David Bonnet wrote:

>
> Hello everybody,
>
> On 19-sep-02, Scott wrote:
>
> > I was speaking with Vietnamese gentalman the other day. He was telling me
> > about the history (in brief) of the Vietnamese witten language. He said
> > that the language was romanized by a Frenchman in the 1600 and that the
> > Vietnamese, prior to that used a character system similar to Chinese. I
> > was wondering if anyone had any knowledge of this or, especially, any
> > examples.
>
> Well, it's fisrt time I post on this very interesting ML.
>
> So, about ancient vietnamese, I can say, according to:
> _ Histoire de l'ecriture, from Jean-Louis Calvet, 1999 (in French), p. 110

Very brief, and unreliable in places

> _ Histoire de l'ecriture, from James Fevrier, 1948, (In French, and
> old, but still the best reference available in France about history of
> writings,
> reprinted in 1995 ), p. 558

Unquestionably the best single-author volume on the topic (Jensen has
more pictures, but Février has opinions, not just facts, and the advice
of the finest experts of his time).

I cringed when I saw the announcement that Coulmas has done the
Cambridge Textbook on the topic. His Blackwell textbook has errors on
every page, and his Blackwell Encyclopedia even has unreliable pictures
(not to mention lousy layout).

> _ The World writing systems, from Peter T. Daniels and William Bright,
> 1996
> (in English and the best of all), p. 189 and 691
>
> The romanisation system for Vietnamese you're speaking about is called
> QUOC-NGU (sorry I haven't Vienamese tones). It was invented by Alexandre de
> Rhodes, French missionary. In fact, his work was continuing what had begun
> other catholic missionaries (especially from Portugal), in order to help
> newly converts to christianity.
> But, his system was still of marginal use in Vietnam, unitl the French
> colonisation from 1880.
> The two previous systems derived from Chinese, used by Vietnamese
> scholars were still in use until the first decades of twentieth century
> (maybe 1920). But the "World writing systems" says this replacement occured
> in the 17th century (which seems very early to me, considering the very
> strong Chinese influence at this period)

I don't think he says it replaced it so early, only that that's when the
Portuguese missionary did his thing; see also his JAOS article in his
references.

> These systems:
> _ CHU NOM ("square script")
> _ CHU HAN or CHU NHO HAN (Scholar script")
>
> These systems are quite like the one used by Koreans before the
> invention of Hangul. Some Chinese characters were used to write just a
> sound of Vietnamese (or Annamese if you prefer), some were used to write an
> idea, and some were used with the two uses. It was very difficult to
> utilise and lead to ambiguities.
> Other characters were invented for special use only inside Annam, like
> other were used just by Koreans.
>
> The problem is this system was far too be perfect, and so the
> romanization was an easy answer to the difficulties brought by Chinese
> characters.
>
> Well, that's all I can say. I you have any other question about the
> Chinese characters used in Korean before Hangul, Perhaps I can answer you
> too.
>
> One last word, visit www.omniglot.com, as mention before. Its author is
> very nice.

--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...