Chữ Nôm

Chữ Nôm (‚å–ƒ, also 8喃/字喃) is the classical writing system of the Vietnamese language and is based on the ideographs of the Chinese language (Hán Tự). Until the 17th century, Vietnamese was written exclusively in the Chữ-Nôm system. The fact that a script based mainly on the Chinese characters was used to render the phonology of the Vietnamese language made it very complex and complicated to learn. It was used exclusively by the Chinese-educated Vietnamese elite. Used until the 20th century, Chữ-Nôm functioned as a Vietnamese-read Chinese script to which new characters were added to render specifically Vietnamese sounds or syllables. Very few Vietnamese today are still able to read Chữ Nôm.

Chữ Nôm was later completely replaced by Quốc Ngữ (國語), Vietnam's current writing system to this day. Quốc Ngữ was developed by linguistically knowledgeable Portuguese and French missionaries to record the Vietnamese language and facilitate literacy. Quốc Ngữ includes a system of diacritical marks to indicate sounds, as well as modified vowels.

Writing system

In Vietnam, Chinese characters were originally used only to write Chữ nho (‚е„’)(classical Chinese). In Chб»Ї NГґm, the use of these characters was expanded in many ways. In addition, a large number of new characters were invented by Vietnamese writers.

Related

There are many classical Chinese words that have found their way into the Vietnamese language through borrowing. These loan words were written with the original Chinese character (hán tự). Examples: vị (味) "taste" (Mandarin: wèi), niên (年) "year" (Mandarin: nián). In addition, Vietnamese contains many loan words from Chinese, some of which were adopted before Chinese characters were introduced into Vietnam and have therefore retained a different pronunciation. These words are also designed based on the corresponding characters of Classical Chinese. Examples: mùi (味) (equivalent to vị, taste), năm (年 or Ґ) (equivalent to niên, year). Often, both versions are also written with the same character, which greatly reduces the amount of writing and the number of characters required. Thus, for many Vietnamized Chinese words, no chu nom exists at all, which would allow a distinction from the normal Chinese borrowing. How the character must be read is then obvious from the context. Thus 字 in 字喃 would be read as chữ, in 喃字 it would be read tự. In Vietnamese, compound words usually appear backwards: adjectives are attached to nouns and do not precede them as in Chinese.

Phonetic borrowing of characters

Many genuine Vietnamese words were written by using characters without meaning (chữ giả tá (‚еЃ‡еЂџ), false loan words). Such a character is reused solely for its pronunciation. Its original meaning is discarded. Thus, the character acquires a second meaning. Often, a character acquires a wide variety of meanings through phonetic borrowing.

invention of characters

Many new characters have been invented for genuine Vietnamese words (called chữ thuần nôm (‚純喃), or nôm for short). These new characters are based on phonetic borrowing and add a semantic component that indicates the new meaning, resulting in a new, separate character. In some cases, a resulting character looks like an existing Chinese character, but with a different meaning.

Standardization

In 1867, Nguyễn Trường Tộ (阮長祚) intended to standardize chữ Nôm, but the new system (Quốc Âm Hán Tự (國音漢字)) was rejected by Emperor Tự Đức (嗣德). Until that time, chữ Nôm was never officially standardized. As a result, there are many different characters for originally Vietnamese words. However, as a writer of texts in Nom, one always follows certain principles of selection.

Chữ-nôm Software

There are a number of software aids that produce Chữ-Nôm characters by simply writing Vietnamese words in Quốc ngữ.

• Vietnamese Keyboard Set allows you to write chữ Nôm in Mac OS X.
• WinVNKey is a Windows-based Vietnamese keyboard driver that supports chữ Nôm.