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On the afternoon of October 7, 2025, Prof. Dr.Sci. Nguyễn Quang Hồng—who devoted his life to the studies of the Vietnamese language and the Hán–Nôm heritage—passed away, entering the vast silence beyond all language.
To the Professor, time—time lived—was the precious condition that made possible his reflections on that singular human invention: language. "The author sat at his desk and typed this monograph for more than a year. Yet the period during which he pursued the questions posed in the work adds up to over twenty years,” he confides in the preface to An Introduction to the Grammatology of Chữ Nôm, recalling his tireless pursuit of the great questions of Vietnamese and its writing. That unceasing research journey crystallized into major works gathered in the collection Language · Writing · Philology on Digitizing Vietnam—only “the tip of the iceberg,” layered over decades of reflection, investigation, and painstaking scholarly labor: concerns ranging from system to detail, from phonetics to literature, from antiquity to the present—all to reach the uttermost of the Vietnamese story.
In his scholarly rigor, the author rarely spoke about himself. The long, winding road—surely with many rough stretches—into the “uttermost ends” of the Vietnamese language is summed up by him in two sentences: “The author is a linguist who, together with linguistics, entered the study of Chữ Nôm and Hán–Nôm texts and works. Viewed in general, then, the author is someone passionately devoted to the work of our national philology.”
Prof. Dr.Sci. Nguyễn Quang Hồng was born in 1940 in Trà Kiệu village, Duy Xuyên district, Quảng Nam province. 1960–1965: studied in Beijing, graduated B.A. in Philology (Peking University, 1965). 1970–1974: graduate studies in Moscow; defended the Candidate of Philological Sciences (Moscow State University & the USSR Institute of Oriental Studies, 1974). 1982–1985: research fellow; defended the Doctor of Philological Sciences. He was appointed Associate Professor in 1984 and Professor in 1991.
The Language · Writing · Philology collection brings together Prof. Nguyễn Quang Hồng’s studies in linguistics, scriptology, and philology. Among them, Vietnamese Syllables and Poetic Language is a monograph co-authored with Dr. Phan Diễm Phương. The studies are diverse, spanning many phenomena and problems, and can be grouped into two main strands: (1) Linguistics and Vietnamese language studies; (2) Philology and Hán–Nôm studies. Digitized items in Digitizing Vietnam’s repository include:
❃ Syllables and Types of Language
❃ Language · Writing · Philology
❃ An Introduction to the Grammatology of Nôm
❃ Explanatory Notes on Truyền kỳ mạn lục
❃ Vietnamese Syllables and Poetic Language
❃ The Inscriptions of Dâu Pagoda: Cổ Châu lục – Cổ Châu hạnh – Cổ Châu nghi
SKETCHING A PORTRAIT OF VIETNAMESE IN LINGUISTICS: WHEN LINGUISTIC SENSIBILITY GUIDES SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
Looking at Prof. Nguyễn Quang Hồng’s linguistic work on Vietnamese, we see not only weighty findings with wide interdisciplinary impact, but also a meticulous comparative program tracking movements within a language and across languages to find the right “frame” for analyzing Vietnamese. Alongside broad engagement with existing models is a guiding “linguistic sensibility”—a keen effort to reconstruct, scientifically, the inner psycholinguistic reality, rather than mechanically imposing a fashionable model.
From this foundation, he established that the tone-bearing syllable (syllabeme) is the minimal meaning-bearing unit of modern Vietnamese; the syllable’s structure is viewed as onset – rime (rime = nucleus + coda), while tone and the medial glide are properties of the whole syllable. Within this framework he situated Vietnamese in a comparative–typological context with other tone languages of East and Southeast Asia (Việt–Mường, Tai–Thai, Sinitic, Tibetic…), treating the syllable as central and analyzing in detail onset – rime – tone; he also bridged phonology and poetics, using verse (especially The Tale of Kiều) to test rhyme, distinguish full rhyme/allowable rhyme, and explain the aesthetic of “harmonious sound.”
In comparison with Chinese, he showed that intra-syllabic segmentation is clearer in modern Vietnamese (and Middle Chinese) than in modern Beijing Mandarin. Vietnamese is rich in reduplication (nhí nhảnh, bồi hồi…) and metathesis/wordplay; Middle Chinese had a comparable phenomenon (“fanqie-like manipulations”), whereas modern Beijing Mandarin tends toward full-syllable repetition (mànmànr, lànlànde), reducing intra-syllabic variation. Reading the Professor’s meticulous comparisons, one seems to step into a linguistic laboratory where diverse syllables are dissected and set in motion under the absorbed gaze of a scientist.
RESEARCH ON CHỮ NÔM: CONNECTING WITH THE WISDOM AND HEART OF GENERATIONS
One cannot speak of Prof. Nguyễn Quang Hồng without the now-classic studies of Chữ Nôm, such as An Introduction to the Scriptology of Chữ Nôm and the Explanatory Dictionary of Chữ Nôm.
An Introduction to the Scriptology of Chữ Nôm is a foundational work treating Nôm through historical linguistics – comparative scriptology – textual scholarship. It establishes a basic conceptual toolkit (language/script; tục tự, thổ tự, phương tự; “non-standard” Chinese characters; what “Chữ Nôm” is), situates Nôm within Vietnam’s traditional scripts (Cham, Thai; Dao Nôm, Ngạn Nôm, Tày Nôm…), and traces the origins and conditions of Nôm through Việt–Sinitic contact, Sino-Vietnamese readings, Lý-dynasty epigraphy, and hypotheses about its emergence. On that basis, he presents the Chinese character model (structure, formation, morphemes), contrasts typological traits of Nôm with other Sinitic-based scripts, distinguishes borrowed Chinese characters from Nôm creations, and proposes a general classification for Vietnamese Nôm.
The Explanatory Dictionary of Chữ Nôm marks a major advance in the study and explication of Nôm, illuminating the creativity and self-reliant spirit of the Vietnamese in language. Based on 124 classical works/texts, each entry has clear provenance with contextual examples.
“By engaging with the Hán–Nôm heritage, we simultaneously engage with the intellect and the heart of countless generations of our forebears across every sphere of our country’s social life in the past.”
The Professor emphasized: “Language—and with it, script—is not merely a vehicle for transmitting information, but a vehicle for transmitting culture, especially from one generation of the nation to the next.”
For him, researching Chữ Nôm was not only a scholarly passion but also a connecting mission, so that generations of Vietnamese might feel the intellect and singular creativity of their ancestors beyond the bounds of time.
SOLVING EVERYDAY RIDDLES WITH SCHOLARLY WIT: THE SHORT i AND THE LONG y
Alongside academic works, Prof. Nguyễn Quang Hồng wrote with humor and grace about everyday language puzzles. A widely loved essay is the story of the short i and the long y. It began with a letter from a technician who types on-screen text for Bình Thuận Television. Unsure whether to write công ti or công ty (“company”)—the director said one thing, the department head another—he asked if there was a rule.
A small matter that isn’t small: Prof. Nguyễn Quang Hồng answered in detail—over four pages—patiently moving from Ministry of Education rules (a syllable ending in the vowel i is written with i, except after u/y as in duy, tuy, quy) to conventions formed over centuries (long y in Sino-Vietnamese words; short i in native words). For the technician’s question, the Professor refused to clamp Vietnamese into a rigid right/wrong vise; instead he showed the calm vision of a scholar who has gone deep enough into the language to trust its resilient flexibility:
“I think that in actual writing practice we should not be too rigid, insisting on applying at once what has been propagated in school. Moreover, what we have learned in school must be tested in social reality; only then can we find more appropriate standards that we hope will be accepted by everyone. If necessary, I am also ready to write ‘công ty’ to suit the ‘taste’ of your supervisor—which may also be the wish of the company that is your agency’s partner!”
He also gently corrected the writer for qui định instead of quy định (“regulation”): “As for quy, I don’t understand why you follow some others in writing qui. Granted, whether you write quy or qui you still pronounce it q + uy, but writing with -ui veers off from the series of words that all rhyme in -uy: duy, huy, luy, tuy, suy, nguy, etc.” The rigor of the linguist led him to catch an “error” not against external rules but against the internal dynamics of the language. “In this case—even if my boss threatened to dock my pay or fire me—I would still write Quy, and would by no means ‘shorten’ it to Qui, mind you,” he quipped—reminding the technician to safeguard Vietnamese, signing off with the colloquial đâu nghe (“mind you”) like a gentle word to a friend. In the stately pages of Language · Writing · Philology, that letter and those two words seem to reveal another face of the author—warm, familiar, simple: a Vietnamese who loves Vietnamese.
The “patchwork rustic words” above can hardly capture the roving dedication of Prof. Dr.Sci. Nguyễn Quang Hồng—a man who went to the farthest reaches of language, touching the finite frontier of a human life. Recall the word “hundred years” in Kiều’s line “Trăm năm trong cõi người ta,” meaning a human lifetime in this world: the character “hundred” (bách 百) set beside lâm 林—the finite beside the infinite. Digitizing Vietnam hopes to join readers in connecting with this finite collection and to grant the work a new “hundred years” of life—to carry the finite toward the infinite.
👉 Read the Language · Writing · Philology Collection:
https://www.digitizingvietnam.com/vi/our-collections/ngon-ngu-van-tu-ngu-van
👉 Read Tự điển Chữ Nôm Dẫn giải:
https://www.digitizingvietnam.com/vi/tools/han-nom-dictionaries/tu-dien-chu-nom-dan-giai
❀ Our deepest gratitude to Prof. Dr.Sci. Nguyễn Quang Hồng (1940–2025) for the legacy he leaves to posterity.
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Chữ Nôm constitutes a salient phenomenon in the historical development of Vietnamese culture. In essence, it is a script that appropriated the graphic forms and principles of character construction from the Chinese writing system to transcribe the Vietnamese language—yet in doing so it embodied a remarkable degree of indigenous creativity.
A question long debated by scholars is: when did Chữ Nôm first emerge? Some suggest that as early as the beginning of the Common Era, with the introduction of Chinese script into Vietnam, isolated “Nôm” graphs were created to represent local toponyms, personal names, and native products, inserted sporadically into Chinese texts. However, this does not imply that Nôm, as a coherent logophonetic system for Vietnamese, was already in existence at that time. The transformation from scattered, provisional characters to a structured and functional script was a protracted process. On the basis of extant research, it is now generally accepted that by the Trần dynasty (13th century), Nôm had achieved the status of a recognizable writing system with the capacity for independent use.
Familiar Yet Unfamiliar
Readers literate in Chinese often assume, at first glance, that they can easily comprehend a Nôm text. Closer examination, however, reveals their surprise at finding it largely unintelligible. This paradox stems from the fact that while Nôm characters retain the outward form of Chinese graphs, their modes of construction are uniquely innovative. Beyond conventional methods such as semantic–phonetic compounding, Nôm also employs associative principles, semantic linkages, and what scholars have termed “submerged–emergent” structures, which defy the expectations of readers trained only in Chinese.
The Structure of Chữ Nôm – Some ‘Keys’ to Decipherment
Scholarly inquiry into the structure of Nôm has yielded various classificatory schemata. Rather than rehearse these in detail, it is useful to underscore several critical insights.
Professor Nguyễn Quang Hồng distinguishes between “Nôm giả tá”—instances where Chinese characters were borrowed wholesale or with only minor phonetic shifts, which need not concern structural analysis—and those instances where characters were adapted or created with modification. In such cases, structural analysis becomes essential. Examples include reduction, as in the character Một 殳, traced to 没 but with a component elided; and augmentation, as in Đĩ 𡚦, created by adding a dot to the graph 女 (“woman”).
Even more complex are characters created through phonetic amalgamation. Such characters have no precedent in Chinese and epitomize Nôm’s distinctiveness. As Nguyễn Quang Hồng notes, these include:
Phonetic compounds (hội âm): characters combining two phonetic elements, e.g. Trăng/Giăng < blăng 𢁋 (巴 ba + 陵 lăng), Trước 𨎟 < klươc (略 lược + 車 cư), reflecting the preservation of complex consonant clusters (bl, ml, tl) in Vietnamese prior to the seventeenth century.
Radical assignment by associative linkage: some characters exhibit radicals that seem semantically incongruous unless viewed relationally. For example, Lỡ (𧾷+呂) in the line “Tối tăm lỡ bước đến đây” (Lục Vân Tiên) gains explanatory force only when juxtaposed with the following character Bước 𨀈 (𧾷+北). Similarly, the use of the “shell” radical 貝 in Gần 𧵆 becomes intelligible only in its semantic pairing with Xa 賒, which itself carries the radical 貝.
Submerged–emergent structures: certain characters conceal part of their phonetic basis, leaving visible only partial indicators. For instance, variants of Mười/Mươi (𨒒, 辻, 𨑮) contain the radical ⻍ (“walk”), traceable to the fuller phonetic base 迈 (mại). Here, the overt (emergent) structure coexists with an implicit (submerged) structure, a duality crucial for understanding the logic of Nôm character formation.
Such phenomena reveal both the structural “instability” of Chữ Nôm and, at the same time, the ingenuity, adaptability, and resourcefulness of its users. By situating these characters within broader networks of phonetic, semantic, and contextual associations, one gains access to the interpretive keys necessary for engaging with Nôm texts.
Thus, the study of Chữ Nôm not only illuminates the inventive capacities of Vietnamese literati but also demonstrates how local cultural agency appropriated and transformed foreign models into a distinctive script responsive to the phonological and semantic demands of the Vietnamese language.
(Based on “Some Issues and Aspects of the Study of Nôm” in the collected volume Language. Script. Literature by Professor Nguyễn Quang Hồng)