Talk:Literary Chinese in Vietnam

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What can/should this article be linked to in vi.wp? or indeed zh.wp? In ictu oculi (talk) 01:02, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I'm not aware of an article on this topic on any other wiki. It happens. Kanguole 01:09, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

Mm. Oh well I've added breakout template from Vietnamese Literature and History of writing in Vietnam. Does the above need a WP Literature tag or WP Linguistics tag? I mean is the main subject the written works or the language? In ictu oculi (talk) 01:42, 19 July 2013 (UTC)

I think the subject is the use of the language, which includes literature, but also routine administration, correspondence, etc. There's a little about the language, but there's little to say; after all Vietnamese scholars were proud of their impeccably standard Chinese. Kanguole 00:46, 20 July 2013 (UTC)

"Southern" writing

Nôm means "vernacular" or "chattering", as you can see here and here. Compare:

喃 (Nôm, chattering)

南 (nam, south) LostFederation (talk) 07:38, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

The reading "Southern writing" for the Vietnamese phrase chữ Nôm comes from the cited source, DeFrancis (1977) p. 27. Kanguole 10:29, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

Somebody must have got confused because the two characters look similar. This character means the same thing in Chinese as it does in Vietnamese, so even a Chinese dictionary would clarify this point. This book cites Durand's An Introduction to Vietnamese Literature, which seems to be a widely cited source on this subject. LostFederation (talk) 11:40, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

John DeFrancis wasn't one to be confused about Chinese characters, and he discusses the various characters used to write this word. The source you cite says "喃 is unusual in that it is also a Chinese character", but in any case it is not for us to piece together the meaning of a term from the characters used to write it; we have to rely on sources that give the meaning of the whole term. Kanguole 13:35, 10 August 2013 (UTC)

That's no reason put something in the article that is clearly incorrect. In Vietnamese, Nôm is the system of writing, and only the system of writing. So the idea of the gloss is presumably to give the Chinese meaning of the character. If the two dictionaries I cited above aren't enough, see here, here, here, and here. These dictionaries all translate the character as some variation of "murmuring", "chattering", or "babbling." DeFrancis writes, "nom, generally considered as derived from nam, 'south'." (p. 27) This sounds like DeFrancis considers the Nôm character to be a Vietnamese construction, which would mean that the existence of a similar Chinese character is coincidence. Either way, this suggest that the spoken form was a Vietnamese coinage, and therefore nam/南/south simply a phonetic element. LostFederation (talk) 08:01, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

It's not "clearly incorrect" – it comes from a recognized authority who discusses the various characters used to write this Vietnamese term at some length. We can't base articles on personal speculation. Kanguole 13:51, 11 August 2013 (UTC)

You have abbreviated the Theodore De Bary quote in a misleading way. The full quote is, "喃 is unusual in that it is also a Chinese character ("to chatter, mumble") and perhaps stems from the ancient Chinese perception of Vietnamese as babble." I've now consulted the ultimate authority on this question: Đại Tự Điển Chữ Nôm (The Great Nom Dictionary) (2007) by Lê Quý Ngưu and Trương Đình Tín. It gives the derivation of Nôm as, "GT: 喃 (nam)", i.e. derived from the nam character that means "chattering". The burden of proof should not be on me since I am not proposing to add anything, but only to remove a dubious claim. LostFederation (talk) 11:19, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

The issue is the gloss for the Vietnamese phrase, not the origin of a character, and the burden of proof has been met by the existing citation. Kanguole 12:42, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

I have to wonder if you have read DeFrancis since it certainly looks to me like he is talking about derivation. If the gloss is not about derivation or meaning, what is its purpose? Decoration? LostFederation (talk) 15:13, 12 August 2013 (UTC)

stricken as blockevation/socking. -- Agathoclea (talk) 09:26, 13 August 2013 (UTC)

Issues with the lead

The lead has a number of issues:

• Contrary to MOS:LEADLANG, Vietnamese terms not common in English are bolded in the opening sentence.
• Vernacular writing in the alphabet is not just in Vietnam, but in the Vietnamese language.
• It is incorrect to say that the literary Chinese in Vietnam was the same as Gugyeol and Kanbun. Those are systems for annotating a Chinese-language text so that it may be read as Korean or Japanese respectively, with native syntax.
• The opening sentence mentions that Văn ngôn as a Vietnamese term for literary Chinese, but this English-language wikipedia article is written in English, and so should use English-language terms in the rest of the article, including the caption of the first image. Using Văn ngôn there is pointlessly obscure.

Kanguole 17:37, 10 December 2022 (UTC)