History of writing in Vietnam Until the beginning of the 20th
century, government and scholarly documents in Vietnam were
written in classical Chinese (called chữ nho "Confucian script,"
or chữ Hán "Chinese script"), using Chinese characters with
Vietnamese approximation of Chinese pronunciations. At the same
time popular novels and poetry in Vietnamese were written in the
chữ nôm script, which used Chinese characters for Sino-
Vietnamese vocabulary and an adapted set of characters for the
native vocabulary. The terms chữ Hán ("Han script") and chữ nho
(𡨸儒 pronounced [cɨ̌ˀ ɲɔ] "Confucian script") are largely
interchangeable. Both mean writing of Chinese in Chinese
characters. However in modern Vietnamese usage chữ Hán can also
refer to characters in the modern Chinese or Japanese languages
- for example in reference by the journal of the Linguistics
Academy of Vietnam to the introduction of pinyin in the PRC in
1958. The term chữ ("character") is in regular use in
Vietnamese, for example "chữ thập" means the C