The different systems of writing of Vietnam

The different systems of writing of Vietnam
By Chu Nho
Did the Vietnamese people have their own system of writing before their cultural contact with China? This is a question which archaeology and linguistics have also so far been unable to answer.
During the centuries of Chinese occupation, Chinese was in Vietnam, as Latin in medieval France, the only written language, used in official documents as well as literary works. The Chinese characters were called "Chu Nho", which literally means "the scholars' script". Although written in the purest tradition of Chinese calligraphy, the Chinese characters received, however, a distinctly Vietnamese pronunciation, which enriched the Vietnamese spoken language with newly-coined Sino-Vietnamese words. A great number of Chinese words. mostly philosophical terms, were thus adopted.

"Chu Nom"
The first stage of Vietnam's linguistic or rather scriptural "liberation" from China began in the mid-13th century with the development of a new system of writing which, although still based on the Chinese characters, was specifically Vietnamese, the "Chu Nom" (literally "the vulgar system of writing "). Under this system, each Vietnamese word was transcribed by the combination of two Chinese ideograms, one used for phonetization purposes, the other to indicate the meaning.
The knowledge of Chinese was still necessary to understand "Chu Nom". Furthermore, there were no fixed and strict rules in the combination of Chinese characters, which often led to several different possible interpretations of the same word.
In spite of all these shortcomings, during six centuries, the "Chu Nom" was to be used as a literary language alongside the "Chu Nho". Han Thuyen, a mandarin and poet of the 13th century was a pioneer in its literary use.
"Quoc Ngu"
A true linguistic revolution took place in the 17th century with the "romanisation" of the Vietnamese language. The name of the French Jesuit missionary Alexandre de Rhodes, from Avignon, is generally associated with the invention of " Quoc Ngu " (literally "national script") using the Roman alphabet.
The first printed work in "quoc ngu" was Alexandre de Rhodes' Cathechismus published in Rome in 1649. But the development of the new script was in fact a collective undertaking which started in the early 16th century. Several generations of Catholic missionaries, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, took part in this undertaking. Although not often mentioned, the contribution of Vietnamese scholars, mostly Catholic catechists, was certainly not negligible.
The "quoc ngu" was codified in the late 17th century but it was not until the early part of the 20th century that it was definitely adopted and gradually superseded the "chu nho" and "chu nom".

Modern written Vietnamese

Modern written Vietnamese
By Sonny Nguyen 
More than once, I have been asked to write my name in "real Vietnamese" and not in "English". Most Americans expect the written Vietnamese to look like the Chinese characters, or the written Korean, or the Japanese Hira-gana and Kata-gana. My "English" name is actually written in the modern romanized Vietnamese - the Japanese equivalent is Romaji - without the diacritical marks above, under or by the side of the vowels.
In the long history of Vietnam, different forms of written languages have been adopted: chu Nho, chu Nom, and now chu Quoc Ngu.
Chu Nho was borrowed directly from the Chinese, just like the use of Latin in Europe. Chu Nho can be literally translated as "the script used by Confucius --Nho Giáo: Confucianism." Chu Nho had been the official written language in Vietnam until the French domination (19th century)
Chu Nom: Han Thuyen, a famous Vietnamese poet in the 13th century is believed to be the inventor of this form of writing. Chu Nom borrowed Chinese characters but altered them to phonetically represent the spoken Vietnamese. Usually two Chinese characters were combined; the unaltered one represented the meaning, the altered character showed how the word was pronounced in Vietnamese. It is a cumbersome process so Chu Nom can be literally translated as "vulgar." The development of Chu Nom satisfied the historical urge of the Vietnamese to have their own written language, and to neutralize or to erase the 1,000 years of Chinese domination. Outstanding masterpieces of the Vietnamese literature had been written in Chu Nom: "Chinh Phu Ngam" (Ballad of a Warrior's Wife) by Doan Thi Diem, "Cung Oan Ngam Khuc" (Elegy of an Odalisque) by Nguyen Gia Thieu, and "Kim Van Kieu" by Nguyen Du (1765-1820).
In Japan Hira-gana and Kata-gana have been developed under similar cultural environment. Unlike chu Nom that did not get the support from Vietnamese Kings, Hira-gana and Kata-gana evolved into the Japanese written languages replacing Chinese character.
The introduction of Christianity into Vietnam (17th century) and the French domination in the 19th century facilitated the emergence of a new form of written Vietnamese: the romanized Quoc Ngu.
1- The development of Quoc Ngu:
Around the 16th and 17th centuries, Catholic priests developed romanized scripts for different Asian languages in order to translate prayers and catechism for their missionary works. In 1548, a Japanese convert Yajiro began the romanization of the Japanese language. In Hoi An (Faifoo) there was a small community of Japanese merchants and the Catholic priests used the romanized Japanese catechism to teach the Bible to that community. It was a short jump from "romaji" to romanize the Vietnamese language; thus the Vietnamese Quoc Ngu was created. Although the romanized Vietnamese was the result of international and collective undertaking, Father Alexendre de Rhodes, a French Jesuit priest, has been widely considered as the inventor of Quoc Ngu when he published the Portuguese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary in 1651.
While the romanization of the written languages received only a reserved welcome in China and in Japan, Quoc Ngu became an extraordinary success in Vietnam. It ultimately replaces both chu Nho and Chu Nom. It has served as catalyst for the revolutionary nationalist movements to overthrow the French domination. Quoc Ngu evolves into the driving forces for social, cultural and political revolutions in Vietnam in the 20th century.
2- THE ROLE OF QUOC NGU IN MODERN HISTORY OF VIETNAM
After nearly 3 decades of war, the French colonialist completely conquered Vietnam in 1884. Under the French domination, Quoc ngu had been taught as an "elective language" in VIETNAM besides French since 1906. Divide to conquer, the French split VIETNAM into three separated states. They directly ruled Cochinchina (South Vietnam) as a colony; Annam (Central Vietnam) remained as an autonomous kingdom under the Nguyen dynasty while Tonkin (North Vietnam) became a French protectorate.
In 1908, the Royal Court in Hue created the Ministry of Education to implement the Quoc ngucurriculum in public schools. Not until 1919, did the Royal Court recognize Quoc ngu as the official national written language. (the literal translation of quoc ngu is national language)
The Vietnamese revolutionaries also considered Quoc ngu as a powerful vehicle to erase illiteracy, to educate the mass, and to fight the French in the cultural front. In 1906, Phan Boi Chau -a distinguished scholar and revolutionary in exile in Japan- sent a clandestine manifesto to Vietnam urging the Vietnamese people to develop an universal education system using Quoc Ngu. The popular national literacy campaign was actually a nationalist political movement in disguise. Private schools had been opened teaching Quoc Ngu. The most famous one was Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc in Hanoi. The French closed the school a few years later under the suspicion that the students learned more about revolutionary ideas than conventional knowledge.
Graduates from Catholic schools were the first Vietnamese scholars who laid the foundation for Quoc Ngu; the most well known were Petrus Truong Vinh Ky and Paulus Huynh Tinh Cua. They converted Vietnamese masterpieces from chu Nho and chu Nom to Quoc Ngu. They also translated a vast amount of French literary works into Quoc Ngu. Paulus Cua composed the first Vietnamese dictionary in Quoc Ngu. Other scholars expanded and refined Quoc ngu into a practical and effective written language. Researches in linguistics, phonetics, grammar, sciences, and books in literature and history had been published in abundance. Quoc ngu is easy to learn; an average adult can learn to read and write in a few months.
In the early 20th century, ideologies of the French 1789 revolution was introduced to the Vietnamese at the same time with French romanticism and logic through translated publications. Vietnamese writers also published a large amount of novels and books exploring all aspects of the Vietnamese culture and society. Patriotic themes were disguised under love stories, folklore researches or historical novels to avoid French censorship.
The world wide events of that era and their ramification had been quickly communicated to the Vietnamese mass through Quoc Ngu: the victory of Japan over the Russian fleet in 1905, the nationalist Chinese revolution in 1911, and the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. The modern printing technology of that era had facilitated the publishing of newspapers and magazines, as well as underground revolutionary literature.
At the end of WW 2, Quoc ngu was resourceful and well proven to support the Vietnamese curriculum from grade school to college level. The term Quoc ngu is now seldom used, it is now "tieng Viet" (the Vietnamese language.). When Vietnam was divided in two by the 1954 Geneva Agreement, Quoc ngu was the official language in both North Vietnam and in South Vietnam.
3- TECHNICALITIES OF QUOC NGU
The refined Quoc ngu alphabets are quite different from the first romanized alphabets used by the Catholic priests in early 18th century. Quoc ngu now have 27 consonants and 12 vowels. The 27 consonants are: b, c, ch, d (equivalent to the English Z), Ç, g, gh, gi, h, k, kh, l, m, n, ng, ngh, nh, ph (equivalent to F), q, r, s, t, th, tr, v and x. The 12 vowels are a, e, i, o, u, y and these derivatives a(, a^, e^, o^, o+, u+.
The spoken Vietnamese is monosyllabic with six different tones. Five diacritical marks differentiate these tones:

flat tone	no mark
high rising	' (sac)
low falling	` (huyen)
falling-rising, constricted	? (hoi)
high-rising broken	~ (nga)
low-falling, short constricted	. (nang)

Many Vietnamese words are almost identical except for the marks mentioned above. These marks are essential for the written Vietnamese because the words are pronounced differently, and have different meanings.
For example:

ma	ghost
ma'	mother (southern accent) or cheek
ma`	who, which, that, whom
ma?	tomb
ma~	horse or appearance
ma.	young rice seeding, or mother (central)

The Vietnamese grammar is simple and straightforward. The words are invariable. Special marker words preceding the nouns express plurality. Special markers also specify genders of the noun, tenses of the verbs and the relationship of subject and object in a sentence. Simple sentences in Vietnamese are built in the order: SUBJECT-VERB-OBJECT. Sometimes the subject or the verb is omitted when the context of the phrase or the paragraph imply them. Verbs are not conjugated, pronouns and adjectives are not declined and grammatical distinctions are achieved through changes in words order.
There is a large amount of compound words formed by the linkage of two words that are connected by a hyphen. Based on this observation, some linguistics maintain that the Vietnamese language comes from an ancient polysyllabic root.
Another important feature in the written Vietnamese is the system personal pronouns. They indicate the subject/object relationship and reflect an unique cultural tradition in the Vietnamese culture.
CONCLUSION
Since the Vietnamese intelligentsia threw away the brush and learned how to handle the iron tip pen in 1920 (Tu Xuong), Quoc ngu has played a vital role in the social, cultural and political revolution in Vietnam. Quoc ngu rose from the disgraceful "elective language" under the French domination to be the venerable national language of Vietnam.
The refined and systematized written Vietnamese is not yet a perfect written language. But Quoc ngu has fulfilled its historical mission in the 20th century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Viet Nam Van Hoa Su Cuong by Dao Duy Anh
Publisher : Bon Phuong, Saigon, 1951

Viet Nam Van Hoc Su Yeu by Duong Quang Ham
Publisher : Nha Hoc Chinh Dong Phap, Ha Noi, 1942
Viet Nam Su Luoc by Tran Trong Kim
Publisher : Tan Viet, Saigon, 1948

Vietnamese-English Dictionary By Nguyen Dinh Hoa
Publisher:Charles E.Tuttle, Tokyo, 1966

Introduction to the Vietnamese language

Vietnamese is the language spoken by some 77 million people inside and outside Vietnam.

Origin of the Vietnamese Language

The origin of the Vietnamese language is the subject of debate among linguists. It is usually put in a language family by itself along with Muong, a language spoken by a group of highlanders in North Viet Nam.

Although it is evident that Vietnamese did not have its origins in Chinese, the influence of China has always been strong in Viet Nam, and thousands of Chinese words have been incorporated into the Vietnamese language. Many of these words reflect the nature of the northern influence throughout the early period of Chinese domination. Chinese philosophic, literary, religious, governmental and military terms are found in great numbers in Vietnamese, although the pronunciation has changed and their relationship to Chinese is not always clearly discernable.

The Six Tones and Their Phonetic Symbols

Vietnamese is basically a monosyllabic language having six tones, which give the language a sing-song effect. A word can be repeated with any one of six tones to indicate six different meanings. For example, the word ma has six different meanings according to the tone which the word carries: phantom, ghost; cheek; but, which, who; tomb; horse; young rice seedling.

There are several mutually intelligible dialects in Vietnamese, the boundaries of which were defined by Henri Maspero in 1943. The Haft Anna group includes both the speech of the Tonkinese of the Red River delta and of North Anna, and the speech of the southern Cochinchinese, prevalent from Tourane to the Mekong delta. The second group includes the dialects of the coastal areas between Tourane and Vinh.

Contemporary Vietnamese sometimes make a different, subjective distinction between northern , central and southern dialects. The northern speech, according to this characterization, is marked by sharpness, or choppiness , with greater attention to the precise distinction of tones. The southern speech, in addition to certain uniform differences from northern speech in the pronunciation of consonants, does not distinguish between the hoi and nga tones; and, it is felt by some to sound more laconic and musical. The speech of the Center, on the other hand, is often described as being heavy because of its emphasis on low tones.

Concerning the tones in the Vietnamese language, it has been suggested by some authors that Vietnamese was originally basically a polysyllabic language. The polysyllabic words were later simplified by way of contraction due to the influence of the languages of continental Asia - most particularly, Chinese, which is essentially a monosyllabic language. Thus, some words which were polysyllabic in the 17th century have now become monosyllables by way of contraction.

Three Systems of Writing

Chu Nho . Vietnamese was first written using the Chinese writing system called chu nho . Beginning sometime around the 9th century, following the period of Chinese domination, all government and official transactions, education, correspondence and Literature used the Chinese characters. This chu nho system was still used by scholars until a few decades ago, and in fact, Vietnamese still request the services of scholars skilled in chu nho for lettering the banners and placards which are traditionally found at weddings, funerals, and festivals.

Chu nom . Vietnamese writers, however, desired a language of their own in which to transcribe their national history and literature. Gradually, a new writing system known as chu nom - vulgar or demotic script - was evolved. Nguyen Thuyen, a poet of the 13th century, is believed to be - if not the inventor - the man responsible for spreading and popularizing chu nom . In this system, Chinese characters were borrow-ed and altered; they resembled Chinese characters, but were often unintelligible to the Chinese themselves. In chu nom , two Chinese characters were usually combined, one of which indicated the meaning of the Vietnamese word, while the other indicated pronunciation. The chu nom system, however, was extremely cumbersome and was used only in literature and non-official documents; chu nom was never accorded recognition as the official language.

Quoc Ngu . Around the 17th century, Catholic missionaries developed a Romanized script to represent the quoc ngu or national language in order to translate prayer books and catechisms.

According to Professors Huard and Durand, the use of the Latin alphabet to record languages using Chinese characters was prob-ably tried for the first time in 1548 by Yajiro, a Japanese who became converted to the Catholic faith and was thereafter baptized by Saint Francis-Xavier. Shortly there-after, missionaries taught Catholicism to Japanese living in Faifoo, Central Viet Nam using the Japanese language with romanized books (romaji) published by the Japanese Jesuit Press. It was only a short jump from that to the attempt to romanize the Vietnamese language. Thus, on the pattern of theromaji, the quoc ngu was created.

Although an international and collective undertaking, the quoc ngu is generally said to have been invented by Alexandre deRhodes, a French Jesuit missionary whose Portuguese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary was published in 1651. Monsignor Pigneau deBehaine (18th century) and Monsignor Taberd (1838) later continued the works of Alexandre de Rhodes.

While the romanization received only a reserved welcome in China and Japan, it obtained an extraordinary success in Viet Nam. It gave the country an unequaled tool of cultural and intellectual development.

However, the beginnings of quoc ngu met with difficulties. For a long time, it remained the exclusive instrument of Catholic priests, and the masses continued to ignore the new system of writing. The knowledge of the traditional system of writing was essential for anyone who wanted to present himself for the triennial examinations. Thus,

quoc ngu was adopted and officially be-came popular only when Viet Nam was under French domination (1864-1945). In effect, French authorities popularized quoc ngu with the objective of eliminating the Chinese-type quoc nom characters, and thereby simplifying problems of publication and drawing Viet Nam closer to Western practices.

At the beginning of the present century, Nguyen Truong To, a great Vietnamese re-former, presented to the Royal Court a petition requesting the adoption of the quoc ngu as the official writing. His request was not accepted because scholars of the time were reluctant to abandon the older traditions.

But, the most popular writers of North Viet Nam followed the example set by their colleagues in South Viet Nam by writing in quoc ngu without waiting for the decision of the Royal Court. This movement on behalf of quoc ngu soon reached considerable proportions, especially when the famous letter of Phan Boi Chau was published. In this letter, the well-known nationalist revolutionary Phan Boi Chau, who was living in Tokyo at the time, stressed the need for education. The patriotic sentiments of the vietnamese people - especially the youth -were stirred.

In 1906, the French administration set up the Council for Improvement of Education, which ordered the study of quoc ngu As a secondary subject in schools. In 1908, the Royal Court of Hue created the Ministry of Education, having the task of applying the new school curriculum in quoc ngu . At last, from 1915 to 1919, a series of decrees was promulgated which abolished triennial literary examinations for the recruitment of governmental officials. In North Viet Nam, the last triennial examinations in Chinese characters was organized in 1915, and the last one in Central Viet Nam's Imperial city of Hue was held in 1919. From then on, quoc ngu became the accepted form of popular national writing, bringing to an end the use of Chinese-type chu nom characters.

The secular prestige of the Chinese characters did not disappear until long after the adoption of quoc ngu , however; and its decline occurred first in the South, where Chinese classical influence was less pronounced, and Western influence was greater.

The romanized writing has permitted the art of printing to develop and innumerable printing houses have been established in Viet Nam. Moreover, since the country became independent in 1945, the progress of the press has exceeded the most optimistic predictions. Daily newspapers and magazines of all persuasions continue to compete for the attention of a large and eager reading public.