In this podcast episode, Dr. Nguyễn Thị Phương Trân speaks with Associate Professor Nhiếp Tân, who currently teaches and conducts research at the Department of Vietnamese Language, the School of Foreign Languages, Beijing International Studies University. Assoc. Prof. Nhiếp Tân is the author of Nghiên cứu chữ Nôm tự tạo trong văn bản giải âm Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục (Vietnam National University Press, Hanoi), a monograph that offers an in-depth study of self-created Nôm characters and a methodology for distinguishing Han-borrowed Nôm characters from those with internal structural logic.

This conversation takes listeners on a journey through Assoc. Prof. Nhiếp Tân’s scholarly path—from the early years of teaching Vietnamese in Beijing, where she was captivated by square-shaped characters that felt at once familiar and unfamiliar, to her decision to use the annotated Nôm transcription of Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục as the central corpus for investigating self-created Nôm characters. With over 45,000 Nôm characters, including more than 11,000 self-created forms, this text enables an exceptionally deep analysis of form–sound–meaning structures, variant phenomena, and the many challenging cases in which Nôm characters coincidentally share graphic forms with Chinese characters.

One representative example analyzed by GS. TS. Nhiếp Tân in the episode is the Nôm character used to record the morpheme “lấp” (垃). This character appears eight times in the annotated transcription of Truyền Kỳ Mạn Lục. Searches in classical Chinese reference works such as Shuowen Jiezi and the Kangxi Dictionary reveal no record of its use, suggesting that it most likely did not exist in contemporaneous Chinese texts. In modern Chinese, a graphically corresponding character has the Sino-Vietnamese reading lạp and means “dirty earth” or “trash,” a meaning entirely unrelated to the Vietnamese morpheme lấp.

In the annotated text, the character is used to write lấp with meanings such as “to fill up,” “to cover or seal a hollow or gap,” or “to make something hidden from sight.” An analysis of its internal structure shows that it is a phono-semantic compound: the earth radical 土 functions as the semantic component, indicating soil or actions related to earth, while 立 (lập) serves as the phonetic component. Thus, the character shares a phonetic relationship with a Chinese graph but no semantic relationship. Based on graphic form, sound–meaning relations, and comparison with Chinese textual sources, Assoc. Prof. Nhiếp Tân concludes that this is a self-created phono-semantic Nôm character, not a Han-borrowed one.

Through concrete examples such as lấp, the podcast demonstrates that Nôm is not merely a borrowed writing system, but an endogenous space of creative expression, in which Vietnamese writers actively organized Chinese graphic materials to record their own language, modes of thought, and worldview.