Nôm - Simple English Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

Language issues

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Chinese characters are used to write various languages in China and elsewhere, including Mandarin, the most widely spoken language in China, Cantonese, spoken in Hong Kong and southern China, and Classical Chinese, traditionally used for formal writing. The characters were formerly used in Korea and Vietnam. Japan uses a mix of Chinese characters and native phonetic script. Even characters that retain their original meaning in all languages may be read in various ways. The character 十 is given as shí in Chinese Romanization (pinyin), jū in Japanese Romanization (Hepburn), sip in Korean Romanization (Revised Romanization), and thập in the Han-Viet system used in Vietnam. In all these languages, the meaning of the character is “ten.”

Syntax

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Modifiers normally come before the noun in Chinese, but follow the noun in vernacular Vietnamese. Chinese texts published in Vietnam often included a line-by-line translation into Nôm.[note 1] Even when the same characters appear in both languages, the order is different. Many Chinese phrases gained currency as loan words. Later, the word order could be reversed to correspond to normal Vietnamese syntax. The word "Vietnam" is from the Chinese Nányuè (南越), meaning “Southern Yue”. In Han-Viet, the same characters are read as Nam Việt. The word order was reversed in modern times. In Chinese, the phrase “Chinese characters” is written 漢字. This is romanized as hànzì in pinyin, kanji in Japanese, hanja in Korean, and Hán tự in Han-Viet. In modern Vietnamese, they are chữ Hán.

Character construction

[change | change source] Main article: Sino-Vietnamese characters

The majority of the characters used in Nôm are of Chinese origin and are composed phonosemantically. For example, the character "喃" is read as "Nôm", whose phonetic component "南" is similar to the Cantonese pronunciation Naam4 and means “chattering.”[note 2] This rule is consistent in all Chu Nôm characters as all Vietnamese-made characters are composed using this method. The word "Nôm" does not have any negative connotation in Vietnamese, but rather suggests plain talk, something easy to understand.[7]

Nôm includes thousands of characters not found in Chinese. In contrast, Japan developed only a few hundred kokuji, and Korea just a handful of rarely used gukja. These characters were created by authors who combined pre-existing elements. One element, called the semantic component, indicates the character's meaning, either pictographically or ideographically. The other element, called the phonetic component, gives pronunciation. For example, the reading ba is indicated by the character 巴. In Mandarin, this character has the same pronunciation as in Vietnamese, but its meaning is unrelated: "to long for." For the character 𠀧 (⿺巴三), the character 三 which means "three" is added as the semanic component. "Father" is also ba, but written as 爸 (⿱父巴). "Turtle" is con ba ba (昆蚆蚆; ⿰虫巴). Most Chinese characters were created by the same method. As the correspondence between sound and meaning is compounded in Vietnamese-created characters than it is in Chinese characters, the same approach resulted in two distinctions between Nôm characters; chữ Nôm (字喃; native characters) and Hán Nôm (漢喃; Han characters).[8]

Of the 9,299 Nôm Ideographs, nearly half are specific to Vietnam. Each character has a codepoint assigned by Unicode. The characters for the V0, V1, and V2 sets were extracted from two Nôm dictionaries published in the 1970s.[note 3][9] The V3 characters were extracted from manuscripts.

Nôm Ideographs
Ideograph	Semanticcomponent	Phoneticcomponent	Reading	English	Status in Chinese	Codepoint	V Source	Total in set
𠊚	人	㝵	người	people	None	U+2029B	V0	2,246
𤤰	王	布	vua	king[note 4]	None	U+24930
妖	女	夭	yêu	to love[note 5]	GB 2312	U+5996	V1	3,311
越	走	戉	Việt	Vietnamese	GB 2312	U+8D8A
𠶡	口	𥐧	trối	dying wish	None	U+20DA1	V2	3,205
㐱	人	彡	chỉn or xỉn	Used in bủn xỉn (stingy)	HDZ, Kangxi	U+3431
𡮲	小	詩	thơ	early childhood	None	U+21BB2	V3	535
𧹼	赤	都	đỏ	red[note 6]	None	U+27E7C
Key: GB 2312-80 is the basic character set for modern Chinese. HDZ (Hanyu Da Zidian) and the Kangxi Dictionary are comprehensive Chinese character dictionaries. Sources: The Unicode Consortium & 1991-2013 harvnb error: no target: CITEREFThe_Unicode_Consortium1991-2013 (help), The Unicode Consortium 2012. The readings are from the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation.