Talk:Chữ Nôm

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[edit] Requested move

It was requested that this article be renamed but there was no consensus for it to be moved. It seems that a move to southern script might be acceptable. --Stemonitis 17:52, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

The following discussion is an archived discussion of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

Chữ Nôm → Chu Nom — Per WP:NC(UE), articles should be named using the Latin alphabet. This article uses the Vietnamese alphabet. Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 02:21, 28 January 2007 (UTC) Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 02:21, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Survey

Add # '''Support''' or # '''Oppose''' on a new line in the appropriate section followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~. Please remember that this survey is not a vote, and please provide an explanation for your recommendation.

[edit] Survey - in support of the move

Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 02:21, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
I support the move, as well. --Ryanaxp 23:21, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Support, but southern script would be better. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 23:02, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Survey - in opposition to the move

Oppose. WP:UE doesn't apply here since Chữ Nôm is not English anyway. (The English would be southern script). And the Vietnamese alphabet is a form of the Latin alphabet with diacritics (like with French or Hungarian) that Wikipedia freely uses in article titles. — AjaxSmack 02:04, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Oppose. The English and Vietnamese alphabets both use the same script: Latin. The title of the article will not be any more English with or without the diacritics. Diacritics hold meaning to some. Others may ignore them without any difficulty. A redirect already exists for Chu Nom, so there is no difficulty finding the page. Bendono 11:22, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

Just a comment - editors interested in this move request might also be interested in the same move request at Talk:Hán Tự. Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 19:44, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I'm not sure what should become of this. I suggest avoiding the use of diacritics that indicate tone; other diacritics might be acceptable. Should the result be Chư Nôm? Chu Nôm? Or, simply, Chu Nom?—Nat Krause^{(Talk!·What have I done?)} 20:11, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I suggest we use "Chu Nom". Diacritics are rarely used in English, and article titles ought to be in English. The diacritics can be indicated in the article itself. And one issue I also wonder about is, if a reader or editor does not have Vietnamese-language support on his or her computer, what does he see? My own computers have it, so I see it normally. Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 20:42, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

I have used the "what if a reader doesn't have Unicode support" argument to argue that Māori language, a legitimate English word, should not have a macron in the title but was assured that I was an idiot to argue such (Talk:Māori_language#Requested_move). And here, Hán Tự doesn't meet the threshold of English; that would be "Chinese character." — AjaxSmack 19:27, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Actually that was not an argument, but a genuine concern. I honestly do not know how Vietnamese tone marks show up on someone's computer if he does not have Vietnamese language support. Anyway, I would argue that Hán Tự and Chữ Nôm both would fall under the "use English" naming convention in that these tone marks rarely appear, if they appear at all, in English-language publications. Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 20:14, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

Junam?

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

[edit] Standardization of capital letter

I've standardized Chữ nôm as "chữ Nôm", following the Vietnamese Wikipedia's example. Cheers.--K.C. Tang 06:59, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

I too have preserved this in my edits on other articles, but as I do not know much about Vietnamese, I was wondering if anyone could explain why Nôm is capitalized? It means south, I think -- is there a convention in Vietnamese that directions are capitalized?

It would be interesting and useful to have a Capitalization in Vietnamese article or similar explaining the conventions if they differ substantially from English usage, which seems likely. 70.132.14.22 02:10, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Proper nouns are capitalized, just as we do in English. In the case of "chu nom", "nom" is capitalized because it represents, or at least is perceived to represent, "Vietnam". Just like we write "Arabic script", not "arabic script". Cheers.--K.C. Tang 06:27, 20 August 2007 (UTC)

In contemporary usage, Vietnamese capitalization does differ considerably from that of English. Because so many words in Vietnamese are compound words, it can be awkward to capitalize every word in a proper noun. For instance, Quỹ Hỗ trợ Wikimedia is one way of translating "Wikimedia Foundation". Quỹ (fund), Hỗ trợ (to financially support), and Wikimedia are the từ (words, possibly compound) that make up this proper noun. This is a relatively recent change; most older writers, especially outside of Vietnam, would still write Quỹ Hỗ Trợ Wikimedia. In this case, there isn't much ambiguity if you capitalize every chữ (the things separated by spaces).

On the other hand, "Vietnamese Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia" is often written Bách khoa toàn thư mở Wikipedia, even if the rest of the document uses title case. In this case, Bách khoa toàn thư (encyclopedia), mở (open[-source]), and Wikipedia are the từ that make up this phrase. If you were to capitalize each từ, you'd get Bách khoa toàn thư Mở Wikipedia, which just looks weird to a Vietnamese reader, because Mở is now sticking out by itself. So a lot of this is aesthetic, not systematic.

Another example: Quốc hội Ấn Độ – Quốc hội (national assembly) and Ấn Độ (India). Many proper nouns like Ấn Độ can't be broken down into meaningful modern Vietnamese words – Ấn Độ is a transliteration from Sino-Vietnamese – so are typically fully capitalized. This depends on the writer: I've seen plenty of Ấn-độ or Ấn độ too. I probably haven't covered every capitalization "rule", but I hope this helps regardless.

– Minh Nguyễn (talk, contribs) 03:42, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a lot for your clarification! Yes, having spaces between the syllables (sometimes morphemes) of a single word is, I guess, the most complained-about thing in the modern Vietnamese writing system.--K.C. Tang 06:43, 11 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Number of characters

Does the article give the total number of Chữ Nôm characters? It would be very good to list the total number of Chữ Nôm (including the total number of invented and borrowed characters). Badagnani (talk) 03:57, 9 April 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Conflicting information

I remember clearly reading a Vietnamese literature book by Vietnamese literary scholar Nguyen Dinh Hoa which mentioned claims that Chu nom dates back at least to the 11th century (or 10th)..not 13th century as this article claims. Is there any online proof? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.190.22.152 (talk) 19:08, 18 September 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Meaning of the word "nôm"

A few users insist that the word "Nôm" in "chữ Nôm" means "chattering". That's not correct. The error lies in confusing the ideas of character and word. In Chinese, the character 喃 is usually used to represent the word nam/nan "chattering", "murmuring". However, in the case of 字喃, the character 喃 is used phonetically to represent the Vietnamese word Nôm (i.e. Vietnam), not the Chinese word "chattering" (I don't think this Chinese word has been borrowed into Vietnamese). The term "chữ Nôm" ("Vietnamese script") is indeed used in contrast to the term "chữ Nho" ("Chinese script"). A comparison of the two terms make the meaning of "Nôm" clear. Hope the explanation make sense. Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 09:38, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

I disagree. The word Nôm does not represent Vietnam, and it never did. Where in the whole of Vietnamese history and culture has the world Nôm/喃 been used to symbolise Vietnam? The phrase chữ Nôm is identified as 'vernacular script' to represent the SPOKEN language of Vietnam (as opposed to chữ Nho, which was used to WRITE historical records). Maybe chữ Nôm doesn't mean 'chattering script', but when words are borrowed into another language they sometimes lose their original meaning and/or gain a new meaning. 'Vernacular' could be an extension of the word 'chattering', as they both have meaning on the basis of sound. Just to clarify something else for other users, Nôm/喃 DOES NOT MEAN SOUTH. Chữ Nôm is NOT 'southern script'; notice the '口' radical on '喃'. '南' means south, but chữ Nôm isn't '字南'. I have seen 'southern script' in this article a couple of times; that is incorrect. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 125.238.23.72 (talk) 03:15, 12 October 2008 (UTC)

The word nôm in Vietnamese doesn't mean "chattering". In fact it's a bound morpheme which only occurs in a few compounds like chữ Nôm (according to my Vietnamese-Chinese dictionary, pls correct me if I'm wrong). The original meaning of this morpheme seems uncertain and controversial, so I think the best way to go is simply avoid the "lit." part.--K.C. Tang (talk) 04:40, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

By the way, what word a character represents can only be determined by the context. That's an important principle in Chinese philology. The word "south" can well be represented by 喃 or many other characters. But that's another story. Cheers.--K.C. Tang (talk) 04:47, 13 October 2008 (UTC)

Good idea to remove the 'lit' part due to uncertainty. However, are you sure the word "south" can well be represented by 喃? Are there any examples? 南 is/was used to represent south in all of the CJKV languages. Also, the Vietnamese language doesn't have a native word for south; it is known as Hướng Nam (向南, 'southern direction'). The context which a character is written in can bend the meaning of the phrase/sentence, but it is very hard to modify the meaning of the original character. Whatever context 喃 is written in, it seems rather unlikely it can be used to represent 'south'. Actually from looking at the Vietnamese version of the encyclopedia in the discussion for Chu Nom, 喃 seems to be used in the context in place of the word language/script (I can't tell, because I can't read Vietnamese), for example, Nôm Triều (喃朝) and Nôm Nhật (喃日) seem to represent the languages(spoken or written) of Korea and Japan, respectively. Can someone who knows a competent level of Vietnamese confirm this? 125.238.169.225 (talk) 03:05, 16 October 2008 (UTC)

Should be "chữ nôm Nhật" and "chữ nôm Triều", where "chữ nôm" refers to native characters coined in Japan and Korea (in contrast to those borrowed from China.)--K.C. Tang (talk) 12:15, 18 October 2008 (UTC)

It could be that this is one of those "obsolete" Chinese words (Wiktionary carries many; Kangxi Dictionary sure helped them). I mean, the compound doesn't make sense the way it stands, but I doubt it's a transliteration if they were using the Chinese script to begin with... ★Dasani★ 01:37, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

Talk:Chữ Nôm

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Contents

[edit] Requested move

[edit] Survey

[edit] Survey - in support of the move

[edit] Survey - in opposition to the move

[edit] Discussion

[edit] Standardization of capital letter

[edit] Number of characters

[edit] Conflicting information

[edit] Meaning of the word "nôm"

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