What is “Chữ Nôm” (Vietnamese Chinese Writing System)?

Chữ Nôm (字喃, literally means “Southern characters”), in earlier times also called quốc âm or chữ nam, is a logographic writing system formerly used to write the  Vietnamese language.

It uses the standard set of classical Chinese characters to represent Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and some native Vietnamese words, while new characters were created on the Chinese model to represent other words.

Although formal writing in Việt Nam was done in classical Chinese, until the early 20th century (except for two brief interludes), chữ Nôm was widely used between the 15th and 19th centuries by Việt Nam’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.

In the 1920s, the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet displaced chữ Nôm as the preferred way to record Vietnamese.

Although chữ Nôm is today mainly taught at the university level within the Vietnamese education system, the characters are still used for decorative, historic and ceremonial value and symbols of good luck.

The task of preservation and study of Vietnamese texts written in Nôm (but also classical Chinese texts from Vietnam) is conducted by the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hà Nội.

One of the best-known pieces of Vietnamese literature, The Tale of Kiều, was composed in chữ Nôm

Etymology

The Vietnamese word chữ (character) is derived from the Old Chinese word 字, meaning ‘character’.

 The word Nôm in chữ Nôm means ‘Southern’, and is derived from the Middle Chinese word 南, meaning ‘south’.

There are many ways to write the name chữ Nôm in chữ Nôm characters.

The word chữ may be written as 字, 𫳘(⿰字宁), 𪧚(⿰字守), 𡨸, 茡, 芓, 𫿰(⿰字文), 𡦂, 佇 or 宁, while Nôm may be written as 喃 or 諵.

Terminology

Chữ Nôm is the logographic writing system of the Vietnamese language.

It is based on the Chinese writing system but adds a high number of new characters to make it fit the Vietnamese language.

In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called chữ Hán (字漢 ‘Han characters’), Hán tự (漢字 ‘Han characters’), Hán văn (漢文 ‘Han characters’), or chữ nho (字儒 ‘Confucian characters’).

Hán văn (漢文) also means Chinese language literature (in this case, Hán văn literally means ‘Han literature’).

The term Hán Nôm (漢喃 ‘Hán and chữ Nôm characters’) in Vietnamese designates the whole body of Vietnamese premodern written materials, 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 Việt Nam 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 (“national language script”) refers to the romanized writing system based on the Vietnamese alphabet.

History

Chinese characters were introduced to Việt Nam after the Han dynasty conquered the country in 111 BC.

Independence was achieved in 939, 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.

Vietnamese Independence from China was achieved in 939

Earliest evidence

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 expelling the Chinese, albeit briefly in the late 8th century.

These two characters literally mean “cloth” + “cover” in Chinese but when pronounced by the Vietnamese, the phonetic value is employed to represent vua cái (“great king”), or archaic Vietnamese bố cái (“father and mother”, i.e. as respectable as one’s parents).

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 still debated.

The oldest surviving objects with chữ Nôm inscriptions are a stele (1209) at Bảo Ân temple containing 18 characters naming villages and people, and a stele at Hộ Thành Sơn in Ninh Bình Province (1343), listing 20 villages.

The first literary writing in Vietnamese is said to have been an incatation in verse composed in 1282 by the Minister of Justice Nguyễn Thuyên and thrown into the  Red River to expel a menacing crocodile.

 The oldest Nom text that is still extant is the collected poetry of Emperor Trần Nhân Tông written in the 13th century.

Chinese loan-words for Chữ Nôm

Hồ dynasty (1400–07) and Ming conquest (1407–27)

During the seven years of the Hồ dynasty (1400–07) Classical Chinese was discouraged in favor of vernacular Vietnamese written in chữ 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 Việt Nam, chữ Nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were thoroughly destroyed; as a result the earliest surviving texts of chữ Nôm post-date the occupation.

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

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).

Among the earlier works in Nôm of this era are the writings of Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442).

The corpus of Nôm writings grew over time as did more scholarly compilations of the script itself.

Trịnh Thị Ngọc Trúc, consort of King Lê Thần Tông, is generally given credit for Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa (the Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds), a 24,000-character bilingual Hán-to-Nôm dictionary compiled between the 15th and 18th centuries, most likely in 1641 or 1761.

While almost all official writings and documents continued to be written in classical Chinese until the early 20th century, Nôm was the preferred script for literary compositions of the cultural elites.

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, making it accessible even to the illiterates.

In 1838, Jean-Louis Taberd compiled a Nom dictionary, helping with the standardization of the script.

In 1867, Catholic scholar Nguyễn Trường Tộ made the bold move to petition the Emperor Tự Đức to adopt Nôm as the official script.

The court failed to make a break with chữ Nho but Nôm did gain some sanction as Quốc Âm, i.e. the national speech.

A page from the bilingual dictionary Nhật dụng thường đàm (1851) with characters representing words in Hán (Chinese) and explained in Nôm(Vietnamese)

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 Hán literature.

Their degrees showed only that they had learned how to write characters, he claimed.

The popularity of Hà Nội’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.[39] On December 28, 1918, Emperor Khải Định declared that the traditional writing system no longer had official status.

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.

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.

Source: Wikipedia