Until the beginning of the 20th century, government and scholarly documents in Vietnam were written in classical Chinese (Vietnamese: c? v?n ?? or v?n ngôn ??), using Chinese characters with Vietnamese approximation of Middle Chinese pronunciations.
At the same time popular novels and poetry in Vietnamese were written in the ch? nôm script, which used Chinese characters for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and an adapted set of characters for the native vocabulary.
The two scripts coexisted until the era of French Indochina when the Latin alphabet qu?c ng? script gradually became the written medium of both government and popular literature.
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Terminology
In Vietnamese, Chinese characters are called ch? Hán (?? "words from Han dynasty"), Hán t? (?? "Han characters/words"), Hán v?n (?? "Han script"), or ch? nho (?? "words of Confucians"). Hán v?n (??) also means Chinese language literature (in this case, Hán v?n literally means 'Han literature').
The Vietnamese word ch? (character, script, writing, letter) is derived from the Old Chinese word ?, meaning 'character'.
Sino-Vietnamese (Vietnamese: t? Hán Vi?t ??? "Sino-Vietnamese words") is a term which is used by modern scholars in relation to Vietnam's Chinese-language texts to emphasise local characteristics and particularly the phonology of the Chinese written in Vietnam, though in regard to syntax and vocabulary this Sino-Vietnamese was no more different from Chinese used in Beijing than medieval English Latin was different from the Latin of Rome.
The term ch? Nôm (?? "Southern characters") refers to the former transcription system for vernacular Vietnamese-language texts, written using a mixture of original Chinese characters and locally coined nôm characters not found in Chinese to phonetically represent Vietnamese sounds." However the character set for ch? nôm is extensive, up to 20,000, and both arbitrary in composition and inconsistent in pronunciation.
Hán Nôm (?? 'Han and ch? Nôm characters') may mean either both Hán and Nôm taken together, as in the research remit of Hanoi's Hán-Nôm Institute, or refer to texts which are written in a mixture of Hán and Nôm, or refer to some Hán texts with parallel Nôm translations. There is a significant orthographic overlap between Hán and Nôm and many characters are used in both Hán and Nôm with the same reading.
The term ch? qu?c ng? (??? "national language script") means Vietnamese written in romanised script.
History
Chinese domination
No writings in Chinese by Vietnamese writers survive from the Chinese domination period.
Imperial Vietnam
In Imperial Vietnam (939-1919), formal writings were, in most cases, done in classical Chinese. This was true both of the language of government and administration, and also of entry into government and administration by the wholly Chinese-language Confucian examination system in Vietnam. Chinese was also the language of medicine, astrology, religion, science and high literature such as poetry. Vietnamese existed only as an oral language, before the creation of the nom script to preserve and circulate less serious poetry and narrative literature. These writings are indistinguishable from contemporaneous classical Chinese works produced in China, Korea, or Japan as are the first poems in ch? nho by the monk Khuông Vi?t (??) and the Nam Qu?c S?n Hà (Hán-Vi?t/Sino-Vietnamese) / Sông núi n??c Nam (Native Vietnamese) / ???? (Hán-Nôm) by general Lý Th??ng Ki?t (???).
Localisation and Sino-xenic pronunciation
In Vietnam, classical Chinese texts were read with the vocalization of Chinese text as such, equivalent to the Chinese On-readings in Japanese kambun (??), or the assimilated vocalizations in Korean hanmun (??). This occurred alongside entry of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into the vernacular Vietnamese language, and created, in Samuel Martin's term, a Sinoxenic dialect. The Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank was the one of the first linguists to actively employ "Sino-Vietnamese" to recover the earlier history of Chinese.
Period of coexistence of two languages and two scripts
From the 13th Century the dominance of Chinese writing - ch? nho - began to be challenged by a system of modified and invented characters modeled loosely on Chinese characters called ch? nôm, which, unlike the system of ch? nho (or ch? Hán), allowed for the expression of purely Vietnamese words, was created in Vietnam at least as early as the 13th century. During the Ming dynasty occupation of Vietnam ch? nôm printing blocks, texts and inscriptions were destroyed, so that the earliest surviving texts are from after the period. While designed for native Vietnamese speakers, ch? nôm required the user to have a fair knowledge of ch? Hán, and thus ch? nôm was used primarily for literary writings by cultural elites (such as the poetry of Nguy?n Du and H? Xuân H??ng), while almost all other official writings and documents continued to be written in classical Chinese until the 20th century.
French colonial period
The use of classical Chinese, and its written form, ch? nho (or ch? Hán), died out in Vietnam early in the 20th century during the middle years of French Indochina. At this time there were briefly four competing writing systems in Vietnam; ch? nho, ch? nôm, qu?c ng?, and French. Although the first romanized script qu?c ng? newspaper, Gia Dinh Bao, was founded in 1865, Vietnamese nationalists continued to use ch? nôm until after the First World War when qu?c ng? became the favoured language of the Vietnamese independence movement. Some scholars still study it today although its application is mostly confined to the historic context of Vietnamese texts.
Usage today
Individual Hán t? are still written by calligraphers for special occasions such as the Vietnamese New Year, T?t.
Use of qu?c ng? for education in both North and South Vietnam from 1945-1975, and then all of Vietnam since 1975, has rendered most Vietnamese unable to read earlier Vietnamese texts, whether written in Chinese ch? nho, or vernacular ch? nôm. Hán Nôm Institute is the national centre for academic research into both Hán and nôm texts. Since the mid-1990s a small resurgence in teaching of Chinese characters, both for ch? nho and the additional characters used in ch? nôm, to enable the study of Vietnam's history has emerged. Additionally, many Vietnamese study Hán t? characters as a part of learning modern Japanese and Chinese, and sometimes Korean. This allows a Vietnamese speaker to learn a word in the target language (represented by Chinese characters) in relation to the Vietnamese cognate reading. The significance of the characters has occasionally entered Western depiction of Vietnam; for instance novelist E. M. Nathanson mentions the characters in A Dirty Distant War (1987).
For linguists the Sino-Vietnamese readings of Chinese characters provide data for the study of historical Chinese phonology.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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