John Phan
I am an assistant professor in the department of East Asian Languages & Cultures at Columbia University. I am currently finishing a book manuscript on the history of Sino-Vietic linguistic contact. My most recent work focuses on the emergence of vernacular literary practices associated with the demotic Vietnamese script known as Chữ Nôm.
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Remarkably, just such a reinvention is articulated in the prefatory material of a seventeenth-century Sino-Vietnamese dictionary called the Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa (Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds 指南語音解義). The Chỉ nam bears two prefaces: one in Literary Sinitic (written in Sinitic characters) and one in Vietnamese (written in Chữ Nôm). Though usually read separately, they in fact combine to form an interlocking argument that redefines Nôm, not as a crude or simplistic facsimile of Sinitic writing, but as a legitimate and authentic extension of the sagely and civilizing technology that Han characters represented. The bilingual prefaces seek to dissolve the linguistic and cultural barriers separating the vernacular from the classical mode and to render Vietnamese intelligible in terms of Literary Sinitic intellectuality.
The Chỉ nam was produced at a crossroads in the history of Vietnamese vernacular writing. Although Nôm had gained some momentum as a pedagogical tool over the fourteenth century, the ascent of Neo-Confucianism following the Ming occupation of 1407–1427 led to a revival of classical education that disrupted or even reversed the course of vernacularization. The Chỉ nam therefore represents a “rebooting” of vernacular practices, fueled by a new perception of its place, nature, and function. Its production in the mid-seventeenth century marks a watershed in the evolution of the Vietnamese vernacular—between the limited and proscribed forms of vernacular literature found in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the flourishing traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Keywords: Viet-Muong, Historical Phonology, subgrouping"
Remarkably, just such a reinvention is articulated in the prefatory material of a seventeenth-century Sino-Vietnamese dictionary called the Chỉ nam ngọc âm giải nghĩa (Explication of the Guide to Jeweled Sounds 指南語音解義). The Chỉ nam bears two prefaces: one in Literary Sinitic (written in Sinitic characters) and one in Vietnamese (written in Chữ Nôm). Though usually read separately, they in fact combine to form an interlocking argument that redefines Nôm, not as a crude or simplistic facsimile of Sinitic writing, but as a legitimate and authentic extension of the sagely and civilizing technology that Han characters represented. The bilingual prefaces seek to dissolve the linguistic and cultural barriers separating the vernacular from the classical mode and to render Vietnamese intelligible in terms of Literary Sinitic intellectuality.
The Chỉ nam was produced at a crossroads in the history of Vietnamese vernacular writing. Although Nôm had gained some momentum as a pedagogical tool over the fourteenth century, the ascent of Neo-Confucianism following the Ming occupation of 1407–1427 led to a revival of classical education that disrupted or even reversed the course of vernacularization. The Chỉ nam therefore represents a “rebooting” of vernacular practices, fueled by a new perception of its place, nature, and function. Its production in the mid-seventeenth century marks a watershed in the evolution of the Vietnamese vernacular—between the limited and proscribed forms of vernacular literature found in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the flourishing traditions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Keywords: Viet-Muong, Historical Phonology, subgrouping"