ベトナムの民族俗字「字喃」の構造とその淵源

Abstract

'Chu Nom, ' the former system of writing invented by borrowing the principles and forms of the Chinese character, really means "vulgar script" or "southern character, " in contrast to 'Chu Nho, ' meaning "Confucianist scholars' script." I have been considering why 'Chu Nom' was not established as the Vietnamese orthography like the similar Japanese demotic script Kana but was replaced by 'Quoc Ngu, ' meaning "national script, " which was invented by modification of the Roman alphabet. Recently I noticed that as long as 'Chu Nom' depended to a large degree phonetically and semantically on the Chinese system it was impossible for most of the people, who were blinded by their governor and had almost no chance to learn Chinese itself, to master it completely. And, paradoxically, just because it remained vulgar, its raison d'etre was to express racial romanticism. In other words, almost all Vietnamese intellectuals, most of whom were bilingual, never hoped that the script would be fostered as a national orthography. If this is true, it is evident that the script played a very important role in every sphere in Vietnamese history. Scholars of Vietnam should, therefore, comprehend its system and structure and, if possible, investigate its origin and how it changed in each period of history.