in nôm, a vietnamese word can be written using a chinese character for a word with a similar meaning or pronunciation. each character represents an idea. such characters are called "ideographs." in addition, each character represents a syllable, or sound. because traditional characters have this dual property, nearly every syllable in modern vietnamese has acquired a semantic meaning. like chinese, vietnamese is a tonal language. since the issue of tone does not arise for japanese or korean, native phonetic scripts could develop for these languages without this complicating factor.