74 replies to this topic

[General_Zhaoyun]

I'm not well-informed about the history of Vietnamese writing. What I know was that Vietnam had been ruled by China for 1000 years and they had used chinese characters in their writing, showing the large influence of culture from China.

Since when did the vietnamese change their writing from "chinese characters" to the use of roman alphabets (romanization)? Was it due to the french occupation during the 19th century?

Please tell me more about the history, including when they started adopting chinese characters, and then later change to roman.

[Yun]

Besides using Chinese characters, the Vietnamese also used chu nom, a form of modified Chinese characters that were used to write indigenous Vietnamese words, something like the use of hiragana and some kanji in Japan. However, in the early 20th century Vietnamese intellectuals promoted the use of quoc ngu (romanised Vietnamese). At about the same time, Chinese nationalists and intellectuals like Sun Yat-sen and Lu Xun were also favouring the romanisation of Mandarin Chinese. It is one of the accidents of history that this in the end happened for Vietnamese but not for Chinese. Perhaps one reason is that the range of regional dialects for Chinese is far wider than the north-south differences in Vietnamese pronunciation.

[General_Zhaoyun]

south = 4 tones, no v and z , only d (=y in chinese)

Please elaborate that.. do you mean southern vietnamese tones?

[meifeng]

The Vietnamese language was romanised with French colonialism (Quoc Ngu), for the ease of French administrators to learn the language. Actually, I was told that although similiarities can indeed be seen between Chinese and Vietnamese, Vietnamese did develop locally. And in a way, the Quoc Ngu introduced by the French was a blessing, as often, the Vietnamese could not find parallels in the Chinese language to express themselves; also, the Chinese language is very hard to pick up, and only limited to select people, i.e. the Mandarins.

The Vietnamese language as spoken today is divided into the Northern and Southern dialect (rumour has it that Central Vietnam has a dialect of its own as well, but I'm not sure), and if I'm not wrong, the South has 5 tones, and the North has 6 tones. (but I could have remembered it wrongly) It's more like Cantonese actually.

[AhMan]

The shift to Romanized character of Vietnamese had contributed to the birth of jianti (simplified form) of Chinese characters. It encouraged the Chinese government to carry out the reform and it was probably used to scare off the conservatives who still wanted to use the繁體 traditional form( like: either we romanize chinese or we simplify it, make your choice!)
According to many Vietnamese as well as foreign linguisticians there are 3 main dialects in Vietnam, North, South and Middle. We can see a continous, fluid change of tones from North to South. To me, it seems each dialect is strongly influenced by the minorities in each region. Southern is strongly influenced by Cham, Hua (Guangdong and Fujian), Middle is influenced by Cham and Hua in which Cham plays a greater role. Northern is influenced by Tai, Miao, Yao, mandarin hua, Hokkien hua and GuangDong hua.

[AhMan]

according to many historical sources, Nanyue officers developed some characters to describe and to pronoune their local things and names as early as 6th century during Sui and Tang dynasty. In Vietnam it was called Chu Num (Southern character) or Nan zi. The Chu Num was first used in Vietnamese recordings in 6th century (with less evidence) and officially used for the first time in 10th century. It was not popular until the Le founded their dynasty. During Nguyen dynasty it was still popular but was forbidden to be used in exam or in any official writing. It was preferred in composing poems though. It was during Nguyen dynasty that standard Mandarin writing was intensified. Most people failed exams because they failed to write Chinese character correctly or the characters belong to forbidden ones since they were the names of royals.
It is a bless that Vietnamese switched to romanized since it was often said that if you wanted to master Chinese it would take 20 years for a normal person to do it.
There were attempts to create more characters to eventually replace all Chinese characters but it was never completed.

[Yun]

Around the beginning of the third century, Si Nhiep (Shi nie) and his brothers ruled Jiaozhi (Noth VN), Hepu (Zhuang, Guangxi), Rinan (Central of VN) and created a writing system based on Han zi

Shi Xie (Si Nhiep) was the Wu governor of Jiaozhou (which included all the territory once ruled by Zhao Tuo as Nan-Yue, as far as Guangzhou) from 196 to 226, the last years of the Eastern Han and the first years of the Wu. He came from a family of officials of Chinese descent whose ancestors had integrated to Viet society in the early 1st century. He was appointed prefect of Jiaozhi (at Hanoi) in 187, and when his superior Zhu Fu, the Han governor of Jiaozhou, was murdered by the people for his corrupt deeds in 196, Shi Xie seized power. He appointed his three brothers as prefects of the surrounding prefectures, and himself got recognition by the Han court as governor of Jiaozhou. For 30 years, he was a sort of local king who nominally was loyal to the Wu regime, but lived in great luxury and prestige.

Shi Xie is one of the few people who are revered by both the Chinese and Vietnamese. He was a good administrator and a dedicated scholar who is credited with teaching and civilising the Viet people using his knowledge of Han culture and rituals, but the Vietnamese also consider him to be one of them. He is referred to in Viet chronicles as "Si Vuong" (King Shi).

[Karakhan]

Examples of Chu Nom with Vietnamese pronunciation and meaning


more..
http://www.omniglot....ting/chunom.htm

[lobster]

Hey, the Chu Nom looks like the newer Chinese characters which are created using the radical-phonetic system, where half of the character has the meaning and half the sound. E.g. the Chu Nom for father is the Cha sound on top to represent the sound, the chinese char. for father on the bottom to represent the meaning.

[Kulong]

If anyone's interested, there is a Nom Preservation Foundation out there

http://www.nomfoundation.org/

and they offer a "Nom Lookup Tool" where you can find the Nom character by typing in Quoc Ngu, Mandarin, Cantonese, English... etc.

[AhMan]

I recognize that many words actually originated from ancient Chinese pronunciation but was corrupted into local pronunciation and become native word.
For example: nam (year) should be a corruption of nian
song (river) is the precursor of jiang
sat (ion) is the corruption of tie