Chữ nôm (Chữ 'script,' and nôm | Chữ nôm or the former Vietnamese script and its past Contributions to Vietnamese literature Nguyễn Khắc-Kham Chữ nôm (Chữ 'script,' and nôm < nam 'south, Vietnamese') is the name given by the Vietnamese to one of their two former systems of writing created by the modification of the Chinese characters. It was called so, as opposed both to Chữ Hán or the Han Chinese script 1) and to Chữ Nho or the script of Vietnamese confucianist scholars. In the latter connotation, it means the demotic or vulgar script in traditional ) The date of its invention has not been so far established beyond controversy. According to Ngô Thì Nhậm (1726-1780) "our National language was most used from Thuyên." 3) Thuyên was Nguyễn Thuyên , a scholar who lived at the end of the thirteenth century, under the Trần dynasty. "He received his doctorate under the reign of Emperor Trần Thái Tôn (1225-1257). In the fall of 1282, while holding the post of Minister of Justice, he was commissioned by Emperor Trần Nhân Tôn to write a message to a crocodile which had come to the Red River. After his writing drove the animal away, the emperor allowd him to change his family name from Nguyễn to Hàn , because a similar incident had occurred before in China to the poet-scholar Hàn Yu (768-824). The anecdote was related in Khâm định Việt-sử Thông-giám Cương- mục , 4) according to which, Hàn Thuyên was skilled in writing Shih fu , and many people took model after ) On the basis of these facts, Hàn Thuyên was claimed to be the inventor of Chữ nôm. Such was the opinion of P. Pelliot 6) and H. Maspero. The latter who shared P. Pelliot's views, also mentioned a stele discovered in Hộ Thành sơn , Ninh Bình province , North ) This stele bore an inscription dating from the year 1343 and on which could be read twenty Vietnamese village and hamlet names in Chữ nôm. The above hypothesis has not been accepted without reserve by other scholars. Nguyễn văn Tố presumed that Chữ nôm had probably .
