CHỮ NÔM or the Former Vietnamese Script and Its Past Contributions to Vietnamese Literature – Section 1

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Nguyễn Khắc-Kham^*

    Chữ Nôm (Chữ ‘script,’ and nôm /nam ‘south, Vietnamese’) is the name given by the Vietnamese to one of their two former systems of writing created by the modification of the Chinese characters. It was called so, as opposed both to Chữ Hán or the Han Chinese script¹ and to Chữ Nho or the script of Vietnamese confucianist scholars. In the latter connotation, it means the demotic or vulgar script in traditional Vietnam.²

The Birth of Nom script^**

   The date of its invention has not been so far established beyond controversy. According to Ngô Thì Nhậm 吴 時 任 (1726-1780) “our National language was most used from Thuyên.”³ Thuyên was Nguyễn Thuyên 阮 詮, a scholar who lived at the end of the thirteenth century, under the Trần dynasty. “He received his doctorate under the reign of Emperor Trần Thái Tôn 陳 太 宗 (1225-1257). In the fall of 1282, while holding the post of Minister of Justice, he was commissioned by Emperor Trần Nhân Tôn 陳 仁 宗 to write a message to a crocodile which had come to the Red River. After his writing drove the animal away, the emperor allowd him to change his family name from Nguyễn 阮 to Hàn 韓, because a similar incident had occurred before in China to the poet-scholar Hàn Yu 韓 愈 (768-824). The anecdote was related in Khâm định Việt-sử Thông-giám Cương mục 欽 定 越 史 通 鑑 綱 目, b.7 p.26a⁴ according to which, Hàn Thuyên was skilled in writing Shih fu, and many people took model after him.⁵

    On the basis of these facts, Hàn Thuyên was claimed to be the inventor of Chữ Nôm. Such was the opinion of P. Pelliot⁶ and H. Maspero. The latter who shared P. Pelliot‘s views, also mentioned a stele discovered in Hộ Thành sơn, Ninh Bình province, North Vietnam.⁷ This stele bore an inscription dating from the year 1343 and on which could be read twenty Vietnamese village and hamlet names in Chữ Nôm.

    The above hypothesis has not been accepted without reserve by other scholars. Nguyễn văn Tố presumed that Chữ nôm had probably existed as early as at the end of the eighth century when the title of Bố Cái Ðại Vương 布 蓋 大 王 (Father and mother of the people) was given by his successor and his subjects to Phùng Hưng, who, in 791, overthrew the then Chinese governor and seized upon the Protectorate of Annam.⁸ Such was also the opinion of Dương Quảng Hàm in his Short history of Vietnamese literature.⁹

    A third hypothesis was advanced in 1932 by another Vietnamese scholar, Sở Cuồng, who tried to prove that Chữ Nôm dated back from Shih-Hsieh 士 燮 (187-226 A.D.). His arguments rested mainly on a statement by a Vietnamese confucianist scholar under the reign of Emperor Tự-Ðức, known under the name of Nguyễn văn San 阮 文 珊 and the pseudonym of Văn-Ða cư-sĩ 文 多 居 士. In his book entitled Ðại-Nam Quốc-ngữ 大 南 國 語, this scholar stated that Shih Wang , was the first to try translating Chinese Classics into Vietnamese by using the Chinese characters as phonetic symbols to transcribe Vietnamese native words. Among the difficulties allegedly encountered by Shih Hsieh in his attempts, he quoted two examples: sui chiu 雎 鳩, (the osprey) and yang táo 羊 桃, (tha carambola or willow peach), to which he did not know what kind of bird and what kind of fruit might correspond in Vietnamese. Sở Cuồng subscribed to Văn-Ða cư-sĩ’s opinion, although he regretted that this author did not give any references to his statement. In support of it, he put forward the following arguments:

1)  At the time of Shih Hsieh, when the first Vietnamese made Chinese studies, they could understand only through the Vietnamese language and their Chineses teachers must have used such Chinese characters as having sounds similar to the Vietnamese words to teach the Vietnamese how to read some Chinese characters. On the other hand, as the Chinese sounds and symbols could not transcribe all the Vietnamese native words, the then Vietnamese students must have tried to fill the vacancies by combining together various components of the Chinese characters to form new characters on the basis of such principles of Chinese writing as Hsiai shêng, chiah chieh, and hui-i. It is in this way that Chữ Nôm was likely to have been devised.

2) Furthemore, Shih Hsieh was a native of Kuang-Hsin 廣 信, where, according to the Ling wai tai ta 嶺 外 代 答, by Chu ch’u Fei 嶺 外 代 答, under the Sung , there had existed from the remotest times, a local script very similar to the Vietnamese chữ Nôm. For instances,  ([1] = small) and   ([2] = quiet).

[1]:      [2]: 

3) The two Vietnamese 布 Bố, father and 蓋 Cái, mother as found in the posthumous title of Bố-Cái Ðại-Vương bestowed upon Phùng-Hưng were historically the earliest evidences for the use of chữ Nôm in the eighth century. Later, under the Ðinh, Ðại Cồ Việt, the official name of the then Vietnam included also a nôm character 瞿 Cồ. Under the Trần there was a very common use of Chữ Nôm as evidenced by the practice of the then Court Minister called Hành Khiển , who used to annotate royal decrees with Chữ nôm so as to make them better understood by the people.¹⁰

    All the views as just outlined above have each some good points. However, anyone is authoritative enough to be adopted as conclusive on the date of the invention of Chữ nôm.

    In fact, Chữ Nôm, far from being devised by an individual sometimes in Vietnamese history, should be rather considered as the product of many centuries of patient and obscure elaboration. Such is the most reasonable conclusion mostly reached by scholars quite recently dealing with research on Chữ Nôm.

   As previously defined, Chữ Nôm consisted essentially of Vietnamese adaptation of borrowed Chinese characters. Accordingly, its invention could be realized only at a stage when the knowledge of Chinese characters had been enough wide-spread in Vietnam.

    The first Vietnamese who commanded the use of Chinese characters were a few entirely sinicized intellectuals. Such was the case with Lý-Tiến 李 進, Lý Cầm 李 琴, Trương Trọng 張 重 (second century A.D.). Later, some of these intellectuals came to make poetries and prosa poetries in Chinese after the Chinese models. Such was the case with Phùng Ðái Tri 馮 戴 知 whose poetic compostion was lauded by the Chinese emperor Kao Tsu of T’ang (618-626), Khương Công Phụ 姜 公 輔 a prosa-poetry of whom can still be found in Chinese anthologies.¹¹

    During the period from the Han to the T’ang some Chữ Nôm patterns might have been devised to represent some native words especially the names of places, persons and official titles in Vietnam. Only a few remains of these attempts have subsisted so far.

    Such are 布 Bố and 蓋 Cái transcribed by two Chinese characters whose Vietnamese reading is similar to the sounds of the two corresponding Vietnamese native words.

   From the tenth century to the thirteenth century, although the Vietnamese had gained back their national independence from China, the Chinese script always enjoyed an exclusive privilege strengthened by the system of civil service examination patterned after the Chinese system.¹² For that reason, Vietnamese intellectuals continued to express their thoughts and feelings in Chinese characters. Not only poetries, prosapoetries and historical records but also royal edicts, memorials to the Kings, laws, and regulations etc… were written in Chinese characters. However, all of these Vietnamese writings in the Chinese script might have been not the same as those of the first Vietnamese intellectuals mentioned above. The form was Chinese but the substance was Vietnamese. In another respect, various genres of Chinese literature in which Vietnamese writers tried their hands were definitive acquisitions for the forthcoming Vietnamese literature in Chữ Nôm. As far as the Nôm script is especially concerned, the official use of the two Nôm characters 蓋 Bố and 蓋 Cái late in the eighth century and that of the Nôm character Cồ in the tenth century are fair indications that some patterns of Chữ Nôm were devised by the Vietnamese at the latest from the eighth to the tenth century.

   Besides such nôm characters as Bố, Cái, Cồ, others might have been created about at the same periods both by the phonetic and by the semantic use of Chinese characters. For example, Vietnamese native words một (one), and ta (I, we) are respectively transcribed by Chinese characters and with their phonetic reading. Vietnamese native words, cày, cấy, ruộng, bếp are respectively transcribed by Chinese characters 耕, 稼, 田, 灶, and with their semantic reading.¹³ As to such other more refined patterns of Chữ Nôm as those coined on the basis of the principles of Chinese writing hui-i and hsieh-shêng, they must have been invented only later, probably after the Sino-Vietnamese had taken a definitive shape.¹⁴

    To summarize, Chữ Nôm was not invented overnight to be put at the disposal of Hàn Thuyên for writing poetry and prosa poetry but its formation process must have stretched over many centuries by starting at the latest from the eighth century before reaching a certain degree of completion under the Trần . It was later improved successively by its users from the Lê, to the Nguyễn before attaining to a relative fixity in such a popular long narrative poems as Kim Vân Kiều 金 雲 翹 and Lục Vân Tiên 蓼 雲 仙 etc…

… continue in section 2 …

SEE MORE:
◊  CHỮ NÔM or the Former Vietnamese Script and Its Past Contributions to Vietnamese Literature – Section 2.
◊  CHỮ NÔM or the Former Vietnamese Script and Its Past Contributions to Vietnamese Literature – Section 3.

NOTES:
¹  Việt Hán Từ Ðiển Tối Tân 越 漢 辭 典 最 新, Nhà sách Chin Hoa, Saigon 1961, page 549: Nôm = 喃 字{意 印 < 南 國 的 字 >}. 
²  Việt Nam Tự Ðiển, Hội Khai-Trí Tiến-Ðức Khởi-Thảo, Saigon Hanoi, Văn Mới 1954. 370: Nôm = Tiếng nói thông thường của dân Việt Nam đối với chữ Nho. 
³  Ngô Thì Nhậm 吳 時 任, Hải Ðông chí lược “ 海 東 誌 略 ”. 
⁴ Nguyễn Ðình Hoà, Chữ Nôm, The Demotic System of Writing in Vietnam, Journal of the American Oriental Society. Volume 79, Number 4, Oct. Dec. 1959. page 271. 
⁵  阮詮海陽青林人善為詩賦人多效之後為國音詩曰韓律者以此 [Nguyen Thuyen of Thanh Lam district, Hai Duong province, was good at poetry, many people imitated and later wrote the national poem.] ( 欽定越史通鑑綱目). 
⁶  P. Pelliot, “Première étude sur les sources Annamites de l’histoire d’Annam.” B.E.F.O. t. IV, page 621, note. 
⁷  H. Maspero, “Etudes sur la phonétique historique de la langue Annamite. Les initiales” B.E.F.O, t. XII, no 1, page 7, note 1. 
⁸  Nguyễn Văn Tố “Phan Kế Bính Việt Hán Văn Khảo, Etudes sur la littérature Sino-Annamite 2 edit.” (Hanoi, Editions du Trung-Bắc Tân Văn, 1930 in 8, 175 p.) B.E.F.O, t. XXX, 1930, No. 1-2 Janvier-Juin, pp 141-146. 
⁹  Dương Quảng Hàm, Việt Nam Văn-Học Sử-Yếu, in lần thứ bảy, Bộ Quốc Gia Giáo Dục, Saigon 1960 page 101. 
¹⁰  Sở Cuồng, “Chữ nôm với chữ Quốc Ngữ.” Nam Phong, No 172, Mai 1932, pp. 495-498. 
¹¹  Nguyễn Ðổng Chi, Việt Nam Cổ Văn Học Sử, Hàn Thuyên, Hanoi, 1942, pp. 87-91. 
¹²  The earliest session of civil service examination in Vietnam dated from 1075 under Lý Nhân Tôn (1072-1127). See Trần Trọng Kim, Việt Nam Sử Lược, in lần thứ Nhất Trung Bắc Tân Văn, Hanoi 1920, page 81. 
¹³  Nguyễn Quang Xỹ, Vũ Văn Kính, Tự-Ðiển Chữ Nôm, Trung Tâm Học Liệu, Saigon 1971. 
¹⁴  H. Maspero, “Le dialecte de Tch’ang Ngan”, B.E.F.O, 1920. Mineya Toru, 三根谷徹, 越南漢字音の研究 [Nghiên cứu âm đọc chữ Hán ở Việt Nam], 東洋文庫, 昭和 47 年 3 月 25日.

NOTES:
* Nguyễn Khắc Kham (23/12/1910, Hanoi – ), pen-names Lãng Xuyên and Lãng Hồ, Professor Emeritus, holds a Licence ès-Lettres (Sorbonne, France, 1934) and a Licence en Droit (Faculty of Law, Paris, 1934), taught at Gia-Long, Thăng-Long, Văn-Lang, Hoài-Ðức (private High Schools), and Chu Văn-An (public High School) in Hanoi (1937-1946), taught at the University of Hanoi, Faculty of Letters (1952-1954), and Pétrus Ký and Chu Văn-An (public High Schools) in Saigon, professor at the University of Saigon, Faculty of Letters and Faculty of Pedagogy (1954-1967), was visiting professor at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (1967-1973), served as a Visiting Researcher at Ostasiatisches Seminar, Frankfurt (1966-1967), and as an acting Director of the Institute for Historical Researches; Director of Cultural Affairs; Secretary General of the Vietnamese National Commission for UNESCO; Director of National Archives and Libraries, was awarded the Education and Culture Medal by the Vietnamese Ministry of Education, was a member of Advisory Board of Southeast Asia, an International Quarterly, Southern Illinois University (SIU) at Carbondale (1969-1974), was successively Research Associate at the Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies and the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, University of California at Berkeley (1982-1991), has been a member of I.S.A. (Independent Scholars of Asia, a non-profit, non-partisan, professional organization), Berkeley, California in USA (1982-2000), and a member of the Board of Advisors at the Institute of Vietnamese Studies, Garden Grove, California (1982-today).

** The title of sections, bold textes and featured sepia image has been set by Ban Tu Thu – thanhdiavietnamhoc.com
◊  Source: Institute of Sino-Nom studies.

BAN TU THƯ
03 /2020