", "heaven") is composed of 天 ("sky") and 上 ("upper").^[47]

A few characters were obtained by modifying Chinese characters related either semantically or phonetically to the word to be represented. For example,^[30]

• the Nôm character 𧘇 (ấy "that', "those") is a simplified form of the Chinese character 衣 with a similar EMC pronunciation /ʔijh/;^[50]
• the Nôm character 爫 (làm "work", "labour") is a simplified form of the Chinese character 為 with related meaning "make, do".

In Korea and Japan, the traditional writing system was simplified so it could be taught to the general public.^[51] Vietnam's educated class looked down on Nom as inferior to Han, so it was not interested in doing the work required to turn Nom into a form of writing suitable for mass communication.^[52] Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language and has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables.^[11] Neither the Korean nor the Japanese writing systems indicate tones, so they cannot be applied to the Vietnamese language.^[13]

Most common characters

The website chunom.org gives a frequency table of the 586 most common characters in Nom literature. According to this table, the most common 50 characters are as follows, with the modern spelling given in italics:^[53]

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 rejected by Emperor Tự Đức.^[54] 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).

Computer encoding

In 1993, the Vietnamese government released an 8-bit coding standard for alphabetic Vietnamese (TCVN 5712:1993, or VSCII), as well as a 16-bit standard for Nom (TCVN 5773:1993).^[55] This group of glyphs is referred to as "V0." In 1994, the Ideographic Rapporteur Group agreed to include Nom characters as part of Unicode.^[56] A revised standard, TCVN 6909:2001, defines 9,299 glyphs.^[57] About half of these glyphs are specific to Vietnam.^[57] Nom characters not already encoded were added to Unicode Extension B.^[57] (These characters have five-digit hexadecimal codepoints. The characters that were encoded earlier have four-digit hex.)

Đại tự điển chữ Nôm [Great Nom Dictionary]

Characters were extracted from the following sources:

1. Hoàng Triều Ân, Tự điển chữ Nôm Tày [Nom of the Tay People], 2003.
2. Institute of Linguistics, Bảng tra chữ Nôm [Nom Index], Hanoi, 1976.
3. Nguyễn Quang Hồng, editor, Tự điển chữ Nôm [Nom Dictionary], 2006.
4. Father Trần Văn Kiệm, Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt [Help with Nom and Sino-Vietnamese], 2004.
5. Vũ Văn Kính & Nguyễn Quang Xỷ, Tự điển chữ Nôm [Nom Dictionary], Saigon, 1971.
6. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm miền Nam [Table of Nom in the South], 1994.
7. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm sau thế kỷ XVII [Table of Nom in the 17th Century], 1994.
8. Vũ Văn Kính, Đại tự điển chữ Nôm [Great Nom Dictionary], 1999.
9. Nguyễn Văn Huyên, Góp phần nghiên cứu văn hoá Việt Nam [Contributions to the Study of Vietnamese Culture], 1995.^[57]

The V2, V3, and V4 proposals were developed by a group at the Han-Nom Research Institute led by Nguyễn Quang Hồng.^[57] V4, developed in 2001, includes over 400 ideograms formerly used by the Tay people of northern Vietnam.^[57] This allows the Tay language to get its own registration code.^[57] V5 is a set of about 900 characters proposed in 2001.^[57] As these characters were already part of Unicode, the IRG concluded that they could not be edited and no Vietnamese code was added.^[57] (This is despite the fact that national codes were added retroactively for version 3.0 in 1999.) The Nom Na Group, led by Ngô Thanh Nhàn, published a set of nearly 20,000 Nom characters in 2005.^[59] This set includes both the characters proposed earlier and a large group of additional characters referred to as "V6".^[57] These are mainly Han characters from Trần Văn Kiệm's dictionary which were already assigned codepoints. Character readings were determined manually by Hồng's group, while Nhàn's group developed software for this purpose.^[60] The work of the two groups was integrated and published in 2008 as the Hán Nôm Coded Character Repertoire.^[60]

Character	Composition	Nom reading	Han Viet	English	Codepoint	V Source	Other sources
吧	⿰口巴	ba	ba	[emphatic final particle]	U+5427	V0-3122	G0,J,KP,K,T
傷	⿰亻⿱𠂉昜	thương	thương	to love	U+50B7	V1-4C22	G1,J,KP,K,T
𠊛	⿰㝵人	người	ngại (碍)	people	U+2029B	V2-6E4F	None
㤝	⿰忄充	suông	song	to become interested in	U+391D	V3-313D	G3,KP,K,T
𫋙	⿰虫強	càng	cường (強)	more, less	U+2B2D9	V4-536F	None
	⿰朝乙	giàu	trào (朝)	wealth	Not assigned	V04-405E	None
Key: G0 = China (GB 2312); G1 = China (GB 12345); G3 = China (GB 7589); GHZ = Hanyu Da Zidian; J = Japan; KP= North Korea; K = South Korea; T = Taiwan. Sources: Unihan Database, Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E" (N4358-A).[58] The Han-Viet readings are from Hán Việt Từ Điển.

The characters that do not exist in Chinese have Han-Viet readings that are based on the characters given in parenthesis. The common character for càng (強) contains the radical 虫 (insects).^[61] This radical is added redundantly to create 𫋙, a rare variation shown in the chart above. The character (giàu) is specific to the Tay people.^[62] It is not yet part of the Unicode character set.^{[lower-alpha 3]} It is a variation of 朝, the corresponding character in Vietnamese.^[63]

See also

• Chinese family of scripts
• Sinoxenic

Notes

References

Works cited

• DeFrancis, John (1977), Colonialism and language policy in Viet Nam, Mouton, ISBN 978-90-279-7643-7. 
• Hannas, Wm. C. (1997), Asia's Orthographic Dilemma, University of Hawaii Press, ISBN 978-0-8248-1892-0. 
• Marr, David G. (1984), Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, University of California Press, ISBN 978-0-520-90744-7. 
• Pulleyblank, Edwin George (1991), Lexicon of reconstructed pronunciation in early Middle Chinese, late Middle Chinese, and early Mandarin, Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, ISBN 978-0-7748-0366-3. 

Further reading

• Chʻen, 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 0-9716296-0-9
• 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.
• Schneider, Paul 1992. Dictionnaire Historique Des Idéogrammes Vietnamiens / (licencié en droit Nice, France : Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, R.I.A.S.E.M.)
• Zhou Youguang 周有光 (1998). Bijiao wenzi xue chutan (比較文字学初探 "A Comparative Study of Writing Systems"). Beijing: Yuwen chubanshe.

External links

• Chunom.org "This site is about Chu Nom, the old writing system of Vietnam."
• Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. Features a character dictionary.
• Han-Nom Collection, digitized manuscripts held by the National Library of Vietnam.
• Chữ Nôm, Omniglot
• Tự điển Hán Nôm, Nôm Na Hanoi
• The Vietnamese Writing System, Bathrobe's Chinese, Japanese & Vietnamese Writing Systems
• (Vietnamese) Han-Nom Research Institute
• (Vietnamese) Tự Điển Chữ Nôm Trích Dẫn, Viện Việt-Học
• (Vietnamese) Vấn đề chữ viết nhìn từ góc độ lịch sử tiếng Việt, Trần Trí Dõi

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.
• Chunom.org Online Editor, a browser-based editor for typing chữ Nôm.

Other entry methods:

• (Chinese) 倉頡之友《倉頡平台2012》 Cangjie input method for Windows that allows keyboard entry of all Unicode CJK characters by character shape. Supports over 70,000 characters. Users may add their own characters and character combinations.

Fonts

Chữ Nôm fonts include:

• Hanamin B – Japanese font supporting nearly 90,000 characters, including those in Unicode CJK Extension C.
• VietUnicode Han Nom Font Set – Two open source TrueType fonts including Unicode CJK Extensions A and B.
• NomNaTongLight – TrueType font, created by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, based on characters found in traditional Vietnamese wood-block prints.
• Mojikyo