Let’s talk about how Chinese characters entered Vietnamese, following our earlier discussion on their introduction to Japanese.
Although Vietnamese now uses the Latin alphabet instead of Chinese characters, Chữ Nôm (Vietnamese Nom script) remains a uniquely distinctive variant of Chinese characters in history.
Within the Chinese cultural sphere, other nations used Chinese characters to build purely phonetic writing systems, while Chữ Nôm follows the logic of Chinese characters far more closely: half phonetic, half semantic.Take the Chinese character 柏 (cypress) as an example. The left radical 木 signifies “tree” and carries meaning, and the right component 白 supplies the pronunciation bái; 木 + 白 forms 柏.
Vietnamese faithfully inherited this formative principle.For instance, the number five: written 五 and pronounced wǔ in Mandarin, but spoken as năm in Vietnamese. Writers selected the character 南, pronounced nam, as the phonetic component. Combining 南 (sound) with 五 (meaning) yields the Nom character 𠄼 (năm).
We can compare the writing systems of China, Japan and Vietnam:English: gold
China (Mandarin): 金 (jīn)
Sino–Japanese reading: 金 (kin)
Japanese kun'yomi reading: 金 (kane)
Sino–Vietnamese literary reading 金: Kim
Vietnamese Nom script: 𨩯 (vàng)
A drawback of Japanese writing: the same character carries two separate readings, and readers must rely entirely on context to determine which pronunciation applies.
Vietnamese avoids this ambiguity, yet the Nom script comes with a major downside: its complex glyphs are cumbersome to write.
Vietnam has stopped using that system
