Chữ nôm

Chữ Nôm
Type	Logographic
Languages	Vietnamese
Time period	13th to early 20th centuries
Parent systems	Chinese characters Chữ Nôm
Sister systems	Kanji, Hanja, Sawndip, Khitan large script

Chữ Nôm (字喃/𡨸喃/𡦂喃 [cɨ̌ˀnom], in earlier times also called 國音 "quốc âm" or 𡨸南 "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 other words are represented using locally created characters based on the Chinese model.

Although formal writing in Vietnam was done in literary Chinese until the early 20th century (except for two brief interludes), chữ Nôm was widely used between the 15th and 19th centuries by Vietnam'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 only 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 Hanoi.

Terminology

Main article: History of writing in Vietnam

• Chữ nôm often capitalized chữ Nôm (𡨸喃 "characters for common speech") 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. The character 𡨸 (chữ, lit. "characters") is proper to Vietnamese and is otherwise unknown in Chinese. The second character 喃 (nôm, lit. "common speech") coincidentally exists in Chinese, too, though with a different meaning. The character set for chữ nôm is extensive, more than 20,000, and has the same linguistic defects as Chinese characters in general, i.e. arbitrariness in composition and inconsistency in pronunciation.
• Chữ Hán (𡨸漢 "Han script") and chữ nho, sometimes capitalized chữ Nho (𡨸儒 "Confucian script") are the Vietnamese terms for classical Chinese used by Vietnamese court officials and scholars in pre-modern Vietnam from the end of the Chinese domination of Vietnam until the loss of sovereignty to French Indochina. The term chữ Hán is also used in Vietnam in reference to modern Chinese. The term chữ nho is more restricted to local Vietnamese Confucian use of classical Chinese.
• The term Hán tự ([hǎːn tɨ̂ˀ] 漢字, "a Chinese character") is the Vietnamese pronunciation of the same Chinese word hanzi, as Korean hanja, and Japanese kanji. The term is mainly used in typographic, calligraphic and lexical contexts to describe Sino-Vietnamese Chinese and Japanese characters.
• The term Hán Nôm (漢喃) 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 Chinese medicine books. 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 romanized writing system based on the Vietnamese alphabet.

History

File:Tu duc thanh che tu hoc giai nghia ca.jpg

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. In this primer, chữ Nôm is used to gloss the Chinese characters, for example, 𡗶 is used to gloss 天.

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han Empire 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.

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 incantation 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.

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 the 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.

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. Trinh Thi Ngoc Truc, consort of King Lê Thần Tông, is given credit for a 24,000-character bilingual Han-to-Nom dictionary written in the 17th century.

While almost all official writings and documents continued to be written in chữ Nho (or chữ Hán) as Hán Văn (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 Nom 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 chu Nho but Nôm did gain some sanction as Quốc Âm, i.e. the national speech.

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 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 teaching of Chinese characters was discontinued in 1917. 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.

Texts

File:Tale of Kieu, vol. 24, p.22.jpg

A page from The Tale of Kieu by Nguyễn Du. This novel was first published in 1820 and is the best-known work in Nom. The edition shown was printed in the late 19th century.

• Đại Việt sử ký tiệp lục tổng tự. This history of Vietnam was written during the Tây Sơn Dynasty. The original is Han, and there is also a Nom translation.
• Nguyễn Du, The Tale of Kieu (1820)
• Nguyễn Trãi, Quốc âm thi tập ("National Language Poetry Compilation")
• Phạm Đình Hồ, Nhật Dụng Thường Đàm (1851). A Han-to-Nom dictionary for Vietnamese speakers.
• Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Lục Văn Tiên (19th century)
• Đặng Trần Côn, Chinh Phụ Ngâm Khúc (18th century)
• Hồ Xuân Hương (18th century) female poet

Syntax

The syntax of nôm naturally follows Vietnamese grammar not Chinese grammar. For example, in nôm texts the Trịnh lords (1545–1787) are Chúa Trịnh (chữ Nôm: 主鄭) not as in Sino-Vietnamese Trịnh vương (chữ Hán: 鄭王). Here the character used (lord in Vietnamese, king in Chinese) is also different, but the difference in syntax is that in Vietnamese the noun "lord" precedes the name, whereas in Chinese "king" follows the name.

A similar example, in Vietnamese Truyện Kiều (傳翹, lit. "Tale of Kiều") the word "tale" precedes the name, but in Chinese syntax "tale" (truyện 傳) should follow the name Kiều. The nôm term "Chữ Nôm" itself is an example of this. In Vietnamese nôm syntax the noun "script" (𡨸) precedes "common" (喃), whereas in chữ Hán the order is reversed and a purely Chinese chữ Hán character used instead of the locally created Chữ (chữ Hán: 喃字). Similarly with gods and heroes; the syntax of the popular name Thánh Gióng (聖容) differes from his chữ Hán name Phù Đổng Thiên Vương (扶董天王); the nôm name Mẫu Thoải (母水), has a Vietnamese syntax while her chữ Hán name Thủy cung Thánh Mẫu (水宮聖母) exhibits Chinese syntax. The official Chinese Tên chữ and vernacular Tên nôm for village names may also have different syntax as well as different characters.

Chinese poems translated into Nôm could retain more Chinese syntax and poetic forms than those translated into Korean or Japanese. Though as literature in Nôm developed it increasingly freed itself from Chinese syntax.

Characters

"My mother eats vegetarian food at the temple every Sunday", written in the modern Vietnamese alphabet (blue) and Nom. Characters borrowed unchanged from Chinese are shown in green, while invented characters are brown.

In Chữ Nôm, each monosyllabic word of Vietnamese was represented by a character, either borrowed from Chinese or locally created. There was no development of a syllabary like Japanese kana or Korean hangul; in part due to the analytic nature of Vietnamese as opposed to the agglutinative morphology of Japanese and Korean.

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 from the Tang period. Such Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary could be written with the original Chinese character for each word, for example:

• 役 dịch ("service", "corvee"), from Early Middle Chinese (EMC) /jwiajk/
• 本 bản ("root", "foundation"), from EMC /pən'/
• 頭 đầu ("head"), from EMC /dəw/

To represent a native Vietnamese word, one method was to use a Chinese character for a Chinese word with a similar meaning. For example, 本 may also represent vốn ("capital, funds"). When a character would have two readings, a diacritic may be added to the character to indicate the "indigenous" reading. Thus when 本 is meant to be read as vốn, it is written as 本㆑, with a diacritic at the upper right corner. 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 /mət/) may represent the Vietnamese word một ("one").

To draw an analogy to the Japanese writing system, 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.

Locally invented characters

This is the Nom character for phở, a popular soup made from rice noodles. It is added to the Unicode 8.0 as part of CJK Unified Ideographs Extended-E (𬖾, U+2C5BE). The radical 米 on the left suggests that the meaning of the character is linked to rice. The remainder 頗 is a phonetic, a Chinese character used to indicate pronunciation.

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 itself, the most common kind of invented character in Nom 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 (EMC /paɨ/) and the semantic part 三 "three". "Father" is also ba, but written as 爸 (⿱父巴), while "turtle" is con ba ba (昆蚆蚆; ⿰虫巴).
• 媄 (mẹ "mother") has 女 "woman" as semantic component and 美 (EMC /mi'/) 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 with a similar EMC pronunciation /ʔijh/;
• the Nôm character 爫 (làm "work", "labour") is a simplified form of the Chinese character 為 with related meaning "make, do".

In Korea and Japan, the traditional writing system was simplified so it could be taught to the general public. Vietnam's educated class looked down on Nom as inferior to Han, so they were not interested in doing the work required to turn Nom into a form of writing suitable for mass communication. Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language and has nearly 5,000 distinct syllables. Neither the Korean nor the Japanese writing systems indicate tones, so they cannot be applied to the Vietnamese language.

Most common characters

The website chunom.org gives a frequency table of the 586 most common characters in Nom literature. According to this table, the most common 50 characters are as follows, with the modern spelling given in italics:

1. 羅 là to be
2. 吧 và and
3. 各 các each; every
4. 没 một one
5. 固 có there is
6. 𧵑 của of
7. 得 được to get, to obtain
8. 𥪝 trong in
9. 𤄯 trong clear
10. 𠊛 (or 𠊚) người people
11. 忍 những (plural marker)
12. 學 học to learn
13. 如 như as
14. 詞 từ word
15. 會 hội, gọi to meet, to call
16. 咍 hay or, good
17. 空 không not
18. 体 thể body, able
19. 四 tư four
20. 拱 cũng also
21. 𠇍 với, mấy with, some
22. 朱 cho to give
23. 社 xã society, company
24. 尼 này, nơi this, place
25. 底 để to place
26. 關 quan frontier, barrier, gate
27. 觀 quan to see
28. 場 trường school
29. 本 bản, vốn, composition, financial capital
30. 𧗱 về to return; about
31. 經 kinh classic works, sutra
32. 行 hàng, hãng, hành, hạnh company, firm
33. 航 hàng sail; navigate
34. 産 sản, sẵn to give birth, to be prepared
35. 𠚢 ra to get out
36. 世 thế world; era
37. 替 thế to replace
38. 勢 thế position, power; like that, so
39. 常 thường frequent; common, normal, usual
40. 事 sự matter; event
41. 妬 đó there; that
42. 濟 té to splash
43. 頭 đầu head; top (of a multitude)
44. 投 đầu to throw, to send
45. 𦓡 mà but
46. 恪 khác another, different; further
47. 一 nhất first
48. 旦 đến arrive, reach
49. 家 nhà home, house; family.

Standardization

In 1867, the reformist Nguyễn Trường Tộ proposed a standardization of chữ Nôm (along with the abolition of classical Chinese), but the new system, what he called quốc âm Hán tự (國音漢字 lit. "Han characters with national pronunciations"), was rejected by Emperor Tự Đức. To this date, chữ Nôm has never been officially standardized. As a result, a Vietnamese word can be represented by variant Nôm characters. For example, the very word chữ ("character", "script"), a Chinese loan word, can be written as either 字 (Chinese character), 𡦂 (invented character, "compound-semantic") or 𡨸 (invented character, "semantic-phonetic"). For another example, the word béo ("fat", "greasy") can be written either as 脿 or . Both characters are invented characters with a semantic-phonetic structure, the difference being the phonetic indicator (表 vs. 報).

From 2013, Han-Nom Revival Committee of Vietnam, an internet-based organization has started its standardization work for Chữ Hán Nôm. Aiming at both Chữ Nôm and Chữ Hán standardization, the Committee's "Chữ Hán Nôm Standardization Project" is designed to determine the Standard Chữ Nôm among many variant Nôm characters, to confirm the usage of Chữ Nôm and Chữ Hán in Pure Vietnamese words, Sino-Vietnamese words (especially Vietnamese-made Sino-Vietnamese words), and Hybrid words, as well as to determine the Chữ Nôm and Chữ Hán characters in Loan words for phonetic transliteration. Till 2015, based on discussions among many specialists of Chữ Hán Nôm, around 500 frequently-used Chữ Hán Nôm are determined and published on its website.

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 Nom (TCVN 5773:1993). This group of glyphs is referred to as "V0." In 1994, the Ideographic Rapporteur Group agreed to include Nom characters as part of Unicode. A revised standard, TCVN 6909:2001, defines 9,299 glyphs. About half of these glyphs are specific to Vietnam. Nom characters not already encoded were added to Unicode Extension B. (These characters have five-digit hexadecimal codepoints. The characters that were encoded earlier have four-digit hex.)

Code	Characters	Unicode block	Standard	Date	V Source	Sources
V0	2,246	Basic Block (593), A (138), B (1,515)	TCVN 5773:1993	2001	V0-3021 to V0-4927	5
V1	3,311	Basic Block (3,110), C (1)	TCVN 6056:1995	1999	V1-4A21 to V1-6D35	2, 5
V2	3,205	Basic Block (763), A (151), B (2,291)	VHN 01:1998	2001	V2-6E21 to V2-9171	2, 5
V3	535	Basic Block (91), A (19), B (425)	VHN 02:1998	2001	V3-3021 to V3-3644	Manuscripts
V4	785 (encoded)	Extension C	Defined as sources 1, 3, and 6	2009	V4-4021 to V4-4B2F	1, 3, 6
V04	1,028	Extension E	Unencoded V4 and V6 characters	Projected	V04-4022 to V04-583E	V4: 1, 3, 6; V6: 4, manuscripts
V5	~900	Proposed in 2001, but already coded		2001	None	2, 5
Sources: Nguyễn Quang Hồng, "Unibook Character Browser," Unicode,Inc., "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E" (N4358-A).

Characters were extracted from the following sources:

1. Hoàng Triều Ân, Tự điển chữ Nôm Tày [Nom of the Tay People], 2003.
2. Institute of Linguistics, Bảng tra chữ Nôm [Nom Index], Hanoi, 1976.
3. Nguyễn Quang Hồng, editor, Tự điển chữ Nôm [Nom Dictionary], 2006.
4. Father Trần Văn Kiệm, Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt [Help with Nom and Sino-Vietnamese], 2004.
5. Vũ Văn Kính & Nguyễn Quang Xỷ, Tự điển chữ Nôm [Nom Dictionary], Saigon, 1971.
6. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm miền Nam [Table of Nom in the South], 1994.
7. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm sau thế kỷ XVII [Table of Nom in the 17th Century], 1994.
8. Vũ Văn Kính, Đại tự điển chữ Nôm [Great Nom 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 Tay people of northern Vietnam. This allows the Tay 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 Nom Na Group, led by Ngô Thanh Nhàn, published a set of nearly 20,000 Nom 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 codepoints. 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.

Character	Composition	Nom reading	Han Viet	English	Codepoint	V Source	Other sources
吧	⿰口巴	ba	ba	[emphatic final particle]	U+5427	V0-3122	G0,J,KP,K,T
傷	⿰亻⿱𠂉昜	thương	thương	to love	U+50B7	V1-4C22	G1,J,KP,K,T
𠊛	⿰㝵人	người	ngại (碍)	people	U+2029B	V2-6E4F	None
㤝	⿰忄充	suông	song	to become interested in	U+391D	V3-313D	G3,KP,K,T
𫋙	⿰虫強	càng	cường (強)	claw, pincer	U+2B2D9	V4-536F	None
𫡯	⿰朝乙	giàu	trào (朝)	wealth	U+2B86F	V4-405E	None
Key: G0 = China (GB 2312); G1 = China (GB 12345); G3 = China (GB 7589); GHZ = Hanyu Da Zidian; J = Japan; KP= North Korea; K = South Korea; T = Taiwan. Sources: Unihan Database, Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E" (N4358-A). The Han-Viet readings are from Hán Việt Từ Điển.

The characters that do not exist in Chinese have Han-Viet readings that are based on the characters given in parenthesis. 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 (giàu) is specific to the Tay 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.

See also

• Chinese family of scripts
• Sinoxenic

References

Works cited

Further reading

• Chʻen, Ching-ho (n. d.). A Collection of Chữ Nôm Scripts with Pronunciation in Quốc-Ngữ. Tokyo: Keiô University.
• Nguyễn, Đình Hoà (2001). Chuyên Khảo Về Chữ Nôm = Monograph on Nôm Characters. Westminster, CA: Institute of Vietnamese Studies, Viet-Hoc Pub. Dept.. ISBN 0-9716296-0-9
• Nguyễn, N. B. (1984). The State of Chữ Nôm Studies: The Demotic Script of Vietnam. Vietnamese Studies Papers. [Fairfax, VA]: Indochina Institute, George Mason University.
• O'Harrow, S. (1977). A Short Bibliography of Sources on "Chữ-Nôm". Honolulu: Asia Collection, University of Hawaii.
• Schneider, Paul 1992. Dictionnaire Historique Des Idéogrammes Vietnamiens / (licencié en droit Nice, France : Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, R.I.A.S.E.M.)
• Zhou Youguang 周有光 (1998). Bijiao wenzi xue chutan (比較文字学初探 "A Comparative Study of Writing Systems"). Beijing: Yuwen chubanshe.
• http://www.academia.edu/6797639/Rebooting_the_Vernacular_in_17th-century_Vietnam

External links

• Chunom.org "This site is about Chu Nom, the old writing system of Vietnam."
• Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation. Features a character dictionary.
• Han-Nom Collection, digitized manuscripts held by the National Library of Vietnam.
• Chữ Nôm, Omniglot
• Tự điển Hán Nôm, Nôm Na Hanoi
• The Vietnamese Writing System, Bathrobe's Chinese, Japanese & Vietnamese Writing Systems
• Han-Nom Revival Committee of Vietnam
• VinaWiki A place for Nom Standardization, and a wiki-based community for writing, discussing of Chu Han Nom.
• (Vietnamese) Han-Nom Research Institute
• (Vietnamese) Tự Điển Chữ Nôm Trích Dẫn, Viện Việt-Học
• (Vietnamese) Vấn đề chữ viết nhìn từ góc độ lịch sử tiếng Việt, Trần Trí Dõi
• 越南北屬時期漢字文獻異體字整理與研究
• Chữ nôm to Vietnamese Latin Converter

Software

There are a number of software tools that can produce chữ Nôm characters simply by typing Vietnamese words in quốc ngữ:

• HanNomIME, a Windows-based Vietnamese keyboard driver that supports Hán characters and chữ Nôm.
• Vietnamese Keyboard Set which enables chữ Nôm and Hán typing on Mac OS X.
• WinVNKey, a Windows-based Vietnamese multilingual keyboard driver that supports typing chữ Nôm in addition to Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
• Chunom.org Online Editor, a browser-based editor for typing chữ Nôm.

Other entry methods:

• (Chinese) 倉頡之友《倉頡平台2012》 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

Chữ Nôm fonts include:

• Hanamin B – Japanese font supporting nearly 90,000 characters, including those in Unicode CJK Extension C.
• VietUnicode Han Nom Font Set – Two open source TrueType fonts including Unicode CJK Extensions A and B.
• NomNaTongLight – TrueType font, created by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, based on characters found in traditional Vietnamese wood-block prints.
• Mojikyo
• Han Nom Gothic - A sans-serif font for Chu Han Nom.