Recently, while browsing Reddit, I encountered several misconceptions held by some Vietnamese individuals regarding Chữ Nôm and Hán Nôm. This has prompted me to address and clarify these common, yet inaccurate, assertions.
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What are Chữ Nôm and Hán Nôm?
· Chữ Nôm (?喃 - The Southern Script) is a logographic writing system derived from and based on Chinese characters (Hán). It was created to represent purely Vietnamese words and sounds by either borrowing existing characters for their sound or meaning, or by constructing completely new characters not found in the standard Chinese lexicon. For example, the character "?" (meaning 'word' or 'script' itself, pronounced chữ in Vietnamese) is a Nôm creation and does not exist in standard Chinese. · Hán Nôm (漢喃) refers to the combined use of both Hán (classical Chinese) and Nôm scripts within a single text or literary tradition.
2. Chữ Nôm looks like Chinese characters = Chinese = Mandarin = People's Republic of China. This is a significant misunderstanding. While Chữ Nôm bears a strong visual resemblance to Chinese characters due to their shared structural principles, their purposes and origins are distinct. Chữ Nôm was developed specifically for writing the Vietnamese language.
Furthermore, I recall an insightful comment from a Quora user: Modern China or the Chinese people do not hold exclusive "ownership" over Chinese characters. The traditional Chinese characters (Phồn thể / 繁體) were historically used to write Classical Chinese (Văn ngôn / 文言), which served as the lingua franca across the entire East Asian cultural sphere, including Vietnam. One could even argue that by adopting Simplified Chinese characters and Mandarin as the national standard, modern China has, in a cultural-linguistic sense, distanced itself from the very script it claims to own.
3. Chữ Quốc Ngữ is easier to learn => It solved illiteracy => It is superior => Chữ Nôm is inferior. In my view, this is only half true, and the perceived shortcomings are not inherent flaws of Chữ Nôm itself. I readily acknowledge the strengths and immense utility of Chữ Quốc Ngữ, its simplicity and role in mass literacy are undeniable. However, comparing Chữ Nôm and Chữ Quốc Ngữ is akin to comparing Pinyin to Chinese characters; they are different types of systems with respective strengths and weaknesses. Chữ Nôm's complexity stems from its nature as a logographic system, capable of conveying meaning directly through its glyphs, much like Hán characters. Its perceived difficulty does not equate to inferiority.
4. One must know Mandarin Chinese to learn Chữ Nôm. This assertion lacks understanding. If we follow this logic (interpreting "Chinese" here as Mandarin), then the Japanese would arguably be the most proficient Mandarin speakers, which is not the case. Vietnamese possesses its own unique, standardized Sino-Vietnamese (Hán-Việt) reading system for these characters. Therefore, learning Chữ Nôm is fundamentally based on understanding these Hán-Việt readings and the structure of the characters, not on learning modern spoken Mandarin.
Conclusion: I want to reiterate that my intention is not to deny the advantages and historical contributions of Chữ Quốc Ngữ. Rather, I seek to clarify the record and dispel these common misconceptions about Chữ Nôm. I firmly believe that Chữ Nôm was not an inherently "bad" script. It was fully capable of serving as Vietnam's primary writing system, provided it had undergone comprehensive standardization and simplification.
For reference, here is a proposed standardizatiom table (https://www.hannom-rcv.org/BCHNCTD.html) and an excerpt from Truyện Kiều that I transcribed using a personal, informal simplified Nôm script I developed in my spare time. This is merely to illustrate what a potential simplified Nôm script could look like. (Please do not take the image too seriously; it was a casual endeavor and not a rigorously academic proposal).
