Chu Nom
Chu Nom or Nom is Vietnam's only indigenous writing system. The etymology of the term Chu Nom is obscure. Chu unambiguously means "character," but Nom has been interpreted as "southern," "demotic," or "popular/native speech." Native Chu Nom should not be confused with imported Chu Han (Chinese characters), though the two scripts look similar to the untrained eye. The latter script was also known as Chu Nho (Confucian characters) due to its use in Confucian texts.
Although the precise origins of Chu Nom are unknown, it was clearly an offshoot of Chu Nho. Chu Nho and the Chinese language were imposed upon Vietnam during a millennium of Chinese rule (111
BCE–939 CE). After liberation from China, however, the Vietnamese had no script of their own. The only script they knew was Chu Nho, which was specifically designed to write the syllables of Chinese. Hence the Vietnamese modified Chu Nho in a number of ways in order to adapt it to their own language. This process probably occurred over several centuries and cannot be attributed to any single person or group.
The resulting Nom script that emerged around the twelfth century consisted of three major types of characters: phonetic loans, semanto-phonetic compounds, and semantic compounds. Phonetic loans were Chu Nho graphs used as phonetic symbols, that is, the Chu Nho graph da "many" was used as a phonetic loan for the unrelated but homophonous native words da "banyan" and da "rice pancake."
Semanto-phonetic compounds each consist of a Chu Nho graph or graph element (radical) that hints at the meaning of the word and a Chu Nho graph representing the sound of the word. For example, the Chu Nho radical trung "insect" and the Chu Nho graph de "emperor" were combined into a semanto-phonetic compound representing the native word de "cricket."
Semantic compounds each consist of combinations of two Chu Nho graphs that hint at the meaning of the word. For example, the Chu Nho graphs thien "heaven" and thuong "above" were combined to form a semantic compound representing the native word gioi "sky." This final class of Nom graphs is the rarest.
In spite of the heavily phonetic nature of Nom, its thousands of graphs were never standardized and hence were difficult to learn. Nevertheless, Nom was in use among educated Vietnamese until the early twentieth century, when it was eclipsed by the Quoc Ngu (national language) alphabet devised in the seventeenth century by Catholic missionaries. Nom is virtually extinct today.
Further Reading
Nguyen Dinh-Hoa. (1992) "Graphemic Borrowings from Chinese: The Case of Chu Nom—Vietnam's Demotic Script." Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 61, 2: 383–432.
Schneider, Paul. (1992) Dictionnaire historique des idéogrammes vietnamiens. Nice, France: Unité de Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur l'Asie du Sud-Est, Madagascar et les Iles de l'Océan Indien (Université de Nice-Sophia Antipolis).
This is the complete article, containing 460 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
