Chữ Nôm

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 (國音, 'national sound') and Quốc ngữ (國語, 'national language').

In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called chữ Hán (𡨸漢 'Han characters'), chữ Nho (𡨸儒 'Confucian characters', due to the connection with Confucianism) and uncommonly as Hán tự (漢字 'Han characters'). Hán văn (漢文) refers to literature written in Literary Chinese.

The term Hán Nôm (漢喃 'Han and chữ Nôm characters') in Vietnamese designates the whole body of premodern written materials from Vietnam, either written in Chinese (chữ Hán) or in Vietnamese (chữ Nôm). 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 (1752) gives the story of early Buddhism in Vietnam both in Hán script and in a parallel Nôm translation. The Jesuit Girolamo Maiorica (1605–1656) had also used parallel Hán and Nôm texts.

The term chữ Quốc ngữ (𡨸國語 'national language script') 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 (1400–1407) and under the Tây Sơn (1778–1802), 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 "布蓋", 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 bu^H kaj^H, of a Vietnamese phrase, either vua cái 'great king', or bố cái 'father and mother' (of the people).

After Vietnam established its independence from China in the 10th century, Đinh Bộ Lĩnh (r. 968–979), the founder of the Đinh dynasty, named the country Đại Cồ Việt 大瞿越. 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 (Phúc Yên, Vĩnh Phúc province). 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 Nôm. Another stele at Hộ Thành Sơn in Ninh Bình Province (1343) is reported as listing 20 villages.

Trần Nhân Tông (r. 1278–1293) 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 ('Sūtra explained by the Buddha on the Great Repayment of the Heavy Debt to Parents') was printed around 1730, but conspicuously avoids the character 利 lợi, suggesting that it was written (or copied) during the reign of Lê Lợi (1428–1433) (see Naming taboo § Vietnam). 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 (1400–1407) 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 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 (1428–1789), 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 (1380–1442) which aimed to disseminate Neo-Confucianism among as broad an audience as possible. Trịnh Thị Ngọc Trúc, consort of King Lê Thần Tông, is generally given credit for Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa (指南玉音解義; 'guide to Southern Jade sounds: explanations and meanings'), 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 (1778–1802) 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 (r. 1802–1820), founder of the Nguyễn dynasty (1802–1945), 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 (r. 1820–1841), 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 (written in Classical Chinese, like all court documents) proposing reforms in several areas of government and society. His petition Tế cấp bát điều (濟急八條 'Eight urgent matters', 1867), includes proposals on education, including a section entitled Xin khoan dung quốc âm ('Please tolerate the national voice'). He proposed to replace Classical Chinese with Vietnamese written using a script based on Chinese characters that he called Quốc âm Hán tự (國音漢字 'Han characters with national pronunciations'), 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 more popular. In an article published in 1935 (based on a lecture given in 1925), 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 (using the alphabet) 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 (1820) 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 ("National Language Poetry Compilation")
• Phạm Đình Hồ, Nhật Dụng Thường Đàm (1851). A Hán-to-Nôm dictionary for Vietnamese speakers.
• Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Lục Vân Tiên (19th century)
• Đặng Trần Côn, Chinh Phụ Ngâm Khúc (18th century)
• Various poems by Hồ Xuân Hương (18th century)
• 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 (解音) – a category of chữ Nôm texts that translates the "sounds" (word-for-word) of the original Literary Chinese text. Examples include Tam thiên tự giải âm (三千字解音), etc. There is significant diversity within works called giải âm (even within a single text), 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.

Here is a line in Tam tự kinh lục bát diễn âm (三字經六八演音), a Vietnamese translation of the Three Character Classic. It features the original text on the top of the page and the Vietnamese translation on the bottom.

人不學不知理 (Nhân bất học bất tri lý)

𠊚空學別𨤰夷麻推 (Người không học biết nhẽ gì mà suy)

Without learning, one does not understand reason.

• Diễn âm (演音) - synonym of giải âm (解音).
• Giải nghĩa (解義) – 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 (指南玉音解義). 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 (演義) – synonym of giải nghĩa (解義).

Characters

Vietnamese is a tonal language, as is Chinese, and has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables. 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 ('character', 'script'), a Chinese loanword, can be written as either 字 (Chinese character), 𡦂 (Vietnamese-only compound-semantic character) or 𡨸 (Vietnamese-only semantic-phonetic character). For another example, the word giữa ('middle'; 'in between') can be written either as 𡨌 (⿰守中) or 𫡉 (⿰字中). Both characters were invented for Vietnamese and have a semantic-phonetic structure, the difference being the phonetic indicator (守 vs. 字).

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, 菱 (lăng), a Nôm character, 𢁋 (⿱巴陵) which is composed of two phonetic components 巴 (ba) and 陵 (lăng) for the Middle Vietnamese blăng, or a chữ Nôm character, 𦝄 (⿰月夌) composed of a phonetic component 夌 (lăng) and a semantic component meaning 月 ('moon').

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:
  • 役 dịch ('service', 'corvée'), from Early Middle Chinese (EMC)
  • 本 bản ('root', 'foundation'), from EMC
  • 頭 đầu ('head'), 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, 本 may also represent vốn ('capital, funds'). 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, 沒 (Early Middle Chinese ) may represent the Vietnamese word một ('one').

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.

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 (𖿰), (a variant form of 个) and nháy (𖿱). Thus when 本 is meant to be read as vốn, it is written as 本^𖿱, with a diacritic at the upper right corner.

Other alternate reading diacritical marks include tháu đấm (草𢶸) 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 (国字) and handful of Korean gukja (국자, 國字), 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:

• 𠀧 (ba 'three') is composed of the phonetic part 巴 (Sino-Vietnamese reading: ba) and the semantic part 三 'three'. 'Father' is also ba, but written as 爸 (⿱父巴), while 'turtle' is con ba ba 𡥵蚆蚆.
• 媄 (mẹ 'mother') has 女 'woman' as semantic component and 美 (Sino-Vietnamese reading: mỹ) as phonetic component.

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

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 𧘇 (ấy 'that', 'those') is a simplified form of the Chinese character 衣 (Sino-Vietnamese reading: ý). 𠂎 is a variant of 𧘇
• the Nôm character 𫜵 (làm 'work', 'labour') is a simplified form of the Chinese character 濫 (Sino-Vietnamese reading: lạm) (濫 > 𪵯 > 𫜵).
• the Nôm character 𠬠 (một 'one') comes from the right part of the Chinese character 没 (Sino-Vietnamese reading: một) (没 > 𱥺 > 𠬠).
• the Nôm character 𪜀 (là 'to be') is heavily simplified from the lower part of the Chinese character 羅 (Sino-Vietnamese reading: la) (羅 > 𱺵 > 𪜀).

Example

As an example of the way chữ Nôm was used to record Vietnamese, the first two lines of the Tale of Kiều (1871 edition), written in the traditional six-eight form of Vietnamese verse, consist of 14 characters:

𤾓

Trăm

hundred

𢆥

năm

year

𥪞

trong

in

𡎝

cõi

world

𠊛

người

person

些

ta,

our

A hundred years—in this life span on earth,

𡨸

Chữ

word

才

tài

talent

𡨸

chữ

word

命

mệnh

destiny

窖

khéo

clever

𱺵

là

to be

恄

ghét

hate

饒

nhau.

each other

talent and destiny are apt to feud.

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 Nôm (TCVN 5773:1993). 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. (These characters have five-digit hexadecimal code points. The characters that were encoded earlier have four-digit hex.)

Characters were extracted from the following sources:

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

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

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 (強) contains the radical 虫 (insects). This radical is added redundantly to create 𫋙, a rare variation shown in the chart above. The character 𫡯 (chàu) 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 朝; the corresponding character in Vietnamese.