5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 1/8
Ch Nm
Type Logographic
Languages Vietnamese
Time
period
circa 12001949
Parent
systems
Oracle bone script
Seal script
Clerical script
Regular script
Ch Nm
Sister
systems
Simplified Chinese, Kanji, Hanja, Khitan
script, Zhuyin
Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic
symbols.
Ch nm
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from Ch Nm)
Ch Nm (// [cnom]) is a demotic
script formerly used to write popular literary work in the
Vietnamese language. The script makes use of the
standard set of classical Chinese characters to represent
Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary; as well as other new
characters coined following the Chinese model to
represent vernacular Vietnamese vocabulary in an
adapted Sino-Vietnamese script.
The script was widely used from 15th to 19th Centuries
by Vietnam's cultured elite, including women, for works in
verse while formal historical and government writings
were still carried out, by men only, in classical Chinese.
For instance one of the most well-known pieces of
Vietnamese literature, Truyn Kiu was composed in ch
nm.
[1]
Nm was displaced by the Latin-based modern
Vietnamese alphabet in the 1920s. Although Nm is no
longer taught in the education system, the characters,
alongside original Hn (Chinese) characters, are still used
as decoration symbols of good luck. The task of research
and preservation of major texts in Nm is still conducted
by the Institute of Hn-Nm Studies in Hanoi.
Contents
1 Terminology
2 History
2.1 Earliest evidence
2.2 H dynasty (1400-1407) and Ming
conquest (1407-1427)
2.3 L (1428-1788), Ty Sn (1788
1802) and Nguyn dynasties (1802-
1945)
2.4 French Indochina and the Latin
alphabet
3 Classification
3.1 Borrowed characters
3.2 Invented characters
3.3 Most common characters
4 Standardization
5 Ch Nm software
6 See also
5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 2/8
7 References
8 Further reading
9 External links
Terminology
ch nm often capitalized ch Nm ( "characters for talking") the transcription
system for native Vietnamese language using original and newly made Chinese characters
to represent Vietnamese sounds. The initial word ch is itself a newly made nm
character unknown in China. It is a compound of (for sound, an approximation to
Vietnamese sound "ch") + (for meaning "character") written together as .
[2]
The
character set for ch nm is extensive, up to 20,000, arbitrary in composition and
inconsistent in pronunciation.
[3][4]
ch Hn ( "Han script") and ch nho, sometimes capitalized ch Nho ( "Confucian
script") are the native Vietnamese names for the form of classical Chinese used by
Vietnamese court officials and scholars in pre-modern Vietnam from the end of the Third
Chinese domination of Vietnam till the loss of sovereignty to French Indochina. The term
ch Hn is also used in Vietnam in reference to modern Chinese. The term ch nho is
more restricted to local Vietnamese Confucian use of Chinese.
[5]
Again the nm ideogram
for ch ( "script") is not found in Chinese and is a local invention to represent the same
Vietnamese native word now written "ch" in Latin alphabet.
[6]
The term Hn t ([hn t] , "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.
[7]
The term Hn Nm () in Vietnamese, designates the whole body of premodern written materials,
both Hn and Nm.
[8]
Hn and Nm could also be mixed in texts
[9]
and given parallel Hn and Nm
readings, particularly in the case of translations of Chinese medicine books.
[10]
The Buddhist history C
Chu Php Vn pht bn hnh ng lc (1752) gives the story of early Buddhism in Vietnam both in
Hn script and in a parallel Nm translation.
[11]
The Jesuit Girolamo Maiorica (1605-1656) had also
used parallel Hn and Nm texts.
The term quc ng ( "National language") refers to texts written in the modern romanized
Vietnamese alphabet.
History
In imperial Vietnam (939-1919), formal writings were, in most cases, done in classical Chinese while vernacular
Vietnamese was used only for less serious literature. These writings are indistinguishable from contemporaneous
classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, or Japan.
[12]
Earliest evidence
5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 3/8
A system of modified and invented characters modeled loosely on Chinese characters called ch nm, which,
unlike the system of ch nho (or ch Hn), allowed for the expression of purely Vietnamese words, was
created in Vietnam at least as early as the 13th century.
[13]
The use of Chinese characters to write the Vietnamese language can be traced to an inscription with the two
characters "", as part of the posthumous title of Phng Hng, a national hero who succeeded in temporarily
gaining back the control of the country from the hands of the Chinese during the late 8th century. These two
characters literally mean "cloth" + "cover" but are evidently used for phonetic value not the Chinese meaning.
They may represent (archaic) Vietnamese b ci, "father and mother" (i.e., as respectable as one's parents), or
Vietnamese vua ci, "great king". During the 10th century, the founder of the inh Dynasty (968-979) named
the country i C Vit (). 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 unknown.
[14][15]
The oldest examples of Ch nm are a stele at a temple at Bo n (1209) containing 18 characters naming
villages and people, and a stele at H Thnh Sn in Ninh Bnh Province (1343), listing 20 villages.
[16][17]
The
first claimed literary writing in Vietnamese is said to have been an incantation in verse composed in 1282 by the
then Minister of Justice Nguyn Thuyn and thrown into the Red River to expel a menacing crocodile.
[16]
H dynasty (1400-1407) and Ming conquest (1407-1427)
During the seven years of the H dynasty (1400-1407) Chinese script was discouraged in favor of ch nm
which became the official script. This was reversed with the subsequent fourth Chinese domination and twenty
years in which use of the vernacular language and demotic script were suppressed.
[18]
During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam ch nm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were destroyed;
as a result the earliest surviving texts of ch nm post-date the occupation.
[19]
While intended to record
Vietnamese, ch nm paradoxically required the user to have a fair knowledge of ch Hn, and thus ch nm
was used primarily for literary writings by cultural elites (such as the poetry of Nguyn Du and H Xun
Hng), while almost all other official writings and documents continued to be written in ch nho (or ch Hn)
as Hn Vn (classical Chinese) until the 20th century.
L (1428-1788), Ty Sn (17881802) and Nguyn dynasties (1802-1945)
Usually only the elite had knowledge of ch Nm, which was used as an aid to teaching Chinese characters
(DeFrancis 1977:30). After the emergence of ch Nm, a great amount of Vietnamese literature was produced
by many notable writers, among them Nguyn Tri of the 15th century, who left us the first surviving collection
of Nm poems. Vietnamese literature flourished during the 18th century, which saw the production of Nguyn
Du's Tale of Kieu and H Xun Hng's lyrics. These works were circulated orally in the villages, so that even
the illiterate had access to the Nm literature.
[20]
On the other hand, formal writings were still mostly done in classical Chinese.
[21]
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. The traditional Civil Service Examination, which emphasized the command of
classical Chinese, was dismantled in 1915 in Tonkin and 1918-1919 in the remaining part of Vietnam. The
decline of the Chinese script also led to the decline of ch Nm given that Nm and Chinese characters are so
intimately connected.
[22]
During the early half of the 20th century, ch Nm gradually died out as quc ng
5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 4/8
A page from T c Thnh Ch T Hc
Gii Ngha Ca (), a
19th-century primer for teaching
Vietnamese children Chinese characters.
The work is attributed to Emperor T
c, the 4th Emperor of the Nguyn
Dynasty. In this primer, ch Nm is used
to gloss the Chinese characters, for
example, _ is used to gloss .
grew more and more standardized and popular. In an article published in 1935 by Cordier he stated that quc
ng is rapidly dethroning Chinese characters and is replacing ch Nm so that by 1935 out of one hundred
literate persons 70 knew quc ng, 20 knew ch Nm and 10 knew Chinese characters.
[23]
Classification
The ch Nm characters can be divided into two groups: those
borrowed from Chinese and those coined by the Vietnamese.
There was no development of a syllabary like Japanese kana or
Korean hangul; in part to the analytic nature of Vietnamese as
opposed to the agglutinative morphology of Japanese and
Korean.
[24]
Borrowed characters
In ch Nm, the characters borrowed from Chinese are used
to:
[25]
1. represent Chinese loan words from the Tang period, such
as bn ("root", "foundation"), from Early Middle
Chinese /pn'/.
[26]
2. represent native Vietnamese words with a similar meaning.
For example may also represent vn ("capital, funds").
When a character would have two readings, a diacritic
may be added to the character to indicate the "indigenous"
reading. Thus when is meant to be read as vn, it is
written as , with a diacritic at the upper right corner.
In this case the word vn is actually an earlier Chinese
loan that has become accepted as Vietnamese; Hannas
(1997:8081) claims that all such readings are similar
early loans.
3. represent native Vietnamese words with a similar sound.
For example, (Early Middle Chinese /mt/
[26]
) may
represent the word mt ("one"). In this case is only
used phonetically, regardless of the meaning of the word it
represents in Chinese.
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 has its parallel in the Man'ygana script that became the origin
of hiragana and katakana.
Invented characters
The coined characters can be divided into:
1. semantic-phonetic, which are composed of two parts, one (a borrowed character or radical) indicating
the semantic field to which the word (that the character represents) belongs or simply the word's meaning,
another (a borrowed or invented character) the approximate sound of the word. For example, _ (ba
"three") is composed of the phonetic part and the semantic part. This type of character is the most
5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 5/8
A modern ch Nm dictionary
common one among the invented characters.
2. compound-semantic characters, which are composed of two Chinese characters which represent words
of similar meaning. For example, _ (tri "sky", "heaven") is composed of ("sky") and ("upper").
3. modified Chinese characters, which can be related either semantically or phonetically to the original
Chinese character. For example, the Nm character (y "that', "those") is a simplified form of the
Chinese character , their relationship being a phonetic one; the Nm character (lm "work",
"labour") is a simplified form of the Chinese character , their relationship being a semantic one.
Most common characters
The website chunom.org
[27]
gives a frequency table of the 586 most common characters in Nom literature.
According to chunom.org the most common 20 characters are as follows:
1. l to be 2. v and 3. cc all; every; (plural maker) 4. mt one 5. c there is 6. [ ca of 7.
c to get 8. _ trong in 9. _ trong clear 10. ngi people 11. nhng (plural marker) 12. hc
to learn 13. nh as 14. t word 15. hi to meet 16. hay or; good 17. khng not 18. th
body 19. t four 20. cng also.
Standardization
In 1867, the reformist Nguyn Trng T proposed a standardization of
ch Nm (along with the abolition of classical Chinese), but the new system,
what he called quc m Hn t ( lit. "Han characters with national
pronunciations"), was rejected by Emperor T c.
[28]
To this date, ch
Nm has never been officially standardized. As a result, a Vietnamese word
can be represented by variant Nm characters. For example, the very word
ch ("character", "script"), a Chinese loan word, can be written as either
(Chinese character), (invented character, "compound-semantic") or
(invented character, "semantic-phonetic"). For another example, the word
bo ("fat", "greasy") can be written either as or . Both characters are
invented characters with a semantic-phonetic structure, the difference being
the phonetic indicator ( vs. ).
Ch Nm software
There are a number of software tools that can produce ch Nm characters simply by typing Vietnamese words
in quc ng:
HanNomIME (http://viethoc.com/hannom/bango_intro.php), a Windows-based Vietnamese keyboard
driver that supports Hn characters and ch Nm.
Vietnamese Keyboard Set (http://herr.atspace.eu/) which enables ch Nm and Hn typing on Mac OS
X.
WinVNKey (http://winvnkey.sourceforge.net/), a Windows-based Vietnamese multilingual keyboard
driver that supports typing ch Nm in addition to Traditional and Simplified Chinese.
Chunom.org Online Editor (http://www.chunom.org/ime/), a browser-based editor for typing ch Nm.
Ch Nm fonts include:
VietUnicode, a Unicode font including ch Nm characters. It is hosted at SourceForge. The project's
5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 6/8
main page is http://vietunicode.sourceforge.net/. Downloadable TrueType fonts are available at
http://sourceforge.net/projects/vietunicode/ (download hannom.zip file).
Mojikyo
See also
Chinese family of scripts
Sinoxenic
References
1. ^ B.N. Ngo The Vietnamese Language Learning Framework - Journal of Southeast Asian Language and
Teaching, 2001 "... to a word, is most frequently represented by combining two Chinese characters, one of
which indicates the sound and the other the meaning. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century many major
works of Vietnamese poetry were composed in ch nm, including Truyn Kiu"
2. ^ Hugh Dyson Walker East Asia A New History -2012 Page 262 "...chu nom, Vietnamese transcription, using
Chinese and nom characters for Vietnamese sounds."
3. ^ Hannas: Asia's Orthg DILM Paper - Page 82 Wm. C. Hannas - 1997 "The linguistic defects are the same as
those noted throughout this book for Chinese characters generally, caused by the large number of tokens (some
twenty thousand in chu' nom), the arbitrariness of their composition, and the inconsistent "
4. ^ Lonely Planet Vietnam 10th Edition Page 522 Nick Ray, Yu-Mei Balasingamchow, Iain Stewart - 2009 "For
centuries, the Vietnamese language was written in standard Chinese characters (ch nho). Around the 13th
century, the Vietnamese devised their own writing system called ch nm (or just nm), which was created by
combining two Chinese words or by using single Chinese characters for their phonetic value. Both writing
systems were in use until the 20th century official business and scholarship was conducted in ch nho, while
ch nm was used for popular literature. The Latin-based quc ng script, widely used since WWI, was
developed in the 17th century by Alexandre de Rhodes (see the boxed text, right). Quc ng served to
undermine the position of Mandarin officials, whose power was based on traditional scholarship in ch nho and
ch nm, scripts that were largely inaccessible to the masses."
5. ^ Nguyn nh Ha Vietnamese London Oriental and African Language Library Vol.9. John Benjamins
Publishing Company 1997 Page 6 "1.7 Writing Systems - The language has made use of three different writing
systems: first, the Chinese characters, ... 1.7.1 Ch nho or ch Hn - Chinese written symbols, shared with
Japanese and Koreanthe two other Asian cultures that were ... Indeed from the early days of Chinese rule
(111 B.C. to A.D. 939) the Chinese governors taught the Vietnamese not only Chinese calligraphy, but also the
texts of Chinese history, philosophy and classical literature (while the spoken language ..."
6. ^ Unicode character 21A38 (http://www.unicode.org/cgi-bin/GetUnihanData.pl?codepoint=21A38)
7. ^ Effective Designs of the Computer-Assisted Chinese Learning Program for Beginning Learners of Chinese
Characters MT Lu, G Hallman, J Black 2010 "A character is a logograph used in written Taiwanese (Hanji),
written Japanese (Kanji), written Chinese (Hanzi), written Korean (Hanja), and written Vietnamese (hn t). A
logograph is a grapheme which represents a word or a morpheme."
8. ^ Asian research trends: a humanities and social science review - No 8 to 10 - Page 140 Yunesuko Higashi Ajia
Bunka Kenky Sent (Tokyo, Japan) - 1998 "Most of the source materials from premodern Vietnam are written
in Chinese, obviously using Chinese characters; however, a portion of the literary genre is written in
Vietnamese, using chu nom. Therefore, han nom is the term designating the whole body of premodern written
materials.."
9. ^ Vietnam Courier 1984 Vol20/21 Page 63 "Altogether about 15,000 books in Han, Nom and HanNom have
been collected. These books include royal certificates granted to deities, stories and records of deities, clan
histories, family genealogies, records of cutsoms, land registers, ..."
10. ^ Khc Mnh Trnh, Nghin cu ch Nm: K yu Hi ngh Quc t v ch Nm Vin nghin cu Hn Nm
(Vietnam), Vietnamese Nm Preservation Foundation - 2006 "The Di sn Hn Nm notes 366 entries which are
solely on either medicine or pharmacy; of these 186 are written in Chinese, 50 in Nm, and 130 in a mixture of
the two scripts. Many of these entries ... Vietnam were written in either Nm or Hn-Nm rather than in 'pure'
Chinese. My initial impression was that the percentage of texts written in Nm was even higher. This is
5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 7/8
because for the particular medical subject I wished to investigate-smallpox-the percentage of texts written in
Nom or Hn-Nm is even higher than is the percentage of texts in Nm and Hn-Nm for general medical and
pharmaceutical .."
11. ^ Wynn Wilcox Vietnam and the West: New Approaches 2010- Page 31 "At least one Buddhist text, the C
Chu Php Vn pht bn hnh ng lc (CCPVP), preserves a story in Hn script about the early years of
Buddhist influence in Vietnam and gives a parallel Nm translation."
12. ^ David G Marr Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 1984 p141 "Because the Chinese characters were
pronounced according to Vietnamese preferences, and because certain stylistic modifications occurred over
time, later scholars came to refer to a hybrid "Sino-Vietnamese" (Han-Viet) language. However, there would
seem to be no more justification for this term than for a Fifteenth Century "Latin-English" versus the Latin
written contemporaneously in Rome.8"
13. ^ o Duy Anh: Chng tch xa nht v ch Nm: mt tm bia i L Cao Tng, Nghin cu lch s s 134,
1973.
14. ^ DeFrancis 1977:21-23.
15. ^ Keith Weller Taylor The Birth of Vietnam 1976 - Page 220 "The earliest example of Vietnamese character
writing, as we have noted earlier, is for the words bo and cai in the posthumous title given to Phung Hung.
Although Vietnamese character writing was eventually developed for literary purposes "
16. ^
a

b
DeFrancis 1977:23.
17. ^ Laurence C. Thompson A Vietnamese Reference Grammar 1987 Page 53 "This stele at Ho-thnh-sn is the
earliest irrefutable piece of evidence of this writing system, which is called in Vietnamese ch nm (chu
'written word', nom 'popular language', probably ultimately related to nam 'south'-note that the ..."
18. ^ Wm. C. Hannas Asia's Orthographic Dilemma 1997- Page 83 An exception was during the brief Ho dynasty
(1400-1407), when Chinese was abolished and ch nm became the official script, but the subsequent Chinese
invasion and twenty-year occupation put an end to that (Helmut Martin 1982:34)."
19. ^ Mark W. McLeod, Thi Dieu Nguyen Culture and Customs of Vietnam 2001 Page 68 - "In part because of the
ravages of the Ming occupation the invaders destroyed or removed many Viet texts and the blocks for
printing them the earliest body of nom texts that we have dates from the early post-occupation era ..."
20. ^ DeFrancis 1977:44-46.
21. ^ Wm. C. Hannas (1997). Asia's orthographic dilemma (http://books.google.com/books?
id=aJfv8Iyd2m4C&pg=PA84&dq=vietnamese+alphabet+chinese&hl=en&ei=KYgbTfyWC4H98Aa8xvGbDg&sa
=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=8&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=chinese%20suzerainty%20b
orrowed%20french%20suppress%20the%20script%20nationalist&f=false). University of Hawaii Press. p. 83.
ISBN 0-8248-1892-X. Retrieved 2010-11-28.
22. ^ DeFrancis 1977:179.
23. ^ Cordier, Georges (1935), Les trois critures utilises en Annam: chu-nho, chu-nom et quoc-ngu (confrence
faite l'Ecole Coloniale, Paris, le 28 mars 1925) (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k5658111f/f127),
Bulletin de la Socit d'Enseignement Mutuel du Tonkin 15: 121.
24. ^ David G Marr Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 1984 Page 141/142 "By the same token, some
women developed word skills to the point where they could outmatch any male participants much to the
delight of their peers.9 Partly as a means to capture Vietnamese folklore in writing, the literati gradually
improvised a separate ideographic system to accord with the sounds and syntax of the spoken language.10
known subsequently as nom, this unique Vietnamese script unfortunately remained even more unwieldy than
the Chinese from which it was spawned. Unlike Japanese kana or Korean Hangul/no process of character
simplification that resulted in a basic set of phonemes or syllables. Some of the problem lay in the tonal and
nonagglutinative nature of Vietnamese as contrasted with Japanese or Korean.11 More important, however,
was the attitude of most Vietnamese literati, who continued to regard Chinese as the ultimate in civilized
communication and thus considered nom a form of recreation."
25. ^ Hannas (1997:8081).
26. ^
a

b
Pulleybank, Edwin G. (1991) Lexicon of Reconstructed Pronunciation in Early Middle Chinese, Late
Middle Chinese and Early Mandarin, University of British Colombia Press, ISBN 0-7748-0366-5.
27. ^ chunom.org "This page shows the character sets ordered by frequency." (http://www.chunom.org/charsets/)
28. ^ DeFrancis 1977:101-105.
Further reading
5/13/13 Ch nm - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch_Nm 8/8
Chen, Ching-ho (n. d.). A Collection of Ch Nm Scripts with Pronunciation in Quc-Ng. Tokyo:
Kei University.
DeFrancis, John (1977). Colonialism and Language Policy in Viet Nam . The Hague: Mouton.
Hannas, Wm. C. (1997). Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. Chapter 4, "Vietnamese". Honolulu: University
of Hawaii Press. ISBN 0-8248-1842-3
Nguyn, nh Ho (2001). Chuyn Kho V Ch Nm = Monograph on Nm Characters.
Westminster, CA: Institute of Vietnamese Studies, Viet-Hoc Pub. Dept.. ISBN 0-9716296-0-9
Nguyn, N. B. (1984). The State of Ch Nm 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 "Ch-Nm". Honolulu: Asia Collection,
University of Hawaii.
Schneider, Paul 1992. Dictionnaire Historique Des Idogrammes Vietnamiens / (licenci en droit
Nice, France : Universit de Nice-Sophia Antipolis, R.I.A.S.E.M.)
Zhou Youguang (1998). Bijiao wenzi xue chutan ( "A Comparative Study of
Writing Systems"). Beijing: Yuwen chubanshe.
External links
Nom Preservation Foundation (http://www.nomfoundation.org/)
Ch Nm (http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chunom.htm), Omniglot
T in Hn Nm (http://www.nomna.org/), Nm Na Hanoi
The Vietnamese Writing System (http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writsys/writviet.html), Bathrobe's
Chinese, Japanese & Vietnamese Writing Systems
Ch Nm frequent characters (http://www.chunom.org/pages/)
(Vietnamese) T in Ch Nm Trch Dn (http://viethoc.com/hannom/tdnom_chidan.php), Vin Vit-
Hc
(Vietnamese) Vn ch vit nhn t gc lch s ting Vit (http://ngonngu.net/index.php?
fld=nnh&sub=nguam&pst=cv_lstv_01), Trn Tr Di
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Ch_nm&oldid=554652519"
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