Chữ Nôm

If you love the shapes and forms of Chinese characters, then you'll love Nôm, the Vietnamese demotic script based on Chinese, but mostly incomprehensible to a reader of Chinese. I like to think of them as Chinese Characters high betel-nut.

On the right are the first few lines of the Nôm poem Đại Nam Quốc Sử Diễn Ca "Song of the History of the Great Southern Land" (1870) written by Lê Ngô Cát.

Here is a sample sentence:
������碎��渃澳學㗂越
This stands for:
"Trước ba năm tôi ̣đến nước Úc học tiếng Việt",
meaning:
"Three years ago I came to Australia to study Vietnamese"

The characters, 澳, 學, and 越, make sense in Chinese and their meanings are the same ("Australia", "to study", and "Vietnam", however 碎 stands for "tôi" meaning "I" in Vietnamese, whereas in Chinese it means "smashed". The five characters �� Trước, "before", �� ba "three", �� năm "year", �� đến "arrive", 渃 nước "country", and㗂 tiếng "language" look strange to Chinese and Japanese.

You can even input Nôm characters into a text. First download and install the fonts Han Nom A and Han Nom B from vietfonts (it is FREE!) then go to "insert character" you will find a treasure trove of thousands of Nôm characters, all arranged by the 214 radicals of the K'ang Hsi Dictionary. The easy way to look these up is by their Vietnamese pronunciation with the Nôm Lookup Tool which will provide you with a unicode number which you can input into the box for "character code" this will take you directly to the character. Sometimes if the character already exists in Chinese and is not specific to Chữ Nôm, you'll have to find it in the Han Nom A set. This is a rather laborious process, and some of the characters marked with "V" on the lookup tool have yet to be given a Unicode number, but if you only have to put a few characters into a text, then it is no problem.
The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation are the kind providers of the lookup tool, and also have a little article about Nôm, however, their claim that a thousand years worth of Vietnamese texts are written in Nôm is stretching it a bit, as most of the early Vietnamese texts were written in Classical Chinese, not in Nôm. Omniglot has a nice little article about Nôm with some more examples of characters.