Chu Nom Revival [Vietnamese]

[Tenebrarum]

First of all, good job on using "Westerners/foreigners" there to imply non-Vietnamese opinions are invalid or at least somehow less valid

It's just an observation on my part - the people who feel the need to assign Vietnam to a nice and neat culture block are the ones who, without fail, hail from outside of it. And I don't understand why they feel such a need in the first place. Our homegrown cultural purists operate from a different platform.

I have never lived in Vietnam but I have certainly been there a few times. My impression was that Vietnamese culture has both East and Southeast Asian elements, with the former more beneath the surface while the latter more on the surface. Once you get past the heat, humidity, eating green papayas and casualness of the people, that's where you see the difference between the more Sino-centric Vietnamese and their more Indo-centric mainland Southeast Asian neighbors.

I agree with you; that's just the way Vietnam is. What does that have to do with chữ Nôm, though?

[Pangu]

I have never lived in Vietnam but I have certainly been there a few times. My impression was that Vietnamese culture has both East and Southeast Asian elements, with the former more beneath the surface while the latter more on the surface. Once you get past the heat, humidity, eating green papayas and casualness of the people, that's where you see the difference between the more Sino-centric Vietnamese and their more Indo-centric mainland Southeast Asian neighbors.

I agree with you; that's just the way Vietnam is. What does that have to do with chữ Nôm, though?

I suppose nothing, you brought up the topic first.

[Cycol]

A wonderpuf website:
http://www.chunom.org/ime/

[Woods]

What a great topic! I congratulate the original poster, who seems quite bright, and the others for keeping a civilised discussion - which shows that there was a point in time when UniLang was a good place!

I fully agree that the benefits of keeping an older writing system from a historical point of view are huge, which this topic was about, although it did degrade into arguments about the script's complexity, which was not the point.

I personally would like to see Vietnam return to Chu Nom, or at least teach the script to all pupils, as well as publish all Vietnamese literature from older times and make it accessible to everyone.

Just like I would like to see much easier transitions such as Turkish returning to the Ottoman script and Swedish returning to Danish.

I read about 20% of the posts, I will continue later.

That being said, I'm wondering if anyone who has been interested in the script has an explanation of why the characters don't show on my Android phone, if they're in UniCode, and a solution to the problem?

[OiJoua]

That being said, I'm wondering if anyone who has been interested in the script has an explanation of why the characters don't show on my Android phone, if they're in UniCode, and a solution to the problem?

Where are the characters that don't show up? Can you post a link? You phone probably doesn't support the CJK extensions. You might need a font like Hanazono. Maybe this will help: https://ctext.org/font-test-page

[Woods]

Where are the characters that don't show up? Can you post a link? (...) You might need a font like Hanazono. Maybe this will help: https://ctext.org/font-test-page

Hello OiJoua! Well, basically all chữ nôm characters that are not Chinese characters. I often read articles on the Internet explaining different things about the script. Unless they've designed the webpage using pictures, Chinese characters show up and chữ nôm ones in between are rendered as empty squares.

A couple of Google links I opened suggested I download a .ttf file and install it through an app, or root the device. The latter is not something I'm going to do, I can look into the former, but shouldn't it work out of the box if the characters are included in UniCode or there are certain sets that don't?

In the very word chữ nôm / [square]喃, only the second character is shown. An example is the Wikipedia article, where this is the second word used after the title.

I tried tricking my phone into thinking I'm localised in Việt Nam by enabling a Vietnamese keyboard layout, but that didn't help.

You phone probably doesn't support the CJK extensions.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean work without fail though.


PS And when I finished my post and tried to publish it here, I got the following message: "Your message contains the following unsupported characters: [chữ nôm character]". I had to remove the character for it to work.

I thought for a moment that I'd been banned by the mysterious admins who delete posts without explanations for expressing a controversial opinion (i.e. supporting the script.)

[OiJoua]

A couple of Google links I opened suggested I download a .ttf file and install it through an app, or root the device. The latter is not something I'm going to do, I can look into the former, but shouldn't it work out of the box if the characters are included in UniCode or there are certain sets that don't?

It depends on the font that you are using.

You phone probably doesn't support the CJK extensions.

Chinese, Japanese and Korean work without fail though.

Not Chinese, Japanese and Korean. CJK extensions. The Chữ Nôm characters are part of CJK Extension B. Not supported by every font.
For example, the Wikipedia article that you mentioned has a secton about Computer Encoding. It says

About half of these glyphs are specific to Vietnam.[86] Nôm characters not already encoded were added to CJK Unified Ideographs Extension B.[86] (These characters have five-digit hexadecimal code points. The characters that were encoded earlier have four-digit hex.)

and

The character (chàu) is specific to the Tày people.[91] It has been part of the Unicode standard only since version 8.0 of June 2015, so there is still very little font and input method support for it.

That is for the Tày language. So it's just an example to show that just because something is part of Unicode standard it doesn't mean your font will support. The same problem happens to Vietnamese Chữ Nôm characters and other character sets that aren't commonly used in computer writing. And yes it happened to me too, I got the same message for the character (chàu) "Your message contains the following unsupported characters" until I deleted it.
Now if you go to the linked Wikipedia article for Tày language, or many other articles, at the bottom of the summary box it says

This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

More information here: Help: Multilingual Support

To be able to correctly view and edit these articles requires that you have the appropriate fonts installed and to have correctly configured your operating system and browser. This guide will help you to do so.

This is the same issue. It depend on what font you have. It's normal. I think Hanazono font is one that works for Chữ Nôm but I don't have it either. When you see suggestions about ttf files, this is what they mean. It means to install a font that supports the CJK extensions or whatever the characters that you need. If you don't have it, you get boxes. It still won't work in some places if you post somewhere (like this board) that doesn't support it either, even if YOU have the font installed. It's not something to take personal against you, its just limits of technology. Maybe when the fonts you use were created, these characters hadn't been added to Unicode yet, or the creater of the font think no one using this font will want to use Chữ Nôm characters. So the font set doesn't "know" they exist and doesn't know how to display them. It's happens to some other writing systems too even though they have Unicode already. It's one reason some languages prefer to use Romanized alphabet letters instead of invent their own unique ones. It's a strong advantage.

[Woods]

It depend on what font you have. (...) Maybe when the fonts you use were created, these characters hadn't been added to Unicode yet, or the creater of the font think no one using this font will want to use Chữ Nôm characters.

Okay, I'll keep thinking about it - but so it seems that the fonts selected by major operating systems and configurations are ones that do not include nom characters, thereby being able to even display those characters is a niche thing requiring special setups and not available to everybody; so the efforts to include nom characters in UniCode have been halfway vain :(

I just realised my computer also does not display nom characters. The Hanazono fonts have been listed as a package, but it hasn't been made available in any of the official or additional repositories I've added to my system, so I get the same result when browsing Wikipedia. Even if I could install them, I suppose they still wouldn't be selected by default by system and software, or would they? If I install a font for a language that is not supported, like Burmese or Gujarati, I need to refresh and characters are displayed; but then the system knows that the text is in these languages and flips the font; I guess it wouldn't be the case with Vietnamese if characters are part of a Chinese-Japanese-Korean set which is supposed to include all of them?

The best solution would be for OS assemblers to use up-to-date fonts that cover all languages, but it seems that Vietnamese written the old way is one about which nobody cares.

[OiJoua]

being able to even display those characters is a niche thing requiring special setups and not available to everybody

So we are following historical trends. Throughout its history chữ nôm has always been a niche thing not available to everybody.

It doesn't have a standardized form either. Words often have multiple ways to write based on original Chinese characters or special chữ nôm characters based on sound alone or based on meaning plus sound. Here is the word "trống" written in chữ nôm. You expect each of the three meanings to have its own character, sure. But not only that. Each of the meanings has at least two or three characters you can choose which one.

The best solution would be for OS assemblers to use up-to-date fonts that cover all languages, but it seems that Vietnamese written the old way is one about which nobody cares.

I'm not sure there is any font that really covers all languages. Some are so "niche" that if you want to use them, you must install a special font. It's just how it is. Fonts are made by people and they have to create each symbol. They choose which ones they think must be included. When the issue is a script like chữ nôm that is not standardize and only use by a small population, who also have another writing system that is already supported by common fonts, maybe they choose not to include and expect people to install the special font if they need it.
Even the great idea "let's include all of Unicode characters" doesn't work because not only is it a monumental task, also Unicode is always growing with new characters added. As soon as the font is made, already new characters have been added to Unicode and so already the font is out of date.

[Woods]

It doesn't have a standardized form either.

What about historical texts? Shouldn't the initial purpose be to simply render all of them accessible, i.e. to include each character that has been used when chữ nôm was Việt Nam's writing system?

By the way do we know / do you know how much has been written - is it a small number of texts that can easily be listed and identified or are there numerous scripta that could hardly all be found?

Does the Vietnamese government consider chữ nôm documents cultural heritage that has a lot of value and needs to be preserved or is it more an enthusiasts' hobby to uncover and decipher most of them, besides most important artifacts?

The best solution would be for OS assemblers to use up-to-date fonts that cover all languages, but it seems that Vietnamese written the old way is one about which nobody cares.

I'm not sure there is any font that really covers all languages. Some are so "niche" that if you want to use them, you must install a special font.

The problem is when you start writing things for other people. It's one thing to install a font on your computer for a certain purpose - okay, but then, when you write that Wikipedia article, what is the use of it when most people won't be able to read it? And even if most of them install additional software, which won't happen, does the browser know it's Vietnamese, or it just goes with its default Chinese fonts?


And at the end of the day, if a thousand years of Vietnam's history have been written with this script, isn't important enough to make it more mainstream? Old Bulgarian can be written with older letters which were displayed on every device I've tried so far without installing anything. I saw Romanian written in Cyrillics one of these days. I am pretty sure Ottoman Turkish will be displayed as well. Are Vietnamese cultural authorities sleeping?


By the way I heard there's a certain Vietnamese-speaking place in China where they still use chữ nôm. So technically speaking, there is a people that does not already have another script for its language. It could be a rural area where they don't use many computers or the Communist Party might be shoving putonghua down their throats and trying to stop them from speaking their language, I don't know; or it might be the other way around and this could have been one of the reasons some efforts were made to encode the language.

As soon as the font is made, already new characters have been added to Unicode and so already the font is out of date.

Sure, but shouldn't major OS platforms such as Android which is allegedly serving 70% of the global mobile-phone market or browsers like Firefox provide up-to-date fonts and an easy way to access those languages?

[OiJoua]

What about historical texts? Shouldn't the initial purpose be to simply render all of them accessible

To be honest, if we're talking about historical texts, for historical purposes I'd rather they be accesible like this and this.

By the way I heard there's a certain Vietnamese-speaking place in China where they still use chữ nôm.

Probably you heard about the Jing villages Wutou (in Vietnamese: Vu Ðầu; Chinese: 巫頭), Wanwei (Vạn Vĩ, 澫尾) and Shanxin (Sơn Tâm, 山心). There, they call chữ nôm "zi nan" (字喃). The thing is that when they write in Vietnamese, they use chữ nôm, but for most things they write in Chinese. The written chữ nôm it's limited to religious texts like songs and scriptures. Only a few can read and write chữ nôm (mostly religious leaders). Like, one source says in 2005 only 20 people in Wanwei knew chữ nôm. So, like always, it's not widely used.