Chu nôm
Chữ nôm (in modern quốc ngữ writing; 字喃 in Chinese characters, lit. "southern script") is a classical vernacular script of the Vietnamese language. Based on Chinese characters, it recorded Vietnamese cultural history for a millennium.
Other Vietnamese writing systems based on Chinese characters were the sinicized hán tự and the vernacular chữ nho (字儒).
Due to the 17th century efforts of French Jesuits, notably Alexandre de Rhodes, by the early 20th century the use of chữ nôm gave way to a Roman-style alphabet known as chữ Quốc Ngữ. Although a vast cultural heritage and history remains written in chữ nôm, few Vietnamese today can read it.
After Vietnamese independence from China in 939 CE, scholars began their creation of chữ nôm, an ideographic script that represents Vietnamese speech. For nearly the next 1,000 years — from the 10th century and into the 20th — much of Vietnamese literature, philosophy, history, law, medicine, religion, and government policy was written in Nom script. During the 14 years of the Tây Sơn emperors (1788-1802), all administrative documents were written in chữ nôm. In the 18th century, many notable Vietnamese writers and poets composed their works in chữ nôm, among them Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương.
This heritage is now nearly lost. With the 17th century advent of quốc ngữ — the modern roman-style script — nôm literacy gradually died out. In 1920, the colonial government decreed against its use. Today, fewer than 100 scholars world-wide can read nôm effectively. Much of Vietnam's written history is inaccessible to the 80 million speakers of the language. A few Buddhist monks and the Jing, the Vietnamese living in China, can read nôm to some extent.
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Attribution
Original text provided by the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation, with permission granted to publish this text under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Categories: Logographic writing systems | Vietnamese language