The Nom Script

In the courtyard of a pagoda in Phúc Yên ward, in Phú Thọ province, a stone tortoise lies flat in the sun. Its shell is worn smooth. Its head is raised. Its four legs spread wide and grip the courtyard floor.

On the tortoise's back stands a stele, an upright tablet of stone. It is about 1.4 meters tall, a little under a meter wide, and a little over 10 centimeters thick.

The stele is carved on both faces. Fifty lines. In all, 1,498 characters. The strokes are cut deep and handsome, in the style of the Lý dynasty, which ruled Vietnam from 1009 to 1225. Around its edges there is not a single decorative pattern. The people who raised this stele did not set out to make it beautiful. They set out to make it readable.

Almost all the characters on the stone are Chinese characters. But mixed in among them, scattered here and there, are a few that look a little odd.

At a glance they still look like Chinese characters. Same horizontal and vertical strokes, same familiar pieces. But read aloud, they are no longer Chinese words. Someone fluent in Chinese characters, reading along, would stop short at that point for exactly one beat.

Those odd characters write the names of places. One is đồng Hấp, another is Đồng Chài. Two more are Đường Sơn and Đồng Nhe. They also write the names of a few people from the village.

They are among the earliest traces of Nôm that survive today. Nôm was an old character script for writing Vietnamese. Here it is not a line of poetry. It is not a proclamation. It is just a few names of rice fields.

This is how it came about.

Chinese characters had been in this land for a very long time. People here read them, wrote them, kept their records in them and wrote poems in them, generation after generation. They knew them like the backs of their own hands.

Chinese characters are a beautiful and complete script. Complete for exactly the language they were born to write. But Vietnamese was a different language, with different sounds, different words and different names.

And on that day, the people making the stele ran straight into that difference.

They had to carve into the stone a list of the land that a donor of the Nguyễn family had just given to the pagoda. It came to more than a hundred mẫu of rice fields. A mẫu is a traditional Vietnamese measure of farmland. With the land came more than 2,000 strings of coins. To record it properly, every plot had to be named. And one of those plots was the field the whole village called Đồng Nhe.

Nhe. A single syllable, nothing more.

In the vast store of Chinese characters, there was not one made to write Nhe. That was no failing of the script. Nhe was simply a word of this one village, the name its people gave their own field. No one in the world had ever needed to write it down before.

They could have left it out. They could have put down some other name and been done.

But on that stone, the name Nhe was written out properly, in the script the Vietnamese had made for themselves. That means someone before them had already worked out how to make characters like this. It means that somewhere in these villages, someone had done something very bold. They had taken the very material they had learned and made from it a script of their own.

That way of making characters later grew into a whole craft, one clever enough to delight anyone even now.

For some Vietnamese words, a Chinese character already existed, so the character was simply borrowed whole. Ông and bà, the words for grandfather and grandmother, were written that way. For other words, the character was borrowed but read a little differently, to suit the Vietnamese voice. And when nothing could be borrowed, there was the finest method of all. Two Chinese characters were joined into one. One half told the reader how the new character sounded. The other half told the reader what it meant.

Sometimes both halves give the meaning. Long ago, people took the character thiên, which means sky, and paired it with the character thượng, which means above. The two pieces joined into a new character that writes the Vietnamese word trời, the sky. It tells the reader quite plainly that the thing high up above is trời.

The eye sees two old characters. The mouth speaks a Vietnamese word.

In this way, one character at a time, the everyday speech of the Vietnamese slowly found a foothold on paper and on stone. The word for calling a child. The word for calling a mother. The name of a stream. The name of a field. Words that had lived only in the mouth could now stay put.

The stele in the courtyard of the Phúc Yên pagoda is dated to the last month of the fifth year of the Trị Bình Long Ứng era. That is the year 1209. It is the earliest dated artifact in the whole of the former Vĩnh Phúc province. Across the country, only 18 steles from the Lý dynasty survive today. This stele is one of them.

From those few field names on stone, the new script kept on growing.

In the 15th century, Nguyễn Trãi left 254 poems written in Nôm. They were later gathered into a collection called Quốc âm thi tập. It is the oldest collection of Nôm poetry that has come down to us. He did not write about faraway things. His poems lean on images close to ordinary daily life. It was the life he saw around him, named in the words he spoke.

Then there was a woman whose poems were so fine that later generations called her the Queen of Nôm Poetry. Hồ Xuân Hương wrote in that script, sharp and playful. She was a Vietnamese poet of the late 1700s and early 1800s. On November 23, 2021, UNESCO honored her. Her poems have now been translated into 13 languages.

Then Nguyễn Du sat down to write Truyện Kiều, the Tale of Kiều. It runs to 3,254 lines of verse in the lục bát form. Every line, every character, is Nôm.

Take one line from it: Trăm năm trong cõi người ta, a hundred years in this world of ours. When Nguyễn Du set that line down, it was a row of Nôm characters on paper. It was the same script the stele makers had once used to write Đồng Nhe.

Today, it is estimated that fewer than a hundred researchers across the whole world can read Nôm with ease. That sounds like a loss. But the script is still there, waiting for readers, and there is one place where anyone can go and see it with their own eyes.

Vĩnh Nghiêm Pagoda still keeps a great store of woodblocks. There are 3,050 separate boards, and together they hold nine books. The boards are made of thị wood, a white, fine and supple wood that is easy to carve and lasts. The characters are carved in reverse on the face of the wood, some Chinese and some Nôm. Brush ink over them, and they print a page of a book. In 2012, UNESCO recognized this collection as documentary heritage of the whole Asia-Pacific region.

Look closely at those boards, and the same paired characters appear. One half hints at the sound, the other half at the meaning. It is the same script that wrote the name Nhe on the stele in the pagoda courtyard, long before.

As for the stele, it still rests there, on the back of the stone tortoise, in the courtyard of the small pagoda. Rain and sun have passed over it for generations. Moss clings to the deep-cut strokes. But if you bend down very close and know where to look, among the neat lines of Chinese characters, those few slightly odd characters still lie quietly in place.

The name of a field. It was given by country people, and written into stone by people who loved their own speech enough to work out how to write it down.