What was Vietnam’s ancient writing system? What is Chữ Nôm? A Thread:

China was the center of East Asian culture, and the countries bordering China, Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, all adopted and used the Chinese script, 漢字, before developing our own native scripts.

Each of these Sinospheric countries adopted Chinese characters to transliterate their own languages, all unrelated to any dialect of Chinese. In addition, each Sinospheric country instituted a Confucian style government and used Classical Chinese as the language of administration

The officials of Vietnam, Korea, and Japan all used “Classical Chinese” to govern, but each word from Classical Chinese was pronounced in the native way, so Classical Chinese’s 國 became, quốc, guk, and koku, respectively.

And thus, Classical Chinese was the only way to write in the Sinosphere for a few centuries, until each country began transliterating their native language using these characters. Thus, came the Man’yōgana system for Japanese, which is similar to Vietnam’s way of transliteration.

In Vietnam, approximating the sound of native words using Chinese characters was our first method of writing native Vietnamese.

For example, the character 没 was pronounced something like “mutt” in Classical Chinese and it means “not”, but 没 sounded like một, the native Vietnamese word for the number 1. So Viet scholars used a Chinese character meaning “not” to mean “1”, because it sounded similar.

This transliteration worked to an extent, but it was clunky and MANY Chinese characters could be used to represent a single Việt word. For example, Mẹ (native word for mother) could be written 媄, 母, or 媽. So a lack of uniformity in readings made parsing texts difficult.

The second way the Việt language could be transcribed was through borrowing the MEANING of a Chinese character, but NOT the pronunciation. For example, if one wanted to write Nôm (the “nativized” word for South), one could use 南.

But, 南 can have two pronunciations: the BORROWED Classical Chinese pronunciation (Nam), or the nativized Việt word, Nôm! So how would a Việt scholar know the reading? Well, said scholars would write a 口 next to 南 to indicate a NATIVE reading. Thus, you’d read 喃 as Nôm.

You’ll notice I said “nativized”, not “native” for Nôm. Because of very close contact (& later invasions) between China and Vietnam, Viets borrowed some words from Chinese millennia ago, making them feel old and “native”, people forgot it was originally Chinese. Thus “nativized”

Second, a complication, Vietnam imported many words from China due to close contact and many invasions, so these words borrowed from Classical Chinese were written in their original forms, as they were recognized as Chinese.

And the last method, dozens of thousands of Vietnamese characters were created by Vietnamese scholars using Chinese principles to represent native words, characters heretofore unseen in China, Japan, or Korea.

An example would be the Native Việt word for tree, Cây, 𣘃. It combines the character that SOUNDS like Cây in Classical Chinese, 荄, with the Chinese character that MEANS tree, 木. 𣘃 is not a Chinese character, it’s a “new” Nôm creation.

This is called a phonosemantic character, the bulk of the Chữ Nôm system is made up of these native characters, similar to the Japanese Kokuji. The Chữ Nôm for Chữ Nôm itself 𡨸喃, are great examples of this!

All these systems, Sound Approximation, Meaning Approximation, Chinese loans, differing reading signaling, and newly created native characters are combined into the single system that is Chữ Nôm.

So what does a Chữ Nôm text look like? Here is the most famous stanza of Nôm text that most Viets can recite from memory, the opening of Truyện Kiều.

To someone literate in Chinese, this is gibberish. They may recognize a few characters but it is incomprehensible to a Sinophone.

In Vietnamese, this is read: “Trăm năm, trong cõi người ta, Chữ tài, chữ mệnh, khéo là ghét nhau.
Khúc nhà tay lựa nên chương, Một thiên bạc mệnh lại càng não nhân.
Trải qua một cuộc bể dâu,
Những điều trông thấy mà đau đớn lòng”

This is a more formal use of Chữ Nôm which uses more Chinese, like how formal English uses much more French vocabulary. However, for casual Chữ Nôm, look at the pictures below.

Here’s what someone literate in Chinese said about the above conversation.

This fit the Vietnamese language well, as all of our words are monosyllabic, and didn’t need to represent native polysyllabic words with multiple characters, like various Japanese surnames like Tanaka. However, this system was hard to learn and inaccessible to the poor.

Thus, in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, a new movement was headed by government scholars to create a native alphabet based off of Chữ Nôm, though there were many proposed variations, the current, Latin-based Quốc Ngữ system won out in the end.

However, a new alphabet based off of Chữ Nôm called Quốc Ngữ Phiên Âm Tự is gaining traction, which looks like this. This is a recent proposal that demonstrates a heightened desire to expel remnants of European colonization by the Vietnamese people.