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It has been suggested that this article be merged into Chữ nôm. (Discuss) Proposed since May 2013.

Template:Contains Nom text Hán-Nôm, or Sino-Vietnamese characters, are characters that were commonly used in Vietnam from the second century BC until the early 20th century. The script could be used to write either Classical Chinese ( Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)), or a form of Vietnamese called Nom ( Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)). It includes both Chinese characters and characters based on the principles of Chinese writing, but particular to Vietnam.

Han was used by the court and for other official purposes, following the practice of the Chinese government at that time. The Temple of Literature in Hanoi was the best-known school for the study of Chinese. Students typically studied to pass the civil service examinations so that they might become magistrates.

In Nom, Chinese characters are used to write Vietnamese. A Vietnamese word can be written using a Chinese character for a word with a similar meaning or pronunciation. It is thus an ideographic script, although each character represents only one syllable. Vietnamese is a tonal language, and it has far more distinct syllables than other East Asian languages do. Japanese and Korean, both non-tonal languages, developed phonetic scripts to supplement Chinese-based script long before Vietnam did.

In the 1920s, Han-Nom was replaced by Vietnamese alphabet, a Latin-based script that indicates tone. Unlike South Korea and Japan, modern Vietnam does not require students to study the traditional characters. Fewer than 100 scholars worldwide can read Nom. However, Han-Nom calligraphy remains popular as a home decoration and as a symbol of good luck. The Han-Nom Research Institute in Hanoi, founded in 1970, collects and studies relevant manuscripts. It has also created a standard for computer encoding.

History

Chinese characters were introduced to Vietnam after the Han Empire conquered the country in 111 BC. Independence was achieved in 939, but the Chinese writing system was adopted for official purposes in 1010. A bell engraved in 1076 is the earliest known example of a Nom inscription. Nguyen Thuyen, who composed poetry in the 13th century, is sometimes given credit as the creator of Nom. However, none of his work has survived. The oldest surviving Nom text is the collected poetry of Emperor Tran Nhan Tong written in the 13th century. The Ming occupation of Vietnam (1407-1428) was highly destructive, and few Nom inscriptions survive from earlier times. Nguyen Trai (1380–1442) wrote both Han and Nom literature in the 15th century. Trinh Thi Ngoc Truc, consort of King Le Than Tong, is given credit for a 24,000 character bilingual Han-to-Nom dictionary written in the 17th century.

Unlike Han, Nom was not studied or classified systematically for most of its history. Instead, authors who had studied Chinese applied the principles of Chinese writing to their native language. Although official records were generally kept in Han, Nom was used under two short-lived dynasties, the Ho dynasty (1400-1407) and the Tay Son (1778–1802). In 1838, Jean-Louis Taberd wrote a Nom dictionary that eventually gained wide acceptance and circulation. In 1867, Catholic scholar Nguyen Truong To petitioned King Tu Duc to replace Han with Nom. The king did not consent to this, but he did respond with various efforts to promote Nom. A decree was issued which praised the script as Quốc Âm (the national voice), as opposed to chữ Nôm (chattering).

In the 19th century, there was a flowering of popular literature written in Nom, including such classics as Nguyen Du's The Tale of Kieu and the poetry of Ho Xuan Huong. Although only 3 to 5 percent of the population was literate, nearly every village had someone who could read Nom aloud for the benefit of other villagers.

In Korea and Japan, the traditional writing system was simplified so it could be taught to the general public. These nations created only a few hundred original characters. Vietnam's educated class looked down on Nom as inferior to Han, so it was 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. As in Chinese, a semantic meaning is attributed to every syllable. This characteristic of the language may be can considered a result of the traditional writing system.

As additional characters were created by combining pre-existing elements, Nom grew more complex. One element might suggest Vietnamese pronunciation, while the other could be derived from a Chinese character with similar meaning. 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). The Chinese also combined phonetic and semantic elements to create Han characters in ancient times. As the correspondence between sound and meaning is different in Vietnamese than it is in ancient Chinese, Nom involved the creation of thousands of additional characters. A set of nearly 20,000 characters has been proposed for a computer encoding standard, over 6,000 of these specific to Vietnam.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the French colonial authorities 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 Boi Chau, "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 Khai Dinh declared that the traditional writing system no longer had official status. The civil service exam was given for the last time at the imperial capital of Hue on January 4, 1919. The examination system, and the education system based on it, had been in effect for almost 900 years. China itself abandoned Han soon afterward as part of the May Fourth Movement.

In more recent times, Han-Nom has been a focus of calligraphy. In 2012, manuscripts in Han were translated to support Vietnam's claim to the Paracel Islands.

Most common characters

The following are the fifty most common characters in Nom literature. The modern spelling is given in italics.

• 羅 là to be
• 吧 và and
• 各 các each; every
• 没 một one
• 固 có there is
• 𧵑 của of
• 得 được to get
• 𥪝 trong in
• 𤄯 trong clear
• 𠊛 (or 𠊚) người people
• 忍 những (plural marker)
• 學 học to learn
• 如 như as
• 詞 từ word
• 會 hội to meet
• 咍 hay or; good
• 空 không not
• 体 thể body
• 四 tư four
• 拱 cũng also
• 𠇍 với with
• 朱 cho to give
• 社 xã society, company
• 尼 này, nơi place
• 底 để to place
• 關 quan frontier, barrier, gate
• 觀 quan to see
• 場 trường school
• 本 bản composition
• 𧗱 về to return; about
• 經 kinh classic works
• 行 hàng, hãng, hành, hạnh company, firm
• 航 hàng sail; navigate
• 産 sản to give birth
• 𠚢 ra to get out
• 世 thế world; era
• 替 thế to replace
• 勢 thế position, power; like that, so
• 常 thường frequent; common, normal, usual
• 事 sự matter; event
• 妬 đó there; that
• 濟 tế to run
• 濟 tế border
• 頭 đầu head; top (of a multitude)
• 投 đầu to throw, to send
• 𦓡 mà but
• 恪 khác another; further
• 一 nhất first
• 旦 đến, đán day, morning
• 家 gia home; family.

Han texts

• Nguyễn Trãi, Gia huấn ca ("The Family Training Ode"), a Confucian morality poem written in the 1420s.
• Đặng Trần Côn, Lament of A Soldier's Wife
• Ngô Sĩ Liên, Complete Annals of Dai Viet
• Trần Thế Pháp, Wondrous Tales of Linh Nam
• Lê Quý Đôn, Vân đài loại ngữ (an encyclopedia)
• Lê Quý Đôn, Frontier Chronicles

Nom texts

• 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 Hán-to-Nôm dictionary for Vietnamese speakers.
• Nguyễn Đình Chiểu, Lục Văn Tiên (19th century)
• Đặng Trần Côn, Chinh Phụ Nghâm Khúc (18th century)
• Hồ Xuân Hương (18th century) female poet

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.)

Characters were extracted from the following sources:

1. Hoàng Triều Ân, Tự điển chữ Nôm Tày , 2003.
2. Institute of Linguistics, Bảng tra chữ Nôm , Hanoi, 1976.
3. Nguyễn Quang Hồng, editor, Tự điển chữ Nôm , 2006.
4. Father Trần Văn Kiệm, Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt , 2004.
5. Vũ Văn Kính & Nguyễn Quang Xỷ, Tự điển chữ Nôm , Saigon, 1971.
6. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm miền Nam , 1994.
7. Vũ Văn Kính, Bảng tra chữ Nôm sau thế kỷ XVII , 1994.
8. Vũ Văn Kính, Đại tự điển chữ Nôm , 1999.
9. Nguyễn Văn Huyên, Góp phần nghiên cứu văn hoá Việt Nam , 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		U+5427	V0-3122	G0,J,KP,K,T
傷	⿰忄昜	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)	more, less	U+2B2D9	V4-536F	None
	⿰朝乙	giàu	trào (朝)	wealth	Not assigned	V04-405E	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 (giàu) is specific to the Tay people. It is not yet part of the Unicode character set. It is a variation of 朝, the corresponding character in Vietnamese.

References

1. The character is part of the proposed set for Extension E. See "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E", (N4358-A), JTC1/SC2/WG2, Oct. 10, 2012, p. 5. The V Source V04-5055.
2. Langenscheidt's Pocket Dictionary Vietnamese, p. 126. 2002. "Hán-Nôm Sino-Vietnamese characters."
3. ^ Hoang Trang-Lan Nguyen, "Vietnamese neglect Han-Nom heritage", Viet Nam News, February 14, 2012.
4. ^ Noboyuki, Matsuo, "The Han Nom Institute, Hanoi", Asian Research Trends: a Humanities and Social Science Review Yunesuko Higashi Ajia Bunka Kenkyū Sentā (Tokyo, Japan), 1998, No. 8-10, p. 140, "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."
5. ^ Hanna, Wm C., Asia's orthographic dilemma, University of Hawaii Press (1997), pp. 78-79, 82.
6. "What is Nôm?", Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
7. Trịnh Khắc Mạnh, "Chữ Nôm và kho chữ Hán Nôm mã hóa", Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
8. Template:Vi Trần Nhân Tông, Cư trần lạc đạo phú
9. ^ Mark W. McLeod, Thi Dieu Nguyen, Culture and Customs of Vietnam, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001, p. 68.
10. Viết Luân Chu, Thanh Hóa, thế và lực mới trong thế kỷ XXI, 2003, p. 52
11. ^ Marr, pp. 141. "Some of the problem lay in the tonal and nonagglutinative nature of Vietnamese as contrasted with Japanese or Korean."
12. Taberd, J.L., Dictionarium Anamitico-Latinum, 1838. This is a revision of a dictionary by Pierre-Joseph Pigneau de Béhain published in 1772-1773. A reprint in 1884 was quite successful.
13. Quyen Vuong Dinh, Văn bản quản lý nhà nước và công tác công văn, giấy tờ thời phong kiến Việt Nam, 2002, p. 50. The decree is entitled, Xin khoan dung Quốc Âm ("Please respect the national voice.")
14. Hanna, p. 78.
15. Marr, p. 142.
16. Marr, David, Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945, 1984, pp. 141-142. "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, there was no process of character simplification that resulted in a basic set of phonemes or syllables."
17. Marr, p. 142. "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...Meanwhile, the minority of the literati who took nom writing seriously had to be careful not to offend the fraternity or be accused of subversion through circulating 'vulgar' texts."
18. Hanna, p. 77. "As a matter of fact, Vietnamese is no more monosyllabic than Chinese or other languages....What Vietnamese does share with Chinese is a monosyllabic morphology that, in my view, evolved in both languages under the influence of Chinese characters."
19. ^ Thanh Nhàn Ngô, Manual, the Nôm Na Coded Character Set, Nôm Na Group, Hanoi, 2005. The set contains 19,981 characters.
20. Trần Văn Kiệm's dictionary has a total of 17,761 characters (See "Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán-Việt - Văn phòng Nôm Na".) Lê Quý Ngưu's Đại Tự Điển Chữ Nôm (2007) has over 19,000 characters.
21. A diacritic is off. It should be, Mẹ tôi thường ăn chay ở chùa mỗi chủ Nhật.
22. Châu Trinh Phan, "Monarchy and Democracy", Phan Châu Trinh and His Political Writings, SEAP Publications, 2009, p. 126. This is a translation of a lecture Chau gave in Saigon in 1925. "Even at this moment, the so-called "Confucian scholars (i.e. those who have studied Chinese characters, and in particular, those who have passed the degrees of cử nhân (bachelor) and tiến sĩ ) do not know anything, I am sure, of Confucianism. Yet every time they open their mouths they use Confucianism to attack modern civilization -- a civilization they do not comprehend even a tiny bit."
23. ^ Template:Vi Phùng Thành Chủng, "Hướng tới 1000 năm Thăng Long-Hà Nội", November 12, 2009.
24. "Hoi An to teach calligraphy for free",VietnamNet, 18 July 2011, "Hoi An, a central ancient city recognized as UNESCO’s World Heritage site, will hold free monthly classes on Han – Nom calligraphy to promote its cultural root."
25. "Ancient Han documents on Hoang Sa Islands translated", Viet Nam News, Sept., 27 2012. "Da Nang's Study Encouragement Association introduced ancient documents translated from Han Chinese script into Vietnamese at their new Han Nom centre on Monday."
26. "Comparison of Character Sets", Chunom.org
27. Luong Van Phan, "Country Report on Current Status and Issues of e-government Vietnam – Requirements for Documentation Standards". The character list for the 1993 standard is given in Nôm Proper Code Table: Version 2.1 by Ngô Thanh Nhàn.
28. "Han Unification History", The Unicode Standard, Version 5.0 (2006).
29. ^ Template:Vi Nguyễn Quang Hồng, "Giới thiệu Kho chữ Hán Nôm mã hoá" , Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
30. ^ "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E", (N4358-A), JTC1/SC2/WG2, Oct. 10, 2012.
31. ^ Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies and Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, Kho Chữ Hán Nôm Mã Hoá (2008).
32. Template:Vi Trần Văn Kiệm, Giúp đọc Nôm và Hán Việt , 2004, "Entry càng", p. 290.
33. Hoàng Triều Ân, Tự điển chữ Nôm Tày , 2003, p. 178.
34. The character is part of the proposed set for Extension E. See "Code Charts - CJK Ext. E", (N4358-A), JTC1/SC2/WG2, Oct. 10, 2012, p. 5.
35. Detailed information: V+63830", Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.
    "List of Unicode Radicals", VNPF.
    Kiệm, 2004, p. 424, "Entry giàu."
    Entry giàu", VDict.com.

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.
• Template:Vi Han-Nom Research Institute
• Template:Vi Cách Gõ Chữ Hán Nôm - WinVNKey Software to allow the entry of Han-Nom characters by reading.
• Template:Zh icon 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

Some characters in this article may require the installation of an additional font to display properly:

• Hanamin B  –This Japanese font supports nearly 90,000 characters, including those in Unicode CJK Extension C.
• NomNaTongLight – This font, created by the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, is based on characters found in traditional Vietnamese wood-block prints.
• Han Nom Font Set – This open source font supports over 70,000 Unicode CJK codepoints.
• Fonts for Chu Nom. How to display and use Han-Nom characters.

• Articles to be merged from May 2013
• Chinese characters
• Chinese scripts
• Writing systems
• Chinese language
• Vietnamese writing systems
• Logographic writing systems