Talk:History of writing in Vietnam

message: While I am not an expert on the subject, I am pretty sure the statement that written Japanese and Chinese are indistinguishable is not true.  In fact, unless by Japanese it means classical Chinese written in Japan, then it is definitely false.  Japanese does use chinese characters, but also two separate written scripts for parts of speech which have no equivalent in chinese.  the meanings have changed, and pronunciations are also often different.  Based on this, I would assume the assertion that one can read the chinese characters by simply replacing them with one's native language is also false. Revision as of 05:22, 10 December 2006 User:Apocalyptic Destroyer
:You've misunderstood the article's assertion, I think.  In ancient times, Classical Chinese (a language never in fact spoken by anyone, but related to Middle Chinese) was the East Asian equivalent of Latin in Europe.  It was the language of the educated, and texts intended for consumption by the intellectual elite of the period were all authored in it, much as Latin was used in the middle ages.  In the same way that a text authored in Latin by a French person of the time was not consistently distinguishable from a text authored in Latin by an Italian person, texts authored in classical Chinese by a Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese or Chinese person were all essentially similar -- none was actually writing in his native language, after all.
:In those days, Japanese kana did not yet exist and no one wrote Japanese at all -- there was no way to write Japanese.  The educated wrote things in Chinese.  After a while, people started wanting to write their own language.  The Japanese tackled this problem by picking a number of Chinese characters whose sound in Chinese approximated a syllable of their own language, and ignoring their meaning -- that is, using them purely phonetically.  This system later developed into Hiragana and Katakana.
:The Vietnamese tackled the problem differently.  They created new characters, called chữ Nôm, to write native Vietnamese words.  This worked well enough because Vietnamese, like Chinese, is basically a monosyllabic language and has a large number of homophones.  But, like the Koreans, the Vietnamese resented constantly being invaded by China and thus saw Chinese characters as a sign of China's cultural domination; this is probably one of the chief reasons that the Latin based quốc ngữ script became their national standard (much as the Koreans have almost completely abandoned Hanja and write entirely in Hangul).  Of course, the Japanese also created some of their own characters (kokuji) but I won't get into that here.
:There is evidence that the use of Kanji is waning in Japan as well; comparisons of documents from 50 years ago and today indicate that the ratio of Kanji to Kana is falling rapidly.  This is not particularly surprising, of course -- Chinese characters are an ill-fit for the Japanese language.  Japanese is agglutinative, polysyllabic, and non-homophonic, except in Sino-Japanese constructs.  Attempting to spell words that aren't at all cognate the same way has resulted in Japanese kanji being a confusing mess, with common characters having dozens of different readings, nothing resembling the Chinese one-character-one-syllable rule... the Japanese themselves are confused by Kanji.  According to Japanese estimates, only about 3000 characters are now needed to read a newspaper in Japan, and furigana are common.  For comparison, 3000 characters is nowhere near enough to read a newspaper in China.
:Hope that helps...  Also, please sign your comments with four tildes, thanks  70.132.14.22 02:31, 13 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: 2006

message: I have rewritten this article because I found that the old article said Chu Nho is a Vietnamese writing system which is not true. Chu Nho is classical Chinese, that was used in Vietnam. Vietnamese could be written in vernacular chinese characters as well, but that is today called Chu nom. - Retval 10:49, 23 May 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Definition

message: I think this page should be merged into the Sino-Vietnamese page, although the Chu Nom page should remain sperate. Le Anh-Huy 03:17, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Sino-Vietnamese does not refer to the writing, but to the vocabulary, which can be written in any form. DHN 18:27, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Merger1

message: It was requested that this article be renamed but there was no consensus for it to be moved. --Stemonitis 17:52, 3 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Add  # Support  or  # Oppose  on a new line in the appropriate section followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.  Please remember that this survey is not a vote, and please provide an explanation for your recommendation.
====Survey - in support of the move====
# Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 02:26, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requested move 2007 

message: :Add  # Support  or  # Oppose  on a new line in the appropriate section followed by a brief explanation, then sign your opinion using ~~~~.  Please remember that this survey is not a vote, and please provide an explanation for your recommendation.
====Survey - in support of the move====
# Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 02:26, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: # Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 02:26, 28 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey - in support of the move

message: #Oppose.  WP:UE doesn't apply here since Hán Tự is not English anyway.  (The English would be Chinese character which is already taken by a related article).  And the Vietnamese alphabet is a form of the Latin alphabet with diacritics (like with French or Hungarian) that Wikipedia freely uses in article titles. —  AjaxSmack    02:03, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey - in opposition to the move

message: Just a comment - editors interested in this move request might also be interested in the same move request at Talk:Chữ Nôm.  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 19:43, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Discussion

message: The first discussion on this talk page back from 2007 had some interesting points (unfortunately no links to back that up.) There was an opinion that it was driven by nationalist sentiment (i.e., against perceived Chinese "hegemony.") Well that's what I get, but what about the communist rule (generally, I think it could be said that communists didn't like Han characters, for example, see Four Olds.) And what role has the French colonial rule played? If anyone is more knowledgeable on this subject it would be great to include this in the article, or you could dump links to external sources here and I could do it. Thus far, searching, e.g., "han tu communists" returns a bunch of dictionary definitions and similar irrelevant stuff. Samarkandas valdnieks (talk) 01:24, 20 October 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical context around replacing hán tự? 

message: Please rename this article. Hán tự is not the word Vietnamese people would refer to this. The expression chữ Hán or chữ Nhois used instead. Hán tự is a character by character transliteration, but it's basically not a native expression, just check the title of the Vietnamese version of this article. Nước mắm ngon quá! (talk) 19:37, 25 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: You can propose a move via the steps at WP:Requested moves if you like. -- 李博杰  | —Talk contribs email 00:26, 26 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Hán tự? --> chữ Hán!  

message: * (cur | prev) 13:53, 18 September 2012‎ Kauffner (talk | contribs)‎ . . (72 bytes) (+52)‎ . . (added Category:Redirects from titles with diacritics using HotCat) (undo)
* (cur | prev) 17:41, 22 February 2012‎ Kauffner (talk | contribs)‎ . . (20 bytes) (+20)‎ . . (moved Hán tự to Han tu: Remove Vietnamese diacritics as these are rare in published English.)
The same happened to Talk:Chữ Nôm. The result of a RM was overturned by undiscussed move and the move locked by redirect edit so that it could not be reversed. In ictu oculi (talk) 23:45, 24 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Undiscussed controversial move counter RM, + redirect lock preventing revert

message: Now that we don't have a "Han tu" article any more, it seems unnecessary to discuss merging it with anything. Han-Nom is the traditional character set, and chữ nho is the Vietnamese word for Classical Chinese. There are both words with real-world usage and meanings, not Wiki-jargon that we can define ourselves like "Han tu". Kauffner (talk) 10:34, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Did you want to phrase this in terms of my post above, i.e. whether we need 1, 2 or 3 articles? Depending on what you are saying, this may not be the right place for the merger discussion. Itsmejudith (talk) 12:29, 12 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the next step to cut the extraneous material and one upmanship and make this an article that is actually about Nho. After all, Nom is a separate article. Kauffner (talk) 11:07, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree that we should keep the discussion of Nom to a minimum, given that it has its own linked article. Would you like to action that? Itsmejudith (talk) 13:24, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger 

message: We have as much consensus as we are ever going to get, 4 editors agree, the article creator isn't listening. Per WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT, WP:FORK and WP:NOR we need to move on. Babelstone as proposer, Kanguole or Itsmejudith, are you ready to start? In ictu oculi (talk) 02:27, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: FYI Another fork has appeared at Han-Viet (previous a redirect to Sino-Vietnamese) a merge to Talk:Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary has been mentioned by User:DHN. In ictu oculi (talk) 02:37, 22 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Implement

message: Referring to the (historical) Vietnamese usage of Chinese characters as "Hán tự" has become quite omnipresent on English Wikipedia, and I am not sure who started it, but it's bad practice, or at least it isn't actual Vietnamese. The Vietnamese themselves use chữ Hán to say "Chinese character(s)". If you look into the (Vietnamese) literature on the use of Chinese (Hán) characters in Vietnam, it's always referred to with its native Vietnamese term chữ Hán. "Hán tự" is sort of a convenient transliteration of 漢字 to the analogy of hànzì, nothing more, it's not a native Vietnamese term, the transliteration into quốc ngữ does not make it Vietnamese. It sounds like when you would use a Latin term that was not loaned into English instead of an actual existing English term, e.g. "It is written in litterae graecae." instead of "It is written in Greek letters." 
If you are not convinced by this, look at some stats.
 site:vi/en.wikipedia.org searches on Google
Query parameters               	Number of results
site:vi.wikipedia.org "Hán tự" 	534
site:vi.wikipedia.org "chữ Hán"	10,300
site:en.wikipedia.org "Hán tự" 	247
site:en.wikipedia.org "chữ Hán"	267
 .vn domain level searches on Google
Query parameters 	Number of results
site:vn "Hán tự" 	51,400
site:vn "chữ Hán"	644,000
As you can see, the native Vietnamese usage undoubtedly prefers chữ Hán over "Hán tự". Note that the majority of those 51,400 results for "Hán tự" in .vn TLD refer to Chinese characters in the context of teaching/learning Japanese (kanjis).  
The problem is not that English Wikipedia uses the competing terms roughly the same number of times, but that people take it for granted that Chinese characters in Vietnamese context can be referred to as "Hán tự", as if it were an established term, and the it pops up on other sites, like Quora, despite not being a native Vietnamese term and sounds obscure to Vietnamese themselves.
Here's also an adhoc gallery of book covers promoting the learning of chữ Hán. I wasn't able to find any book with "Hán tự" in its title.
I suggest to stop creating an English neologism that does not exist in Vietnamese and therefore propose changing all instances of "Hán tự" into chữ Hán, leaving only those where for the sake comparison parallel transcriptions (hàn+zì – kan+ji – han+ja – hán+tự) is necessary. 
Please advise or comment on my suggestion. ImreK (talk) 17:00, 4 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  How can I initiate renaming 'hán tự' into 'chữ Hán' on the entire English wikipedia? 

message: I'm quite certain that this article should not be categorized as an element of "Writing systems"; it seems reasonable that it *concerns* a writing system, but it *is* indubitably not a writing system. If there is a justification as keeping it categorized under "Writing systems" because it is an attribute of that category, I suggest that the categorization under "Vietnamese writing systems" is sufficient. --Halemyu (talk) 20:22, 2 January 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Categorization under "Writing systems" 

message: The following Wikimedia Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion:
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Participate in the deletion discussion at the . —Community Tech bot (talk) 19:51, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  A Commons file used on this page or its Wikidata item has been nominated for deletion 

message: Wowzer, this page is interesting ... I'm not clear why the page uses a lot of non-Latin characters with no pronunciation guide. I was trying to find out what Vietnamese characters are called in English, but this page doesn't appear to name them _in English_ but in some sort of Latinised Vietnamese script?? I followed a link in this discussion to "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu_Nom" but it redirects to "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m", the former is clearly an Anglicised word (not one I've heard before today). There's clearly a lot of axe grinding going on here, but English doesn't have any "u" character other than "u" and it's capitalisation. Please use English for the English Wikipedia. 212.100.0.227 (talk) 11:56, 5 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronounciation? 

message: And this? https://omniglot.com/conscripts/chuviettri.htm – kgyt (talk) 10:13, 27 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chữ Việt Trí