Doc Type: Working Group Document
Title: Proposal to Encode Two Vietnamese Alternate Reading Marks
Source: Lee Collins, Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation Ngô Thanh Nhàn, Temple University
Status: Individual Contribution
Action: For consideration by JTC1/SC2/WG2 and UTC
Date: 2017-11-6
Introduction
This paper proposes the encoding of two diacritical marks used in the Chữ Nôm script to indicate alternate readings of Hán characters (chữ Hán). These marks (dấu) are collectively referred to in Vietnamese as cá-nháy, from the terms for the two most common marks, cá 个 (variant: ) and nháy�.
Chữ Nôm is composed roughly of two types of ideographic characters: characters borrowed directly from Chinese (chữ Hán) and characters created in Vietnam to represent native Vietnamese words (chữ Nôm)1 . Figure 1 provides a convenient overview and further break down of this scheme2 .
The borrowed characters, chữ mượn Hán, were used to write the many words imported from a dialect of Middle Chinese, with original meanings and readings adapted into a Vietnamese standardization of that dialect (called Hán-Việt or SinoVietnamese, SV). They were also used without modification to represent native words and sounds….
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