Chữ Nôm
Chữ Nôm is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the Vietnamese language. It uses Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, with other words represented by new characters created using a variety of methods, including phono-semantic compounds. This composite script was therefore highly complex and was accessible to the less than five percent of the Vietnamese population who had mastered written Chinese.
Although all formal writing in Vietnam was done in Classical Chinese until the early 20th century, between the 15th and 19th centuries some Vietnamese literati used chữ Nôm to create popular works in the vernacular, many in verse. One of the best-known pieces of Vietnamese literature, The Tale of Kiều, was written in chữ Nôm by Nguyễn Du.
The Vietnamese alphabet created by Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, with the earliest known usage occurring in the 17th century, replaced chữ Nôm as the preferred way to record Vietnamese literature from the 1920s. While Chinese characters are still used for decorative, historic and ceremonial value, chữ Nôm has fallen out of mainstream use in modern Vietnam. In the 21st century, chữ Nôm is being used in Vietnam for historical and liturgical purposes. The Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies at Hanoi is the main research centre for pre-modern texts from Vietnam, both Chinese-language texts written in Chinese characters and Vietnamese-language texts in chữ Nôm.
Etymology
The Vietnamese word chữ 'character' is derived from the Middle Chinese word , meaning ' character'. The word Nôm 'Southern' is derived from the Middle Chinese word , meaning 'south'. It could also be based on the dialectal pronunciation from the South Central dialects.There are many ways to write the name chữ Nôm in chữ Nôm characters. The word chữ may be written as,,,,,,, or, while Nôm is written as.
Terminology
Chữ Nôm is the logographic writing system of the Vietnamese language. It is based on the Chinese writing system but adds a large number of new characters to make it fit the Vietnamese language. Common historical terms for chữ Nôm were Quốc Âm and Quốc ngữ.In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called chữ Hán, chữ Nho and uncommonly as Hán tự. Hán văn refers literature written in Literary Chinese.
The term Hán Nôm in Vietnamese designates the whole body of premodern written materials from Vietnam, either written in Chinese or in Vietnamese. Hán and Nôm could also be found in the same document side by side, for example, in the case of translations of books on Chinese medicine. The Buddhist history Cổ Châu Pháp Vân phật bản hạnh ngữ lục gives the story of early Buddhism in Vietnam both in Hán script and in a parallel Nôm translation. The Jesuit Girolamo Maiorica had also used parallel Hán and Nôm texts.
The term chữ Quốc ngữ refers to the Vietnamese alphabet in current use, but was used to refer to chữ Nôm before the Vietnamese alphabet was widely used.
History
Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han dynasty conquered Nanyue in 111 BC. Independence was achieved after the Battle of Bạch Đằng in 938, but Literary Chinese was adopted for official purposes in 1010. For most of the period up to the early 20th century, formal writing was indistinguishable from contemporaneous classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, and Japan.Vietnamese scholars were thus intimately familiar with Chinese writing. In order to record their native language, they applied the structural principles of Chinese characters to develop chữ Nôm. The new script was mostly used to record folk songs and for other popular literature. Vietnamese written in chữ Nôm briefly replaced Chinese for official purposes under the Hồ dynasty and under the Tây Sơn, but in both cases this was swiftly reversed.
Early development
The use of Chinese characters to transcribe the Vietnamese language can be traced to an inscription with the two characters "", as part of the posthumous title of Phùng Hưng, a national hero who succeeded in briefly expelling the Chinese in the late 8th century. The two characters have literal Chinese meanings 'cloth' and 'cover', which make no sense in this context. They have thus been interpreted as a phonetic transcription, via their Middle Chinese pronunciations buH kajH, of a Vietnamese phrase, either vua cái 'great king', or bố cái 'father and mother'.After Vietnam established its independence from China in the 10th century, Đinh Bộ Lĩnh, the founder of the Đinh dynasty, named the country Đại Cồ Việt. The first and third Chinese characters mean 'great' and 'Viet'. The second character was often used to transcribe non-Chinese terms and names phonetically. In this context, cồ is an obsolete Vietnamese word for 'big'.
The oldest surviving inscription using Chinese characters to transcribe Vietnamese names is on a stele at the Báo Ân pagoda in Tháp Miếu village. The inscription, re-engraved in the 18th century from an original dating from 1209, is written in Chinese but includes names of 21 people and villages written in an early form of Nom. Another stele at Hộ Thành Sơn in Ninh Bình Province is reported as listing 20 villages.
Trần Nhân Tông ordered that Nôm be used to communicate his proclamations to the people.
The first literary writing in Vietnamese is said to have been an incantation in verse composed in 1282 by the Minister of Justice Nguyễn Thuyên and thrown into the Red River to expel a menacing crocodile.
Four poems written in Nom from the Tran dynasty, two by Trần Nhân Tông and one each by Huyền Quang and Mạc Đĩnh Chi, were collected and published in 1805.
The Nôm text Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh was printed around 1730, but conspicuously avoids the character lợi, suggesting that it was written during the reign of Lê Lợi.
Based on archaic features of the text compared with the Tran dynasty poems, including an exceptional number of words with initial consonant clusters written with pairs of characters, some scholars suggest that it is a copy of an earlier original, perhaps as early as the 12th century.
Hồ dynasty (1400–1407) and Ming conquest (1407–1427)
During the seven years of the Hồ dynasty Classical Chinese was discouraged in favor of vernacular Vietnamese written in Nôm, which became the official script. The emperor Hồ Quý Ly even ordered the translation of the Book of Documents into Nôm and pushed for reinterpretation of Confucian thoughts in his book Minh đạo. These efforts were reversed with the fall of the Hồ and Chinese conquest of 1407, lasting twenty years, during which use of the vernacular language and demotic script were suppressed.During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam, chữ Nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were thoroughly destroyed; as a result the earliest surviving texts of chữ Nôm post-date the occupation.
15th to 19th centuries
Chữ Nôm was not reinstated as the official script after the demise of the Hồ dynasty and restoration of Viet rule. Very few extant vernacular texts in Nôm predate the 15th century and even many later texts in Nôm were translations or rewritings of works in Chinese. During the 15th and 16th centuries, reformist governments translated Chinese Classics into Nôm, but these translations have not survived due to being seen as subversive by successive governments. As a result of its marginalized nature and lack of institutional backing, chữ Nôm was used as a medium for social protest during the Lê dynasty, leading to its banning in 1663, 1718, and 1760.While almost all official writings and documents continued to be written in Classical Chinese until the early 20th century, Nôm was used for popular literary compositions. The corpus of Nôm writings grew over time as did more scholarly compilations of the script itself. Among the earlier works in Nôm of this era are the writings of Nguyễn Trãi which aimed to disseminate Neo-Confucianism among as broad an audience as possible., consort of King Lê Thần Tông, is generally given credit for , a 24,000-character bilingual Hán-to-Nôm dictionary compiled between the 15th and 18th centuries, most likely in 1641 or 1761.
The Tây Sơn dynasty mandated the use of Nôm in both government business and civil service examinations but their policy was reverted after the dynasty's collapse. Gia Long, founder of the Nguyễn dynasty, supported chữ Nôm only for as long as it took for him to become emperor and then immediately reverted to Chinese. His successor, Minh Mạng, the second emperor of the Nguyễn dynasty, prohibited the use of Nôm in the government.
Nôm reached its golden period with the Nguyễn dynasty in the 19th century as it became a vehicle for diverse genres, from novels to theatrical pieces, and instructional manuals. Apogees of Vietnamese literature emerged with Nguyễn Du's The Tale of Kiều and Hồ Xuân Hương's poetry. Although literacy in premodern Vietnam was limited to just 3 to 5 percent of the population, nearly every village had someone who could read Nôm aloud for the benefit of other villagers. Thus these Nôm works circulated orally in the villages, and were accessible even to the illiterates.
Nôm was used as the dominant script in Vietnamese Catholic literature until the late 19th century. In 1838, Jean-Louis Taberd compiled a Nôm dictionary, helping with the standardization of the script. The reformist Catholic scholar Nguyễn Trường Tộ presented the Emperor Tự Đức with a series of unsuccessful petitions proposing reforms in several areas of government and society. His petition Tế cấp bát điều, includes proposals on education, including a section entitled Xin khoan dung quốc âm. He proposed to replace Classical Chinese with Vietnamese written using a script based on Chinese characters that he called Quốc âm Hán tự, though he described this as a new creation, and did not mention chữ Nôm.
Despite the increasing use of Nôm for popular literature and as a medium for oral dissemination in rural areas, this composite script was never able to supplant Classical Chinese as the primary script of Vietnam. It was highly complex and inefficient, requiring the user to have some prior knowledge of the Chinese script. It was accessible to less than five percent of the Vietnamese population who had already mastered written Chinese and served primarily as a way to learn Classical Chinese and to record folk literature. The small number of literati who took Nôm seriously had to contend with their peers and make sure not to offend their sense of propriety. Even figures known to have written in Nôm such as Lê Thánh Tông and Nguyễn Trãi were more renowned for their Chinese language writings. According to language researcher Nguyen Thuy Dan, the majority of the Vietnamese elite up to the 19th century seem to have never written in anything but Classical Chinese and even criticized the use of Nôm.
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 unfavourably 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.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 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. The examination system, and the education system based on it, had been in effect for almost 900 years.
The decline of the Chinese script also led to the decline of chữ Nôm given that Nôm and Chinese characters are so intimately connected. After the First World War, chữ Nôm gradually died out as the Vietnamese alphabet grew more and popular. In an article published in 1935, Georges Cordier estimated that 70% of literate persons knew the alphabet, 20% knew chữ Nôm and 10% knew Chinese characters.
However, estimates of the literacy rate in the late 1930s range from 5% to 20%.
By 1953, literacy had risen to 70%.
The Gin people, descendants of 16th-century migrants from Vietnam to islands off Dongxing in southern China, now speak a form of Yue Chinese and Vietnamese, but their priests use songbooks and scriptures written in chữ Nôm in their ceremonies.
Texts
- Đại Việt sử ký tiệp lục tổng tự. This history of Vietnam was written during the Tây Sơn dynasty. The original is Hán, and there is also a Nôm translation.
- Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kieu The poem is full of obscure archaic words and Chinese borrowings, so that modern Vietnamese struggle to understand an alphabetic transcription without clarifications.
- Nguyễn Trãi, Quốc âm thi tập
- Phạm Đình Hồ, Nhật Dụng Thường Đàm. A Hán-to-Nôm dictionary for Vietnamese speakers.
- Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Lục Vân Tiên
- Đặng Trần Côn, Chinh Phụ Ngâm Khúc
- Various poems by Hồ Xuân Hương
- Mechanics and Crafts of the People of Annam – French manuscript with illustrations depicting Vietnamese culture in French Indochina, the illustrations are described in chữ Nôm.
- Ngô Thì Nhậm, Tam thiên tự – Used to teach beginners Chinese characters and chữ Nôm.
- Nguyễn Phúc Hồng Nhậm, Tự Đức thánh chế tự học giải nghĩa ca – a 32,004 character bilingual Literary Chinese – Vietnamese character dictionary.
Types of texts
- Giải âm – a category of chữ Nôm texts that translates the "sounds" of the original Literary Chinese text. Examples include Tam thiên tự giải âm, etc. Often these translations attempt to match the word order as the original Literary Chinese text with no regard for Vietnamese syntax). There is significant diversity within works called giải âm, with some coming fairly close to the modern concept of translation, while some are closer to annotations with "word-matching" between Literary Chinese and Vietnamese, with little to no regard to the structure or syntax of Vietnamese.
- Diễn âm - synonym of giải âm.
- Giải nghĩa – a category of chữ Nôm texts that translates the "meaning", often having no regard for Literary Chinese syntax. Examples include Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa. Some giải nghĩa or diễn nghĩa works focus on extracting as much meaning as possible from the source texts, with little to no regard to the structure and syntax of Literary Chinese.
- Diễn nghĩa – synonym of giải nghĩa.
Characters
In chữ Nôm, each monosyllabic word of Vietnamese was represented by a character, either borrowed from Chinese or locally created.
The resulting system was even more difficult to use than the Chinese script.
As an analytic language, Vietnamese was a better fit for a character-based script than Japanese and Korean, with their agglutinative morphology.
Partly for this reason, there was no development of a phonetic system that could be taught to the general public, like Japanese kana syllabary or the Korean hangul alphabet, until the arrival of the Europeans.
Moreover, most Vietnamese literati viewed Chinese as the proper medium of civilized writing, and had no interest in turning Nôm into a form of writing suitable for mass communication.
Variant characters
Chữ Nôm has never been standardized. As a result, a Vietnamese word could be represented by several Nôm characters. For example, the very word chữ, a Chinese loanword, can be written as either , or . For another example, the word giữa can be written either as or . Both characters were invented for Vietnamese and have a semantic-phonetic structure, the difference being the phonetic indicator.Another example of a Vietnamese word that is represented by several Nôm characters is the word for moon, trăng. It can be represented by a Chinese character that is phonetically similar to trăng, , a Nôm character, which is composed of two phonetic components and for the Middle Vietnamese blăng, or a chữ Nôm character, composed of a phonetic component and a semantic component meaning .
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 during the Tang period. Such Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary could be written with the original Chinese character for each word, for example:
- * dịch , from Early Middle Chinese
- * bản , from EMC
- * đầu , from EMC
- One way to represent a native Vietnamese word was to use a Chinese character for a Chinese word with a similar meaning. For example, may also represent vốn. 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.
- 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, may represent the Vietnamese word một.
When a character would have two readings, a diacritic may be added to the character to indicate the "indigenous" reading. The two most common alternate reading diacritical marks are cá, and nháy. Thus when is meant to be read as vốn, it is written as, with a diacritic at the upper right corner.
Other alternate reading diacritical marks include tháu đấm where a character is represented by a simplified variant with two points on either side of the character.
Locally invented characters
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.As in the Chinese writing system, the most common kind of invented character in Nôm 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:
- is composed of the phonetic part , while 'turtle' is con ba ba.
- has 'woman' as semantic component and as phonetic component.
A few characters were obtained by modifying Chinese characters related either semantically or phonetically to the word to be represented. For example,
- the Nôm character is a simplified form of the Chinese character .
- the Nôm character is a simplified form of the Chinese character .
- the Nôm character comes from the right part of the Chinese character .
Example
| character | word | gloss | derivation |
| trăm | hundred | compound of 'hundred' and lâm | |
| năm | year | compound of nam and 'year' | |
| trong | in | compound of long and 'inside' | |
| cõi | world | compound of 'earth' and quý | |
| người | person | compound of ngại and 'person' | |
| ta | our | character of homophone Sino-Vietnamese ta 'little, few; rather, somewhat' | |
| chữ | word | compound of trữ and 'character; word' | |
| tài | talent | Sino-Vietnamese word | |
| chữ | word | compound of trữ and 'character; word' | |
| mệnh | destiny | Sino-Vietnamese word | |
| khéo | clever | variant character of the near-homophone Sino-Vietnamese khiếu 'hole', Sino-Vietnamese reading of is giáo | |
| là | to be | simplified form of là 'to be', using the character of near-homophone Sino-Vietnamese la 'net for catching birds' | |
| ghét | hate | compound of 'heart' classifier and cát | |
| nhau | each other | character of near-homophone Sino-Vietnamese nhiêu 'bountiful, abundant, plentiful' |
Computer encoding
In 1993, the Vietnamese government released an 8-bit coding standard for alphabetic Vietnamese, as well as a 16-bit standard for Nôm. This group of glyphs is referred to as "V0." In 1994, the Ideographic Rapporteur Group agreed to include Nôm characters as part of Unicode. A revised standard, TCVN 6909:2001, defines 9,299 glyphs. About half of these glyphs are specific to Vietnam. Nôm characters not already encoded were added to CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B.Characters were extracted from the following sources:
- Hoàng Triều Ân, Tự điển chữ Nôm Tày , 2003.
- Institute of Linguistics, Bảng tra chữ Nôm , Hanoi, 1976.
- Nguyễn Quang Hồng, editor, Tự điển chữ Nôm , 2006.
- Father Trần Văn Kiệm, Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt , 2004.
- Vũ Văn Kính & Nguyễn Quang Xỷ, Tự điển chữ Nôm , Saigon, 1971.
- Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm miền Nam , 1994.
- Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm sau thế kỷ XVII , 1994.
- Vũ Văn Kính, Đại tự điển chữ Nôm , 1999.
- Nguyễn Văn Huyên, Góp phần nghiên cứu văn hoá Việt Nam , 1995.
The characters that do not exist in Chinese have Sino-Vietnamese readings that are based on the characters given in parentheses. The common character for càng contains the radical . This radical is added redundantly to create, a rare variation shown in the chart above. The character is specific to the Tày people. It has been part of the Unicode standard only since version 8.0 of June 2015, so there is still very little font and input method support for it. It is a variation of ; the corresponding character in Vietnamese.
Texts
- , digitized manuscripts held by the National Library of Vietnam.
Software
- , a Windows-based Vietnamese keyboard driver that supports Hán characters and chữ Nôm.
- which enables chữ Nôm and Hán typing on Mac OS X.
- , a Windows-based Vietnamese multilingual keyboard driver that supports typing chữ Nôm in addition to Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
- , a browser-based editor for typing chữ Nôm.
- , a rime-based IME for typing chữ Nôm.
- 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
- ' on chunom.org.
- ' on hannom-rcv.org.
Category:Vietnamese writing systems
Category:Writing systems using Chinese characters
Category:Writing systems without word boundaries
Category:Vietnamese inventions