Letter to the editor Chữ Nôm and the cradle of Vietnamese poetry Journal of Chinese Writing Systems 1–3 © The Author(s) 2019 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/2513850219815638 journals.sagepub.com/home/cws Trang Phan Vietnam National University, Vietnam Norbert Francis Northern Arizona University, USA The recent study by Trần Trọng Dương (Trần, 2018a) of graphemic borrowing in the transcription to chữ Nôm of Sinitic loanwords attracted our attention because of the importance of this work for research on broader questions These are questions of language contact, in history and in the modern day, informed by linguistic theory and cognitive science approaches to the study of writing and literacy Taking its sample from the Quốc Âm Thi Tập [Poetry Collection in the National Language], the framework of the study is centered on the Sinitic lexicon, divided between loanwords read in Sino-Vietnamese (SV) pronunciation and loanwords read in Non-Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation (NSV) The overarching purpose is to analyze the functional structure of the Nôm characters that transcribed them, emerging over many years Within the corpus of Sinitic loanwords from the source text, the analysis centers on the design features, the ‘functional structure’ of the self-generated Nôm characters and how they compare to the larger set that borrows Sinitic graphic forms exactly How the self-generated and the exact borrowings, together, came to be integrated into an autonomous orthographic system will eventually address the important problem of origins and development discussed, for example, by Nguyễn (1992) The definitive resolution of this question may be forever out of reach because only a fraction of the original written record remains But the study makes an important contribution toward a better understanding of the role of language-specific factors, especially of the phonological subsystem, in how the adopted character system underwent transformation The study of the design features of Nôm will also shed further light on the parallel developments in all the East Asian cultures that during the same years, more or less, adopted the Chinese characters While on the surface the end results in the modern day in each case appear to differ markedly, the separate historical developments may have followed similar paths An important finding of previous work, confirmed by the present study, is that of the self-generated Nôm characters all incorporate a phonetic component, either as part of a phono-semantic compound or as a ‘pure phonetic,’ and that none are read in SV pronunciation (Trần, 2018a: 47) Such would be one of the important keys to uncovering ‘common trends’ (Trần, 2018a: 43), referring back to the problem of origins and development (‘river’) and sống (‘to live’) They are both self-generated Nôm Take into account the two examples of sông characters belonging to category (B) of Trần’s (2018a) classification, and more particularly, to the subcategory (B–), that is, those Nôm characters which lack any linkage to the graphic form of the Sinitic etymons They are of special interest, for despite their Sinitic origin, the transcribers intuitively considered them as indigenous Vietnamese Let us consider their internal structure in detail Sông (‘river’), reconstructed as /*krông/ (Trần, 2018b: 319), consists of two components: a radical (meaning ‘water’) served as the semantic notation, and the Sinitic character (read as long) served as the phonetic notation This is one instance of the group (B4) in Trần’s (2018a) classification system On the other hand, sống (‘to live’), reconstructed as /*kloŋ/ (Trần, 2018a: 49), is the composition of two phonetic notations: the Sinitic graph 古 (read as cổ), transcribing as the first consonant of the initial consonant cluster /k-/, and another Sinitic character, 弄 (read as lộng), transcribing the fluid sound / l-/ and the rhyme /-oŋ/ This instance of the group (B6) in Trần’s (2018a) classification is of special value for it is the remaining vestige of the so-called phenomenon of sequisyllables with the syllabic structure of CCVC of the Vietnamese language in the 15th century Corresponding author: Trang Phan, Pham Van Dong, Cau Giay district, Hanoi, Vietnam Email: chengnn85@gmail.com Journal of Chinese Writing Systems 00(0) The 2018 report forms part of an ambitious initiative by the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies, including Trần’s Nguyễn Trãi Quốc Âm Từ Điển [A Dictionary of 15th Century Ancient Vietnamese], its second printing released by Nhà Xuất Bản Văn Học in 2018, and Nguyễn Quang Hồng’s (2014) two-volume dictionary Tự Điển Chữ Nôm Dẫn Giải The project seeks to both recover a literary tradition and arrive at a complete description of the writing system that found a way to put voice to page As researchers from outside of the field of Nôm Studies, we are calling attention to these new developments in the hope that qualified scholars might give these works a proper review, the reason being the unique opportunity for cross-discipline discussion that all of this represents The Dictionary of 15th Century Ancient Vietnamese and Trần’s ‘Graphemic borrowings’ article are devoted to one single writer, the famed poet and Confucian scholar Nguyễn Trãi (1380–1442), focusing the analysis on his poems collected in Quốc Âm Thi Tập According to the dictionary’s introduction, it can be taken as a representative historical record of the 15th century Vietnamese language as a whole, accommodating 11,067 instances of Nôm characters, with each of these characters standing as an invaluable scientific and cultural artifact In light of this conception, building upon the work of previous dictionaries, each word is illustrated by its functional category, its meaning and its actual occurrence in the collection Take a closer look at the example of sông (Trần, 2018b: 319): Sông dt sông nước Thuyền chèo đêm nguyệt, sông biếc Cây đến ngày xuân, tươi (Ngơn chí 22.5) From the above annotation, it is shown that sông is a noun (dt.), which means “river” One occurrence of this word is in the verse Thuyền chèo đêm nguyệt, sông biếc Cây đến ngày xuân, tươi [Boats rowed on a moon night, the river shined Trees came to a spring day, the leaves glorified] (the poem Ngơn chí, number 22 in the collection, line 5) Apart from the conventional format, what truly differentiates this dictionary from other dictionaries is its purpose in wedging apart multiple layers of the 15th-century Vietnamese lexicon, that is, separating the words that are borrowed from Chinese throughout different periods of history from words that are of more indigenous origin Again, take the example of sông (Trần, 2018b: 319) The principal annotation of this word centers around its origin in comparison with other river-denoting words available in the lexicon First, compare sông with the standard Sino-Vietnamese counterpart giang 江 The author adopts Zhang’s (1998) reconstruction, that the proto form of giang is /*krông/ That is to say, although both giang and sông are of Sinitic origin, sông is the more ancient form; it is an instance of the so-called Pre-Sino-Vietnamese Taking the findings of Nguyễn (2005), among others, the author goes on to compare sông with other river-denoting words which originated from more indigenous languages, including nậm of the Tai languages, and k’oŋ, şoŋ, p’aw, k’aw, t’aw of different dialects of the Muong languages Standing on giants’ shoulders, the work of Hán-Nôm scholars today marks an important advance in making the chữ Nôm corpus accessible to readers of various interests, ranging from literature to the study of writing systems, historical linguistics and research on the interaction between cultural and cognitive factors in language and literacy The observation has been made that Vietnamese poetry rests on the foundation of popular verse of the oral tradition This assertion is correct with the clarification that it is true, in one way or another, for the development of literary culture in all modern civilizations Chữ Nôm did not give birth to poetry; but it may have served for many years as its crèche The parallel systems that emerged in Korea (idu) and Japan (man’yōgana), among other examples in East Asia, and showing similar linguistic features, may have done the same Subsequent investigations will answer more completely the question of the motivation on the part of the select elite of literate bilingual speakers of the time: if, prior to the emergence of chữ Nôm, classical Chinese would have sufficed for written communication among persons who could read and write, what precisely was the incentive for designing a system that represented the morphosyntax and phonology of Vietnamese? After all, only the same educated class of bilingual literates could also read texts in the new modified system More importantly, far from a marginal invention, hobby or passing curiosity, it came to be a major vehicle of literary (and non-literary) production for many hundreds of years A line of inquiry building upon this proposed poetry–chữ Nôm connection, already suggested by scholars (Marr, 1981; Nguyễn, 1992), could focus on the defining features of verse that make special use of the grammatical and sonorous properties of language These properties of poetic text were language – Vietnamese language – specific A poetic reading to a non-literate audience, translating simultaneously from classical Chinese, could be imagined as theoretically possible, but hardly feasible or very difficult The modified writing system that then mapped the new graphemes onto the linguistic subsystems of phonology and morphosyntax of speakers may have been the link that put the learned poets into face-toface contact with the poetic compositions of the oral tradition Each one nurtured the other in cycles of more effective mutual comprehension, in the performance contexts of readings: encounters between the literate reader and the nonliterate audience According to this idea, the former learned from the oral tradition and the latter incorporated the new material into an enriched popular poetic tradition Phan and Francis The hypothesis that we are putting forward for discussion is that while all the genres were served by the emergence of chữ Nôm, poetry virtually required it It is no accident that the apogee of literary expression – the verse narrative Tale of Kiều written in Nôm – coincided with an advanced version, in the 18th century, of the nativized, language-specific, character writing system For Marr (1981): Nguyễn Du was Vietnam’s Chaucer [He participated] in local poetry exchanges, and his ear for popular phraseology was unsurpassed among the educated elite [Bards] of every succeeding generation would memorize and recite Kiều [Local] poets were not constrained from improvising on Nguyễn’s verses, from further amplifying the characters or from fashioning new scenes entirely (p 44) A closer linguistic analysis of Nôm as a system (as in the ‘Graphemic borrowings’ article) will help us better understand literary history, and literary language itself Recall that one of the key features of the analysis for uncovering the common threads in the emergence and development of the system centered on the self-generated characters: that all incorporate or consist entirely of a phonetic component, all in turn linked to an NSV pronunciation We can now look forward to the same analysis beyond the corpus of loanwords, and then to further work, beyond the phonological patterns, to the syntax of Nôm texts Where, especially in poetic texts, the grammatical patterns diverge from Chinese word order and where was it maintained? References Marr DG (1981) Vietnamese Tradition on Trial 1920–1945 Berkeley, CA: University of California Press Nguyễn D-H (1992) Graphemic borrowing from Chinese: The case of chữ Nôm – Vietnam’s demotic script Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 61(2): 383–432 Nguyễn VT (2005) Ngữ âm tiếng Mường qua phương ngôn [Phonetics of Mường through its dialects] Hanoi: Nhà xuất Từ điển Bách khoa Trần, TD (2018a) Graphemic borrowings and transformations from Sinitic: The case of Quốc Âm Thi Tập Journal of Chinese Writing Systems 2(1): 43–57 Trần, TD (2018b) Nguyễn Trãi Quốc Âm từ điển [A Dictionary of 15th Century Ancient Vietnamese] Hanoi: Nhà xuất Văn học Zhang HM (1998) Chinese etyma for River Journal of Chinese Linguistics 26(1): 1–47 ... t’aw of different dialects of the Muong languages Standing on giants’ shoulders, the work of Hán -Nôm scholars today marks an important advance in making the chữ Nôm corpus accessible to readers of. .. history, and literary language itself Recall that one of the key features of the analysis for uncovering the common threads in the emergence and development of the system centered on the self-generated... emergence of chữ Nôm, poetry virtually required it It is no accident that the apogee of literary expression – the verse narrative Tale of Kiều written in Nôm – coincided with an advanced version, in the