Chữ Nôm and the cradle of Vietnamese poetry

The recent study by Trần Trọng Dương (Trần, 2018a) of graphemic borrowing in the transcription to chữ Nôm of Sinitic loanwords attracted our attention because of the importance of this work for research on broader questions. These are questions of language contact, in history and in the modern day, informed by linguistic theory and cognitive science approaches to the study of writing and literacy. Taking its sample from the Quốc Âm Thi Tập [Poetry Collection in the National Language], the framework of the study is centered on the Sinitic lexicon, divided between loanwords read in Sino-Vietnamese (SV) pronunciation and loanwords read in Non-Sino-Vietnamese pronunciation (NSV). The overarching purpose is to analyze the functional structure of the Nôm characters that transcribed them, emerging over many years. Within the corpus of Sinitic loanwords from the source text, the analysis centers on the design features, the ‘functional structure’ of the self-generated Nôm characters and how they compare to the larger set that borrows Sinitic graphic forms exactly.