History of writing in Vietnam
Spoken and written Vietnamese today uses the Latin-script based Vietnamese alphabet, the lexicon altogether containing native Vietnamese words derived from the Latin script, Chinese-Vietnamese words (Hán-Việt), Nôm words (native Vietnamese), and other adapted foreign words. Historic Vietnamese literature was written by scholars in Nôm and before that Hán (Chinese characters).
During ancient times, the ancestors of the Vietnamese were considered to have been Proto-Austroasiatic (also called Proto-Mon–Khmer) speaking people, possibly traced to the ancient Dong Son culture. Modern linguists describe Vietnamese as having lost some Proto-Austroasiatic phonological and morphological features that the original Vietnamese language had. This was noted in the linguistic separation of Vietnamese from Vietnamese-Muong roughly one thousand years ago.[1][2][3] From 111 BC up to the 20th century, Vietnamese literature was written in Traditional Chinese (Vietnamese: cổ văn 古文 or văn ngôn 文言), using Chữ Hán (Chinese characters) and then also Nôm from the 10th century to 20th century (Chinese characters adapted for vernacular Vietnamese).[4][5]
Nom had widespread use in the 10th century, and was begun to be used as early as the 8th century in prose fiction and poetry in Vietnamese, but was never officiated. Nom used Chinese characters for Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary and an adapted set of characters to transcribe native Vietnamese, with Vietnamese approximations of Middle Chinese pronunciations.[6] The two concurrent scripts existed until the era of French Indochina when the Latin alphabet chữ quốc ngữ gradually became the current written medium of literature.[7] In the past, Sanskrit and Indic texts also contributed to Vietnamese literature either from religious ideas from Mahayana Buddhism, or from historical influence of Champa and Khmer.
Terminology[]
In Vietnamese, Chinese characters go by several names, but all mean the same script:
- Chữ Hán (