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Zev Handel

@zevhandel.bsky.social

2K followers 61 following 1.1K posts

Author of 𝙎𝙞𝙣𝙤𝙜𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙝𝙮 (2019) & 𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝘾𝙝𝙖𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙨 𝘼𝙘𝙧𝙤𝙨𝙨 𝘼𝙨𝙞𝙖 (@uwapress, 2025). Chinese characters, writing systems, historical phonology, etc. https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/9780295753027/chinese-characters-across-asia/

uwapress.uw.edu

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Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · Dec 6

Pokémon names provide fertile ground for linguistic analysis. Many are extremely clever and subtle, and yield delightful “ah-ha” moments when you figure out how they are formed. I find it especially interesting to compare the original Japanese names with names in English and other languages.

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The pokémon Eevee with its names written in Japanese, English, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

There's also a great set of new digitized Nôm tools here at the Digitizing Vietnam project: www.digitizingvietnam.com/en/tools

/end of references

Tools | Digitizing Việt Nam

Digitizing Việt Nam, a central hub for resources about Vietnam Studies.

www.digitizingvietnam.com

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

You can find variants (like in Tweet #42) yourself using this on-line tool from the Nôm Preservation Foundation: nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/No... .

Try entering trăng in the search box!

© VNPF 1999 - 2025. Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, All Rights Reserved.

nomfoundation.org

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

Alexandre de Rhodes’ dictionary:
Page images at the Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal (Portuguese National Library): purl.pt/961
Digitized on Wikisource: vi.wikisource.org/wiki/T%E1%BB...

Dictionarium annamiticum lusitanicum, et latinum ope sacrae congregationis de propaganda fide in lucem editum ab Alexandro de Rhodes e Societati Jesu, eiusdemque Sacra Congregationis Missionario Apost...

Página de acesso à obra Dictionarium annamiticum lusitanicum, et latinum ope sacrae congregationis de propaganda fide in lucem editum ab Alexandro de Rhodes e Societati Jesu, eiusdemque Sacra Congrega...

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

Huỳnh Sanh Thông translation from Posts #7-8: “Graphemic borrowings from Chinese: The case of chữ nôm--Vietnam’s demotic script” by Nguyễn Đình-Hoà. Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology 61.2:383–432. (I don’t know where the translation was originally published.)

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

Tale of Kieu image from Post #4: nomfoundation.org/nom-project/...

Nôm dictionary page from Post #5: Trần Văn Kiệm 1989. Giúp Đọc Nôm Và Hán Việt. Republished 1999 Huê: Thuân hóa.

Text of Nguyễn Trãi poem Bảo kính cảnh giới #47 from Posts #6, 13: www.nomfoundation.org/nom-tools/QA...

© VNPF 1999 - 2025. Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation, All Rights Reserved.

nomfoundation.org

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

50/ References follow for those interested.

/end

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

49/ ... from writing a word for a giant snake and the name of an ancient Chinese state over 2,000 years ago and 1,500 km to the north, to humbly representing the consonant sound [b] in 17th-century Vietnamese Chữ Nôm writing!

Same high resolution photograph of the moon as in post #1

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

48/ Next time you look up at the full moon, spare a thought for the incredible journey of the Chinese character 巴 ...

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

47/ Here, for example, is the page from the bl- section of the Dictionarium with the entry for ‘fruit’ (trái in modern Vietnamese), along with one of the Nôm graphs that writes it.

𢁑 trái ‘fruit’: 巴 (b-) + 賴 (lại) for earlier blái

Page from de Rhodes' dictionary with this entry highlighted: blái: fruta: fructus, vs.

Image of the graph 𢁑 (巴 over 賴) in case it doesn't render

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

46/ This isn’t a one-off. There are enough other examples of 巴 used in this way that we can be quite confident about its function.

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

45/ It’s effectively an alphabetic letter representing the sound /b/, the first sound of a consonant cluster.

巴 (b-) + 陵 (lăng) → blang

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

44/ In 𠀧 ‘three’, the 巴 is a syllabic phonetic component, indicating the sound of the Vietnamese word being written. But in the Nôm graph for ‘moon’, it’s one of two phonetic components, and it’s not syllabic!

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

43/ Three of these Nôm graphs writing blang ‘moon’ contain 巴.

The 巴 in these graphs is functioning quite differently from the one in this Nôm graph for the Vietnamese word ba ‘three’ that we saw earlier.

3 𠀧 ba ‘three’: 巴 (ba) + 三 (‘three’)

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

42/ Among the variant forms of Nôm graphs writing ‘moon’ that are attested are:
⿰巴夌
𪩮
𣎞
𦝄 (Note the semantic component 月!)
菱

[I put these in an image below in case they don't render for you.]

Image of the five graphs in this post, in case they don't render properly for the reader

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

41/ Take a look at the SV pronunciations of the two parts again, with the older blang pronunciation of 'moon' in mind:

巴 (ba) + 陵 (lăng) writing blang ‘moon’.

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

40/ The word for ‘moon’ is undoubtedly blang in the 17th-century dialect that de Rhodes is recording.

🥳 So now we have the answer to our puzzle about how the Nôm graph is structured.

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

39/ So take a look at that page again with the entry for ‘moon’. The text reads:

blang mạt blang: a lua: luna, æ.
blang tlòn: lua chea: pleniluniū, ij.
blang khuiét; mingoante ou quando não he chea: luna non rotunda extra plenilunium.

The same page of the dictionary from Post #34, showing the entry for 'moon'

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

38/ That means 17th-century Vietnamese had these pronunciations. Not too long after de Rhodes compiled his dictionary, these clusters started to simplify. tl- and bl- both changed into the single consonant sound tr-.

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

37/ The Dictionarium contains words starting with bl-, ml-, mnh-, and tl-, and plenty of them.

Here’s a page from the ml- section.

A page from de Rhodes' dictionary, showing Vietnamese words starting with ml-

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

36/ Modern Vietnamese doesn’t have bl- clusters. Indeed, Modern Vietnamese doesn’t have any clusters at all. (Sure, tr- looks like a cluster, but it’s not. It spells a single consonant, pronounced [c] or [ʈ] depending on dialect/accent.)

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

35/ Yep, the entry is right there in the ... in the …

bl- section ?!?!? 🤯

That’s a head-scratcher!

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

34/ Check out the dictionary’s entry for ‘moon’, glossed as Portuguese lua, Latin luna.

A page from the Rhodes' dictionary, with the entry for blang highlighted. (The full text of the entry will given in thread below.)

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

33/ 🔎 The clue that will help us unravel this mystery can be found in Alexandre de Rhodes’ 1651 Dictionarium Annamiticum Lusitanum et Latinum (Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin Dictionary), which employed a romanized form of Vietnamese that is ancestral to modern Quốc ngữ.

a cartoon of a duck wearing a hat and collar

Alt: Daffy Duck walking down a city street wearing a detective's fedora while looking through a large magnifying glass at the sidewalk

media.tenor.com

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

And we're back!

32/ Nôm graphs, like Chinese characters, are not arbitrary. They were intended to be legible, even to readers who had never seen a particular graph before or been explicitly taught what it means. These components cannot be meaningless or random.

We just have to crack the code. 🕵️‍♂️🕵️‍♀️

Zev Handel @zevhandel.bsky.social · 1d

Gotta take a break. I'll let the mystery hang here for a bit, then be back to finish the thread.

⏲️