L | A (Translated with ChatGPT)
By Nguyễn Hải Hoành
For over a hundred years, our country has officially used the Chữ Quốc Ngữ (the Latin-based Vietnamese script), the script that early 20th-century progressive intellectuals praised as the soul of the nation; a miraculous tool for liberating the Vietnamese intellect. They believed that the future success or failure of our country depended on this script.
In the past, public opinion in our country credited the creation of this marvelous script to the French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes.
Recently, however, there has been a call to recognize the contributions of non-French missionaries such as Francisco de Pina, António Barbosa, Gaspar do Amaral, António de Fontes... and the Southern Vietnamese Catholics who helped these missionaries learn Vietnamese and played the role of 'evaluators' during the trial process of using this new script.
Unfortunately, to this day, public opinion in our country has yet to reach a consensus on which individuals should be recognized for creating Chữ Quốc Ngữ, and the relevant government authorities have not definitively resolved this issue. Letting this situation persist is not beneficial for the image of a civilized nation.
It is time to engage in broad discussions and take action to honor those who truly deserve recognition. This article aims to contribute to that discussion. As the writer has limited knowledge of linguistics, any suggestions made here may contain errors, and I kindly ask for the readers' guidance.
Spoken language is a natural ability of humans, while writing is a creative invention not all cultures possess. In ancient times, the process of developing a writing system for a language took many centuries, even thousands of years. Vietnamese has an extremely rich phonetic system, which makes it both enduringly vibrant and difficult to create a writing system for; this may be why it took us longer to develop our own script.
However, it is precisely because of the richness of our phonetics that our nation ultimately inherited one of the finest writing systems in East Asia.
It is rare to find a country that has used three types of writing systems like ours: Classical Chinese characters, Chữ Nôm, and the Latin-based Vietnamese script. Each of these scripts represents a glorious chapter in our history worth recalling.
Chữ Nho (Classical Chinese characters)
Around the 2nd century BCE, the feudal rulers of China occupied our country and required our people to learn Chinese characters. This was the first time the Vietnamese knew of writing – a means of communication that is extremely convenient, unrestricted by space and time like spoken language. Recognizing its significant advantages, the great minds of Vietnam at that time conceived the idea of using this script.
However, learning Chinese was extremely difficult because Chinese was read in hundreds of different dialects. The challenge led to innovation: our ancestors devised a method to read this script in Vietnamese rather than in Chinese, meaning they learned the script without learning the language.
Modern linguistics explains this as reasonable because Chinese characters are ideograms (symbols representing ideas), similar to pictograms of animals or numerical symbols like 1, 2, 3 or signs like $, %, … which are understood globally, even if read in different languages. Our ancestors exploited the ideographic nature of Chinese characters to read them in Vietnamese, just as people in China read them in their local dialects.
Therefore, the occupying authorities could not prevent our people from reading Chinese characters in our own way.
The Vietnamese referred to the Sinicized phonetic script as Chữ Nho, meaning 'the script of learned people.' At that time, each Chinese character was pronounced with a Sino-Vietnamese reading close to its original Chinese sound; however, one Chinese character could correspond to several different Vietnamese pronunciations. No Chinese character was left without a Vietnamese name.
Naming tens of thousands of Chinese characters took several centuries and was truly a monumental task.
Remarkably, 2,000 years ago, Confucian scholars across our country managed to read Chinese characters with a unified Vietnamese pronunciation through oral transmission (China aimed to have a unified Chinese pronunciation by 2020). This may be the first time that Chinese characters were transliterated into a foreign language.
Because teaching and learning Chinese characters in the mother tongue made it easier for our people compared to teaching and learning in Chinese, we were able to adopt this script and consider Chữ Nho as 'our own script' for about 2,000 years.
Many skilled individuals were as proficient in it as the Chinese themselves. For example, Khương Công Phụ AKA Jiang Gongfu (731-805) from Thanh Hóa passed the highest imperial examinations in China and was later appointed Prime Minister by the Tang Dynasty emperor.
After acquiring a writing system, our people moved out of the primitive era and into an age of recorded history, with tools for internal and external communication, literary and poetic creation, educational development, and the adoption of advanced Chinese civilization. We organized society according to the Chinese model, thereby establishing Vietnamese civilization.
Using Chinese characters without speaking Chinese allowed our people to continue speaking their native language, avoiding the disaster of Chinese assimilation. Chữ Nho quietly thwarted attempts to Sinicize the Vietnamese language. After more than 1,000 years of Chinese rule, our nation retained its native language and cultural heritage. This is the greatest victory in Vietnamese history.
The method of using Sino-Vietnamese words to transliterate Chinese characters, thus creating Chữ Nho, is an outstanding linguistic innovation with immense benefits: it allows us to adopt Chinese characters for our use while also drawing on the vast vocabulary of Chinese characters to enrich the Vietnamese lexicon.
In fact, Sino-Vietnamese terms are now so seamlessly integrated with native Vietnamese words that distinguishing between them can be challenging (e.g., 'programming' [lập trình], 'near-poverty' [cận nghèo], etc.). When a new term appears, we often refer to how it is used in China.
For example, the term 'quantum' is translated by the Chinese as 量子 (liàng zǐ), which we read in Sino-Vietnamese as 'lượng tử,' a very effective and understandable translation.
Modern Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, derived from the late 19th-century Japanese translation of Western terms, has been directly adopted into Vietnamese by Confucian scholars from Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc (Tonkin Free School). Today, there is no new term that cannot be translated into Vietnamese.
Moreover, our ancestors used a uniquely clever method to transliterate Chinese characters.
The Koreans (South Koreans) transliterated Chinese characters by closely following the Chinese pronunciation, which resulted in inheriting the problem of numerous homophones in Chinese characters. As a consequence, even after 7 centuries of using Hangul, they still have to use Chinese characters to annotate homophones.
The Japanese, on the other hand, read Chinese characters according to Japanese meanings rather than Chinese pronunciations—this method initially required them to use tens of thousands of Chinese characters, making classical Japanese extremely complex. Later, they developed Kana (syllabic scripts), which reduced the number of Chinese characters needed to around 2,000.
Our ancestors, however, transliterated Chinese characters by converting one Chinese sound into multiple Vietnamese sounds. This approach reduced the number of homophones by many times, making Sino-Vietnamese terms more precise. For example, the Chinese sound [yi] has 135 homophones, which are translated into multiple Vietnamese sounds such as ất, dật, di, dĩ, dị, dịch, duệ, ích, y, ý, nghi, nghị, nghĩa, nhị, ức, etc.
Chữ Nho, being Classical Chinese characters, cannot fully represent spoken Vietnamese, and therefore cannot serve as a writing system for Vietnamese.
In reality, Chữ Nho was entirely foreign to the language of the common people; only a small number of people from the official or elite classes knew how to use Chữ Nho, and it was used solely for written communication (correspondence), limited to certain fields, and not for spoken language. Literary works and poetry written in Chữ Nho following the Chinese style are not considered Vietnamese literature.
Chữ Nôm (Sino-Vietnamese Script)
From around the 12th century, our ancestors began creating a writing system to record the sounds of their native language, known as Chữ Nôm.
This experiment reflected a desire for linguistic autonomy and a unique writing system, ending the reliance on borrowed characters. It showcased the intelligence of the Vietnamese people, advancing towards the creation of the most sophisticated type of script—phonetic script (a system for recording sounds), a type of script that the Chinese had never before developed.
Chữ Nôm was built on the basis of Chinese characters read according to Hán-Việt pronunciation, combining both ideographic and phonetic elements. Since the Latin alphabet was not known at that time, our ancestors used square Chinese characters (with modifications) to record their native language.
Initially, Chữ Nôm borrowed the form of Chinese characters to represent Vietnamese sounds, and gradually began creating new characters by combining two Chinese characters—partly phonetic and partly ideographic.
Over time, this invented script was used more extensively. However, since the original square Chinese characters were not alphabetic, the accuracy of representing Vietnamese sounds was relatively low, lacked standardization, and many characters had to be guessed for their pronunciation, with some sounds having multiple characters, etc.
Each Chữ Nôm character represents a syllable. Vietnamese, being rich in syllables, has many Chữ Nôm characters.
According to historical records, by the mid-17th century, there were about 80,000 Chữ Nôm characters. The 'Chữ Nôm Reference Table' (published in 1976) lists 8,187 characters. The 'Chữ Nôm Dictionary' by Professor Nguyễn Quang Hồng (2015) includes 9,450 Chữ Nôm characters (including nearly 3,000 newly created characters), recording 14,519 Vietnamese syllables.
Since Chữ Nôm has not been standardized, these numbers may vary, but they all indicate that our ancestors created a vast number of characters, suggesting that Chữ Nôm of the past could record a large portion (if not nearly all) of the Vietnamese sounds used.
Chữ Nôm was once referred to as Quốc ngữ or Quốc âm, meaning the script of our language (whereas Chữ Nho was never called that). However, because it was based on Chinese characters, Chữ Nôm depended on Chữ Hán, making it difficult to learn (one needed to know Chữ Nho to learn Chữ Nôm) and challenging to disseminate.
Moreover, because the feudal state and the elite class were blindly devoted to Chữ Hán, Chữ Nôm was not recognized as an official script and was considered inferior to Chữ Hán. Consequently, Chữ Nôm was difficult to develop and perfect and lacked standardization.
However, poetry written in Chữ Nôm, which captures the spoken language and the emotions of common people, proved to be far superior to Chữ Nho literature.
Chữ Nôm literature reached its peak from the Late Lê period to the early Nguyễn dynasty (17th-19th centuries), with masterpieces by Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm (1491-1585), Đoàn Thị Điểm (1705-4
, Nguyễn Gia Thiều (1741-9, Nguyễn Huy Tự (1743-90), Nguyễn Du (1765-1820), Hồ Xuân Hương (18th-19th centuries), Phạm Thái (1777-1813), Bà Huyện Thanh Quan (19th century), Lý Văn Phức (1785-1849), Nguyễn Đình Chiểu (1822-8, Nguyễn Khuyến (1835-1909), Trần Tế Xương (1870-1907), and others.
The book Thiên Nam Ngữ Lục (Annals of the Heavenly South) (late 17th century) contains 8,136 lines of lục bát (six-eight) poetry, using 58,212 Chữ Nôm characters.
Over time, Chữ Nôm became increasingly used: for more than 200 years after the introduction of Chữ Quốc ngữ (Latin alphabet), which had not yet become widespread, Catholic priests used Chữ Nôm to write religious materials. This demonstrates the significant role of Chữ Nôm in our cultural life, especially within the Catholic community, which was generally averse to using original Chinese characters.
Why was Chữ Nôm difficult to learn yet widely used? This was primarily because Chữ Nôm had a very clear phonetic element, recording the speech of ordinary people, and was considered the 'script of our language.' Modern linguistics explains that Chữ Nôm’s phonetic element was due to the richness of Vietnamese syllables, allowing it to overcome the limitations of monosyllabic languages.
Chữ Quốc ngữ (Latin alphabet)
In the 17th century, Jesuit missionaries such as Francisco de Pina, António Barbosa, Gaspar do Amaral, António de Fontes, Girolamo Maiorica, Alexandre de Rhodes, and others came to our country for missionary work. The Jesuits only recruited individuals with a doctoral degree and strictly required missionaries to be proficient in the local language and to adhere to the customs and traditions of the local people.
According to records, Francisco de Pina arrived in Vietnam in 1617, and three years later, he and other missionaries composed religious materials in Nôm script.
Between 1632 and 1656, Girolamo Maiorica (an Italian) wrote 45 works in Nôm script, of which the French National Library currently holds 15 works totaling 1.2 million Nôm characters—52 times the number of Nôm characters in Truyện Kiều (The Tale of Kieu). Some libraries still preserve many Nôm documents by pioneering missionaries such as Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa.
Since the target audience for missionary work at that time were farmers and fishermen from Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi provinces, it was natural that the religious materials in Nôm script used everyday language. From this, it can be inferred that these missionary scholars, being experts in linguistics, must have recognized that Nôm script had phonetic elements and could record most Vietnamese sounds.
However, because they used the square characters of Chinese script, the phonetic transcription was not precise, and it was difficult to learn and disseminate. The experience of the Jesuit missionaries in Japan with the unsuccessful attempt to Latinize Kanji characters (Chinese characters) further demonstrates that the phonetic aspect of Nôm script was a significant advantage when transcribing it into Latin phonetics.
With this understanding, the skilled Nôm scholars among the missionaries naturally conceived the idea and belief that Latin letters could be used to transcribe Nôm script, transforming the Chinese-derived script with phonetic elements into a phonetic Latinized script that would be easier to learn and use for missionary work.
Clearly, transcribing a language that already has a writing system to record its sounds is much simpler than transcribing a language that does not have a writing system. In ancient times, this was an extremely complex creative task that required the efforts of many people over hundreds of years.
In reality, although the aforementioned missionaries were few in number and worked in a dispersed manner, they quickly identified suitable Latin letters to replace the square characters in Nôm and created a new script in a remarkably short time: 32 years (1617-1649).
Francisco de Pina arrived in Đàng Trong in 1617 and completed a Vietnamese vocabulary in Latin script by 1619. In 1631, Gaspar do Amaral arrived in Đàng Ngoài and, the following year, achieved very good transcription of Vietnamese sounds, completing a Vietnamese vocabulary in 1634. During meetings in Macao (1630-1631), the missionaries identified six tones and the monosyllabic nature of Vietnamese.
In 1649, Rhodes left Vietnam with the manuscript of the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary). In 1651, this dictionary was published in Rome, marking the birth of the Vietnamese Quốc ngữ script. This was the first time in history that a Latin-based phonetic writing system was successfully developed in an area influenced by Chinese characters.
In the process of creating Quốc ngữ, the missionaries had to address many difficulties caused by the rich and unfamiliar phonetic system of Vietnamese. The most complex issue was to research and create a system of diacritical marks to represent the tonal distinctions of sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, and nặng, as well as letters for phonemes not present in the Latin alphabet, such as ă, â, ê, ơ, ô, ư, and đ.
This system of marks and letters has been described by a famous Chinese scholar as 'wearing a hat and shoes': 'Vietnamese writing, after phonetic adaptation, wears a hat and shoes, which is quite amusing.' In reality, these 'hat and shoes' are such logical innovations that both ancient and modern Vietnamese would not accept any form of Quốc ngữ that lacks these diacritical marks and letters.
For example, recent public opinion has rejected proposals to omit tonal marks in Quốc ngữ. Additionally, the missionaries refined Vietnamese sounds that Nôm did not accurately capture and modernized grammar and writing conventions, such as incorporating punctuation, paragraph breaks, brackets, mathematical symbols, capitalization, and abbreviations.
In terms of form, Quốc ngữ differs greatly from Nôm, but in essence, both are writing systems that record Vietnamese phonetics. Quốc ngữ, as seen in the Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary, clearly reflects its connection to Nôm.
After several decades of diligent and creative work, the aforementioned missionaries completed the process of transcribing and transforming Nôm into a phonetic script using the Latin alphabet—a type of writing system that was the most advanced and internationalized of its time, later known as Quốc ngữ. Clearly, Quốc ngữ is essentially Nôm that has been Latinized and modernized.
If at that time there had been no Nôm, only chữ Hán, the work of the missionaries would have been extremely difficult because chữ Hán is derived from Chinese characters. Practical experience with writing reform in China has shown that it is impossible to use any alphabetic script to transcribe Chinese characters into a phonetic script.
In 1582, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in China to spread Christianity. He was very proficient in Chinese and spent many years studying how to transcribe Chinese characters. In 1605, Ricci proposed a method of transcribing Chinese characters using the Latin alphabet, but this method only made it easier for Europeans to learn Chinese characters and was not a new script.
Later, Chinese intellectuals continued to research based on Ricci's approach with the aim of creating a phonetic script that could replace Chinese characters, which they wished to eliminate. However, all such efforts were unsuccessful.
In 1958, the Chinese Writing Reform Committee developed the Pinyin system for transcribing Chinese sounds using the Latin alphabet, but this system serves only as an auxiliary tool for noting pronunciation and is not a new script.
Since 1986, the committee has ceased to mention the goal of creating a phonetic script to replace Chinese characters and stated that the future of Chinese characters will be decided by future generations. Currently, China continues to use Chinese characters as before, with Pinyin used only to annotate pronunciation.
In summary, the use of the Latin alphabet to transcribe Nôm into a phonetic script succeeded as early as the mid-17th century, while similar efforts with Chinese characters have still not succeeded to this day.
Why is that? It is because Nôm has phonetic elements, whereas Chinese characters are ideographic and not phonetic; and this situation originates from the fact that Vietnamese is rich in syllables, whereas Chinese is less so.
It can be concluded that Nôm laid the linguistic foundation upon which the aforementioned missionaries based their creation of Quốc ngữ. The entire Vietnamese people will forever remember the achievements of our ancestors in creating Nôm, viewing it as an outstanding linguistic innovation that played a crucial role in the formation of Quốc ngữ.
Finally, it is important to emphasize the significant role of Christianity. As a cultural phenomenon, major religions universally uphold and promote noble ideals of compassion. In the 17th century, European Christian missionaries arriving in Vietnam combined their missionary work with a mission of civilizing the local people, distinct from the colonial conquest behaviors of Western imperialism.
For instance, the Portuguese colonists in Brazil enforced the assimilation of the local population by forcing them to speak Portuguese. In contrast, Christian missionaries like Francisco de Pina, when they arrived in Vietnam, did not do so; instead, they sought to Latinize the Nôm script.
Furthermore, de Pina envisioned using this modern script to build a bridge of dialogue between Vietnam and the civilized Europe, aiming to create a new culture for our country. This is indeed a noble idea!
When they first occupied Vietnam, the French colonists intended to force the Vietnamese to speak French forever, as they did in their African colonies. However, French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes fervently worked to create a distinct writing system, helping the Vietnamese preserve their native language. Without Quốc ngữ, Vietnam would surely have been assimilated by the French long ago.
Therefore, it would be a mistake to believe that Christian missionaries who came to Vietnam were serving the colonialist policies of the French. With the tradition of 'drinking water and remembering its source,' our nation will forever be grateful to all the Christian missionaries who contributed to the creation of the marvelous script that we have used for over a hundred years.
Thus, it can be said that Quốc ngữ is the result of the fusion of Vietnamese civilization with Christian civilization, a priceless gift that the Jesuit missionaries gave to our nation in a historical coincidence that occurred in the 17th century.
By Nguyễn Hải Hoành
For over a hundred years, our country has officially used the Chữ Quốc Ngữ (the Latin-based Vietnamese script), the script that early 20th-century progressive intellectuals praised as the soul of the nation; a miraculous tool for liberating the Vietnamese intellect. They believed that the future success or failure of our country depended on this script.
In the past, public opinion in our country credited the creation of this marvelous script to the French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes.
Recently, however, there has been a call to recognize the contributions of non-French missionaries such as Francisco de Pina, António Barbosa, Gaspar do Amaral, António de Fontes... and the Southern Vietnamese Catholics who helped these missionaries learn Vietnamese and played the role of 'evaluators' during the trial process of using this new script.
Unfortunately, to this day, public opinion in our country has yet to reach a consensus on which individuals should be recognized for creating Chữ Quốc Ngữ, and the relevant government authorities have not definitively resolved this issue. Letting this situation persist is not beneficial for the image of a civilized nation.
It is time to engage in broad discussions and take action to honor those who truly deserve recognition. This article aims to contribute to that discussion. As the writer has limited knowledge of linguistics, any suggestions made here may contain errors, and I kindly ask for the readers' guidance.
Spoken language is a natural ability of humans, while writing is a creative invention not all cultures possess. In ancient times, the process of developing a writing system for a language took many centuries, even thousands of years. Vietnamese has an extremely rich phonetic system, which makes it both enduringly vibrant and difficult to create a writing system for; this may be why it took us longer to develop our own script.
However, it is precisely because of the richness of our phonetics that our nation ultimately inherited one of the finest writing systems in East Asia.
It is rare to find a country that has used three types of writing systems like ours: Classical Chinese characters, Chữ Nôm, and the Latin-based Vietnamese script. Each of these scripts represents a glorious chapter in our history worth recalling.
Chữ Nho (Classical Chinese characters)
Around the 2nd century BCE, the feudal rulers of China occupied our country and required our people to learn Chinese characters. This was the first time the Vietnamese knew of writing – a means of communication that is extremely convenient, unrestricted by space and time like spoken language. Recognizing its significant advantages, the great minds of Vietnam at that time conceived the idea of using this script.
However, learning Chinese was extremely difficult because Chinese was read in hundreds of different dialects. The challenge led to innovation: our ancestors devised a method to read this script in Vietnamese rather than in Chinese, meaning they learned the script without learning the language.
Modern linguistics explains this as reasonable because Chinese characters are ideograms (symbols representing ideas), similar to pictograms of animals or numerical symbols like 1, 2, 3 or signs like $, %, … which are understood globally, even if read in different languages. Our ancestors exploited the ideographic nature of Chinese characters to read them in Vietnamese, just as people in China read them in their local dialects.
Therefore, the occupying authorities could not prevent our people from reading Chinese characters in our own way.
The Vietnamese referred to the Sinicized phonetic script as Chữ Nho, meaning 'the script of learned people.' At that time, each Chinese character was pronounced with a Sino-Vietnamese reading close to its original Chinese sound; however, one Chinese character could correspond to several different Vietnamese pronunciations. No Chinese character was left without a Vietnamese name.
Naming tens of thousands of Chinese characters took several centuries and was truly a monumental task.
Remarkably, 2,000 years ago, Confucian scholars across our country managed to read Chinese characters with a unified Vietnamese pronunciation through oral transmission (China aimed to have a unified Chinese pronunciation by 2020). This may be the first time that Chinese characters were transliterated into a foreign language.
Because teaching and learning Chinese characters in the mother tongue made it easier for our people compared to teaching and learning in Chinese, we were able to adopt this script and consider Chữ Nho as 'our own script' for about 2,000 years.
Many skilled individuals were as proficient in it as the Chinese themselves. For example, Khương Công Phụ AKA Jiang Gongfu (731-805) from Thanh Hóa passed the highest imperial examinations in China and was later appointed Prime Minister by the Tang Dynasty emperor.
After acquiring a writing system, our people moved out of the primitive era and into an age of recorded history, with tools for internal and external communication, literary and poetic creation, educational development, and the adoption of advanced Chinese civilization. We organized society according to the Chinese model, thereby establishing Vietnamese civilization.
Using Chinese characters without speaking Chinese allowed our people to continue speaking their native language, avoiding the disaster of Chinese assimilation. Chữ Nho quietly thwarted attempts to Sinicize the Vietnamese language. After more than 1,000 years of Chinese rule, our nation retained its native language and cultural heritage. This is the greatest victory in Vietnamese history.
The method of using Sino-Vietnamese words to transliterate Chinese characters, thus creating Chữ Nho, is an outstanding linguistic innovation with immense benefits: it allows us to adopt Chinese characters for our use while also drawing on the vast vocabulary of Chinese characters to enrich the Vietnamese lexicon.
In fact, Sino-Vietnamese terms are now so seamlessly integrated with native Vietnamese words that distinguishing between them can be challenging (e.g., 'programming' [lập trình], 'near-poverty' [cận nghèo], etc.). When a new term appears, we often refer to how it is used in China.
For example, the term 'quantum' is translated by the Chinese as 量子 (liàng zǐ), which we read in Sino-Vietnamese as 'lượng tử,' a very effective and understandable translation.
Modern Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary, derived from the late 19th-century Japanese translation of Western terms, has been directly adopted into Vietnamese by Confucian scholars from Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc (Tonkin Free School). Today, there is no new term that cannot be translated into Vietnamese.
Moreover, our ancestors used a uniquely clever method to transliterate Chinese characters.
The Koreans (South Koreans) transliterated Chinese characters by closely following the Chinese pronunciation, which resulted in inheriting the problem of numerous homophones in Chinese characters. As a consequence, even after 7 centuries of using Hangul, they still have to use Chinese characters to annotate homophones.
The Japanese, on the other hand, read Chinese characters according to Japanese meanings rather than Chinese pronunciations—this method initially required them to use tens of thousands of Chinese characters, making classical Japanese extremely complex. Later, they developed Kana (syllabic scripts), which reduced the number of Chinese characters needed to around 2,000.
Our ancestors, however, transliterated Chinese characters by converting one Chinese sound into multiple Vietnamese sounds. This approach reduced the number of homophones by many times, making Sino-Vietnamese terms more precise. For example, the Chinese sound [yi] has 135 homophones, which are translated into multiple Vietnamese sounds such as ất, dật, di, dĩ, dị, dịch, duệ, ích, y, ý, nghi, nghị, nghĩa, nhị, ức, etc.
Chữ Nho, being Classical Chinese characters, cannot fully represent spoken Vietnamese, and therefore cannot serve as a writing system for Vietnamese.
In reality, Chữ Nho was entirely foreign to the language of the common people; only a small number of people from the official or elite classes knew how to use Chữ Nho, and it was used solely for written communication (correspondence), limited to certain fields, and not for spoken language. Literary works and poetry written in Chữ Nho following the Chinese style are not considered Vietnamese literature.
Chữ Nôm (Sino-Vietnamese Script)
From around the 12th century, our ancestors began creating a writing system to record the sounds of their native language, known as Chữ Nôm.
This experiment reflected a desire for linguistic autonomy and a unique writing system, ending the reliance on borrowed characters. It showcased the intelligence of the Vietnamese people, advancing towards the creation of the most sophisticated type of script—phonetic script (a system for recording sounds), a type of script that the Chinese had never before developed.
Chữ Nôm was built on the basis of Chinese characters read according to Hán-Việt pronunciation, combining both ideographic and phonetic elements. Since the Latin alphabet was not known at that time, our ancestors used square Chinese characters (with modifications) to record their native language.
Initially, Chữ Nôm borrowed the form of Chinese characters to represent Vietnamese sounds, and gradually began creating new characters by combining two Chinese characters—partly phonetic and partly ideographic.
Over time, this invented script was used more extensively. However, since the original square Chinese characters were not alphabetic, the accuracy of representing Vietnamese sounds was relatively low, lacked standardization, and many characters had to be guessed for their pronunciation, with some sounds having multiple characters, etc.
Each Chữ Nôm character represents a syllable. Vietnamese, being rich in syllables, has many Chữ Nôm characters.
According to historical records, by the mid-17th century, there were about 80,000 Chữ Nôm characters. The 'Chữ Nôm Reference Table' (published in 1976) lists 8,187 characters. The 'Chữ Nôm Dictionary' by Professor Nguyễn Quang Hồng (2015) includes 9,450 Chữ Nôm characters (including nearly 3,000 newly created characters), recording 14,519 Vietnamese syllables.
Since Chữ Nôm has not been standardized, these numbers may vary, but they all indicate that our ancestors created a vast number of characters, suggesting that Chữ Nôm of the past could record a large portion (if not nearly all) of the Vietnamese sounds used.
Chữ Nôm was once referred to as Quốc ngữ or Quốc âm, meaning the script of our language (whereas Chữ Nho was never called that). However, because it was based on Chinese characters, Chữ Nôm depended on Chữ Hán, making it difficult to learn (one needed to know Chữ Nho to learn Chữ Nôm) and challenging to disseminate.
Moreover, because the feudal state and the elite class were blindly devoted to Chữ Hán, Chữ Nôm was not recognized as an official script and was considered inferior to Chữ Hán. Consequently, Chữ Nôm was difficult to develop and perfect and lacked standardization.
However, poetry written in Chữ Nôm, which captures the spoken language and the emotions of common people, proved to be far superior to Chữ Nho literature.
Chữ Nôm literature reached its peak from the Late Lê period to the early Nguyễn dynasty (17th-19th centuries), with masterpieces by Nguyễn Bỉnh Khiêm (1491-1585), Đoàn Thị Điểm (1705-4
, Nguyễn Gia Thiều (1741-9, Nguyễn Huy Tự (1743-90), Nguyễn Du (1765-1820), Hồ Xuân Hương (18th-19th centuries), Phạm Thái (1777-1813), Bà Huyện Thanh Quan (19th century), Lý Văn Phức (1785-1849), Nguyễn Đình Chiểu (1822-8, Nguyễn Khuyến (1835-1909), Trần Tế Xương (1870-1907), and others. The book Thiên Nam Ngữ Lục (Annals of the Heavenly South) (late 17th century) contains 8,136 lines of lục bát (six-eight) poetry, using 58,212 Chữ Nôm characters.
Over time, Chữ Nôm became increasingly used: for more than 200 years after the introduction of Chữ Quốc ngữ (Latin alphabet), which had not yet become widespread, Catholic priests used Chữ Nôm to write religious materials. This demonstrates the significant role of Chữ Nôm in our cultural life, especially within the Catholic community, which was generally averse to using original Chinese characters.
Why was Chữ Nôm difficult to learn yet widely used? This was primarily because Chữ Nôm had a very clear phonetic element, recording the speech of ordinary people, and was considered the 'script of our language.' Modern linguistics explains that Chữ Nôm’s phonetic element was due to the richness of Vietnamese syllables, allowing it to overcome the limitations of monosyllabic languages.
Chữ Quốc ngữ (Latin alphabet)
In the 17th century, Jesuit missionaries such as Francisco de Pina, António Barbosa, Gaspar do Amaral, António de Fontes, Girolamo Maiorica, Alexandre de Rhodes, and others came to our country for missionary work. The Jesuits only recruited individuals with a doctoral degree and strictly required missionaries to be proficient in the local language and to adhere to the customs and traditions of the local people.
According to records, Francisco de Pina arrived in Vietnam in 1617, and three years later, he and other missionaries composed religious materials in Nôm script.
Between 1632 and 1656, Girolamo Maiorica (an Italian) wrote 45 works in Nôm script, of which the French National Library currently holds 15 works totaling 1.2 million Nôm characters—52 times the number of Nôm characters in Truyện Kiều (The Tale of Kieu). Some libraries still preserve many Nôm documents by pioneering missionaries such as Gaspar do Amaral and António Barbosa.
Since the target audience for missionary work at that time were farmers and fishermen from Quảng Nam and Quảng Ngãi provinces, it was natural that the religious materials in Nôm script used everyday language. From this, it can be inferred that these missionary scholars, being experts in linguistics, must have recognized that Nôm script had phonetic elements and could record most Vietnamese sounds.
However, because they used the square characters of Chinese script, the phonetic transcription was not precise, and it was difficult to learn and disseminate. The experience of the Jesuit missionaries in Japan with the unsuccessful attempt to Latinize Kanji characters (Chinese characters) further demonstrates that the phonetic aspect of Nôm script was a significant advantage when transcribing it into Latin phonetics.
With this understanding, the skilled Nôm scholars among the missionaries naturally conceived the idea and belief that Latin letters could be used to transcribe Nôm script, transforming the Chinese-derived script with phonetic elements into a phonetic Latinized script that would be easier to learn and use for missionary work.
Clearly, transcribing a language that already has a writing system to record its sounds is much simpler than transcribing a language that does not have a writing system. In ancient times, this was an extremely complex creative task that required the efforts of many people over hundreds of years.
In reality, although the aforementioned missionaries were few in number and worked in a dispersed manner, they quickly identified suitable Latin letters to replace the square characters in Nôm and created a new script in a remarkably short time: 32 years (1617-1649).
Francisco de Pina arrived in Đàng Trong in 1617 and completed a Vietnamese vocabulary in Latin script by 1619. In 1631, Gaspar do Amaral arrived in Đàng Ngoài and, the following year, achieved very good transcription of Vietnamese sounds, completing a Vietnamese vocabulary in 1634. During meetings in Macao (1630-1631), the missionaries identified six tones and the monosyllabic nature of Vietnamese.
In 1649, Rhodes left Vietnam with the manuscript of the Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary). In 1651, this dictionary was published in Rome, marking the birth of the Vietnamese Quốc ngữ script. This was the first time in history that a Latin-based phonetic writing system was successfully developed in an area influenced by Chinese characters.
In the process of creating Quốc ngữ, the missionaries had to address many difficulties caused by the rich and unfamiliar phonetic system of Vietnamese. The most complex issue was to research and create a system of diacritical marks to represent the tonal distinctions of sắc, huyền, hỏi, ngã, and nặng, as well as letters for phonemes not present in the Latin alphabet, such as ă, â, ê, ơ, ô, ư, and đ.
This system of marks and letters has been described by a famous Chinese scholar as 'wearing a hat and shoes': 'Vietnamese writing, after phonetic adaptation, wears a hat and shoes, which is quite amusing.' In reality, these 'hat and shoes' are such logical innovations that both ancient and modern Vietnamese would not accept any form of Quốc ngữ that lacks these diacritical marks and letters.
For example, recent public opinion has rejected proposals to omit tonal marks in Quốc ngữ. Additionally, the missionaries refined Vietnamese sounds that Nôm did not accurately capture and modernized grammar and writing conventions, such as incorporating punctuation, paragraph breaks, brackets, mathematical symbols, capitalization, and abbreviations.
In terms of form, Quốc ngữ differs greatly from Nôm, but in essence, both are writing systems that record Vietnamese phonetics. Quốc ngữ, as seen in the Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary, clearly reflects its connection to Nôm.
After several decades of diligent and creative work, the aforementioned missionaries completed the process of transcribing and transforming Nôm into a phonetic script using the Latin alphabet—a type of writing system that was the most advanced and internationalized of its time, later known as Quốc ngữ. Clearly, Quốc ngữ is essentially Nôm that has been Latinized and modernized.
If at that time there had been no Nôm, only chữ Hán, the work of the missionaries would have been extremely difficult because chữ Hán is derived from Chinese characters. Practical experience with writing reform in China has shown that it is impossible to use any alphabetic script to transcribe Chinese characters into a phonetic script.
In 1582, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in China to spread Christianity. He was very proficient in Chinese and spent many years studying how to transcribe Chinese characters. In 1605, Ricci proposed a method of transcribing Chinese characters using the Latin alphabet, but this method only made it easier for Europeans to learn Chinese characters and was not a new script.
Later, Chinese intellectuals continued to research based on Ricci's approach with the aim of creating a phonetic script that could replace Chinese characters, which they wished to eliminate. However, all such efforts were unsuccessful.
In 1958, the Chinese Writing Reform Committee developed the Pinyin system for transcribing Chinese sounds using the Latin alphabet, but this system serves only as an auxiliary tool for noting pronunciation and is not a new script.
Since 1986, the committee has ceased to mention the goal of creating a phonetic script to replace Chinese characters and stated that the future of Chinese characters will be decided by future generations. Currently, China continues to use Chinese characters as before, with Pinyin used only to annotate pronunciation.
In summary, the use of the Latin alphabet to transcribe Nôm into a phonetic script succeeded as early as the mid-17th century, while similar efforts with Chinese characters have still not succeeded to this day.
Why is that? It is because Nôm has phonetic elements, whereas Chinese characters are ideographic and not phonetic; and this situation originates from the fact that Vietnamese is rich in syllables, whereas Chinese is less so.
It can be concluded that Nôm laid the linguistic foundation upon which the aforementioned missionaries based their creation of Quốc ngữ. The entire Vietnamese people will forever remember the achievements of our ancestors in creating Nôm, viewing it as an outstanding linguistic innovation that played a crucial role in the formation of Quốc ngữ.
Finally, it is important to emphasize the significant role of Christianity. As a cultural phenomenon, major religions universally uphold and promote noble ideals of compassion. In the 17th century, European Christian missionaries arriving in Vietnam combined their missionary work with a mission of civilizing the local people, distinct from the colonial conquest behaviors of Western imperialism.
For instance, the Portuguese colonists in Brazil enforced the assimilation of the local population by forcing them to speak Portuguese. In contrast, Christian missionaries like Francisco de Pina, when they arrived in Vietnam, did not do so; instead, they sought to Latinize the Nôm script.
Furthermore, de Pina envisioned using this modern script to build a bridge of dialogue between Vietnam and the civilized Europe, aiming to create a new culture for our country. This is indeed a noble idea!
When they first occupied Vietnam, the French colonists intended to force the Vietnamese to speak French forever, as they did in their African colonies. However, French missionary Alexandre de Rhodes fervently worked to create a distinct writing system, helping the Vietnamese preserve their native language. Without Quốc ngữ, Vietnam would surely have been assimilated by the French long ago.
Therefore, it would be a mistake to believe that Christian missionaries who came to Vietnam were serving the colonialist policies of the French. With the tradition of 'drinking water and remembering its source,' our nation will forever be grateful to all the Christian missionaries who contributed to the creation of the marvelous script that we have used for over a hundred years.
Thus, it can be said that Quốc ngữ is the result of the fusion of Vietnamese civilization with Christian civilization, a priceless gift that the Jesuit missionaries gave to our nation in a historical coincidence that occurred in the 17th century.
