It is truly a joy and a delight to hold in my hands the manuscript of Nguyễn Trãi Quốc Âm Từ Điển (Nguyễn Trãi National Language Dictionary) by the young Hán-Nôm expert Trần Trọng Dương. This feeling reminds me of an experience 37 years ago, when I was working as a librarian at Southern School No. 8 (Tam Đảo, Vĩnh Phú). At that time, I was fortunate to acquire for myself the first edition of Từ Điển Truyện Kiều (*The Dictionary of Truyện Kiều) by Đào Duy Anh from the Nhân Dân Bookstore in Vĩnh Yên. Now, that emotion rises once more—stronger and more fervent—after nearly four decades of wrestling with the study of the Vietnamese language, especially in the fields of etymology and comparative linguistics.
Unlike Từ Điển Truyện Kiều, whose purpose was defined by scholar Đào Duy Anh as primarily explaining words and phrases, recording their frequency, and listing the verses in which they appear, Nguyễn Trãi Quốc Âm Từ Điển offers a more comprehensive synthesis. Thanks to this, readers will find the necessary tools to explore and appreciate Quốc Âm Thi Tập by Nguyễn Trãi—an elegant and noble masterpiece of our classical medieval literature, written in a language that now lies six centuries behind us.
The birth of this dictionary brings a heartening message: as our senior Hán-Nôm scholars gradually leave us—the most recent being Professor Nguyễn Tài Cẩn—we now have a new generation of young, formally trained, capable Hán-Nôm specialists who are determined to shoulder the task of preserving and unlocking the cultural treasures entrusted to us by our forebears.
With these thoughts in mind, I sincerely wish author Trần Trọng Dương continued success and many new achievements on his scholarly path.
July 2011
An Chi