American Poet Helps Save Ancient Vietnamese Script
By Matt Steinglass
Hanoi
18 December 2008


Modern Vietnamese writing, developed by French colonists, looks much like English or French. But for centuries, Vietnamese was written in a different script, based on Chinese-style characters. Now, only a few score of people in the world can read that language fluently. The Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation is trying to keep this heritage from being forgotten.



http://voanews.com/english/2008-12-18-voa36.cfm

http://www.nomfoundation.org/index.php

Very nice. Are you considering learning this script? I think it would be cool to learn since its the original. I will learn it as well once I find some adequate resources.

i havent heard anything good about this script, only that it was used by ancient vietnamese and thats why we should ressurect it.

i maintain keeping a small number of individuals that can read it, so they can translate old books, but for everyday use i'll stick with quoc ngu

For the majority of Vietnam's timeline, Nom script was never used as the official writting script of the State anyway, let it die in glory.

well, die as it not used regularly, i still support keeping a dictionary so that future translations of old books are possible

Even though many books say French colonists developed modern Viet writtings, if you can use your own thinking, you will know it is not the fact.

Then, who developed it?

The present day Vietnamese script was developed mainly from the Portugese with the help of the local Vietnamese in the 1600's. However, not until the early 1900's that the script is starting to be used widely for one obvious reason: <1% of Vietnam's population could read or write at that time and it will take only a couple of month to a year to learn to read and write Vietnamese 100%

Now that is more likely, thinking. It was not used widely because the backward thinkers of the last Nguyens were stuck in the past. They refused to modernize and suppressed anything that would. So much so that Viets hid their names from such involvement. The catholics and the French tried to hide this fact that they basically copied from the first dictionary publication of the language by destroying all the such dictionaries and replaced them with a dead and useless language dictionary just to claim the credit that they did it all for Viet Nam modernisation, which was a sell for change, a direct contrast to the backward Nguyens.

It's quite likely that the late Nguyens were being played because Viet culture is an adaptable culture. For them to be such backward, something must have got in their heads. Come to think of it so much like the 3lashes and the Ho Ho VCs.

i don't really like Nom because it's so hard to write. well, not that hard but too many strokes compare with Chinese.