Nôm

Nôm was a script formerly used in Vietnam. It involved the use of Chinese characters to write Vietnamese. The Van Ban bell, engraved in 1076, has the earliest known example of a Nôm inscription. The earliest surviving Nôm literature dates from the 13th century. The best known work of Vietnamese literature is The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du, written in Nôm in the early 19th century. The script was in common use until the 1920s, when it was replaced by the Vietnamese alphabet, a form of the Latin alphabet.

Language issues

Chinese characters are used to write various languages in China and elsewhere, including Mandarin, the most widely spoken language in China, Cantonese, spoken in Hong Kong and southern China, and Classical Chinese, traditionally used for formal writing. The characters were formerly used in Korea and in Vietnam. Japan uses a mix of Chinese characters and native phonetic script. Even characters that retain their original meaning in all languages may be read in various ways. The character 十 is given as shí in Chinese romanization (pinyin), jū in Japanese romanization (Hepburn), sip in Korean romanization (Revised Romanization), and thập in the Han-Viet system used in Vietnam. In all these languages, the meaning of the character is “ten.”

Syntax

Modifiers normally come before the noun in Chinese, but follow the noun in vernacular Vietnamese. Chinese texts published in Vietnam often included a line-by-line translation into Nôm. Even when the same characters appear in both languages, the order is different. Many Chinese phrases gained currency as loan words. Later, the word order could be reversed to correspond to normal Vietnamese syntax. The word "Vietnam" is from Chinese Nányuè (南越), meaning “Southern Yue”. In Han-Viet, the same characters are read as Nam Việt. The word order was reversed in modern times. In Chinese, the phrase “Chinese characters” is written 漢字. This is romanized as hànzì in pinyin, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean, and Hán tự in Han-Viet. In modern Vietnamese, they are chữ Hán.

Character construction

The majority of the characters used in Nôm are of Chinese origin, selected because they have an appropriate pronunciation or meaning. For example, the character used to write the word "Nôm" (喃) is pronounced nán in Chinese and means “chattering.” The fit between the Chinese character and the Vietnamese word is not always exact. The word "Nôm" does not have any negative connotation in Vietnamese, but rather suggests plain talk, something easy to understand.

Nôm includes thousands of characters not found in Chinese. In contrast, Japan developed only a few hundred native Chinese-style character, Korea just a handful, none of which were ever commonly used. These characters were created by authors who combined pre-existing elements. One element, called the radical, indicates the character's meaning, or at least a semantic category. The other element, called the remainder, gives pronunciation. For example, the reading ba is indicated by the character 巴. In Chinese, this character indicates the same sound as in Vietnamese, but it's meaning is unrelated: "to long for." For the character 𠀧 (⿺巴三), horizontal lines are added to indicate that the meaning is "three." "Father" is also ba, but written as 爸 (⿰父巴). "Turtle" is con ba ba (昆蚆蚆; ⿰虫巴). Most Chinese characters were created by the same method. As the correspondence between sound and meaning is different in Vietnamese than it is Chinese, the same approach could result in two quite different character sets.

When a character is read as Vietnamese, it is romanized according to its Nôm reading. When it is read as Chinese, it can be romanized into Vietnamese as Han-Viet, or into English as pinyin.