James Campbell wrote:
>
> Even if you can read Chinese you wouldn't be able to make
> sense of them. I can read Chu Nom but I've done a lot of
> Vietnamese study.
Where would one start? I've seen the _Tu Dien Chu Nom_ 字典{字字}喃
dictionary in the library, but that's certainly not the best way to learn. I
think there are some Japanese books on chu nom as well, but little or nothing
in English except articles in academic journals describing it (e.g., Nguyen
Dinh-hoa in JAOS decades ago.) I've heard that Vietnamese books on the subject
are easy to acquire in Vietnam, but that is a lot harder for me to acquire than
Japanese or Chinese books from the US (a less established distribution system,
I guess).
I do know of one book, an English translation of Ho Xuan Huong's 胡春香
poetry, _Spring Essence_, translated by John Balaban (Port Townsend, WA:
Copper Canyon Press, 2000). It has chu nom original (in some cases,
reconstructed from the quoc ngu), romanized quoc ngu, and Balaban's
translation. Other than a few accidental coincidences with historical
Chinese and/or Cantonese, e.g., {口既}, it's all unfamiliar.
> No this website does not have Chu Nom characters. They are
> not listed in any Chinese, Japanese, or Korean dictionary.
> The only modern compilation they're listed in is Unicode.
Well, chinalanguage.com does have some since it's upgrade to Unicode
3.1, but no information on them since it's sources are Sinocentric,
e.g., U+20129
http://chinalanguage.com/cgi-bin/view.p ... uery=20129
for Viet. hai 'two'.
> The mojikyo is very limited, and offers a mere sampling of
> the Chu Nom (about 1000). Many of the more common Chu Nom
> characters are missing.
Hmm, and it is toted as being the first/best solution for chu nom
on computers? Must be ad copy from Japanese sources.
> Better to check the new Unicode
> extension, if you can identify which ones are Chu Nom. But
> even in that extension I still find some certain Chinese
> dialectal characters missing.
With the unihan.txt file, one can find the characters which came from the
V0 source, which is the TCVN 5773:1993 character set, which contains chu nom
characters.
Yes, a lot of Chinese dialect characters are missing, and Cantonese is
perhaps the best supported so far (though only tolerably--you can write what
you want, but you don't really have your pick of all the possible variants
ever used for a character), which doesn't bode well for others. Current
support for other dialect characters seems to be accidental. I think Zhuang
characters are missing, too, aside from accidental coincidence.
> There are about 9000 Chu Nom
> included. But no computer supports it yet, and as far as I
> and a few other researchers know, no Unicode extension fonts
> exist yet.
There is a font called "Simsum (Founder Extended)" (filename: sursong.ttf),
which I hear is included with Office XP Proofing Tools, as well as Chinese localized editions of Win XP, which contains all of Extension B, and thus,
would include the chu nom that are currently in Unicode. The Proofing Tools
method seems to be the cheaper and preferred way for most people in the West
to acquire the font.
> It's like I could create a new English dictionary and fill it
> up with thousands of words like, zxyt, mguy, efjbd, etc. and
> explain that the pronunciations of these words are unknown,
> and that they were created for the purpose of a fictitionary
> John Blohn back in 1975 to transcribe a dream he had in
> poetic form, and nobody else ever has had a need for using
> these except for reproducing them endlessly and forevermore
> in new dictionaries for the purpose of making them long and
> filling them up with fluff.
Funny you mention this, as the artist Xu Bing printed a book of
brand new intentionally made-up characters (see "A Book from the Sky"--天書
at
http://www.xubing.com/)--a few are said to accidently pre-exist
his work. (On a tangent, he also did something called "square word
calligraphy", which are English words made to look like Han characters--
see the red logo on the first page, which is just his romanized name.)
> I think I've mentioned before somewhere that when you're
> looking for specialized information like this, try searching
> in Chinese, and if you can't find anything, there's usually
> more topics and information covered in Japanese. For example,
> a lot of the information linked with mojikyo is all in
> Japanese.
Yes, very true. I've found some nice stuff, like: _Kanji no shashin jiten_
漢字之寫真字典 (sorry about the mangled character name) [1], which has photos
of unusual/rare characters spotted on the streets of Asia, or _Wasei kanji no
jiten_ 和製漢字之辭典_[2], which has Japanese kokuji, or _Dictionary of Chinese
Character Variants_ by the ROC Ministry of Education (seems to be down?)[3]
which also has some interesting appendices like Korean-made characters, etc.
[1]
http://homepage2.nifty.com/Gat_Tin/kanji/kaindex.htm
[2]
http://member.nifty.ne.jp/TAB01645/ohara/abstract.htm
[3]
http://140.111.1.40/
About Mojikyo and Tron, there is a project to map Mojikyo to Unicode:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/kanji-database/
(I don't follow such stuff, though, as Unicode seems to me the better
approach--at least, for Chinese dialect characters.)
Thomas Chan
tc31@cornell.edu