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From: Grace Chew <gclchew@yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Fri, Jul 18, 2008 at 3:56 AM
To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Dear List:
I find the Nom dictionary online very useful. I now have a question regarding the different characters in the right hand column of an entry-word.
I wonder if each of these characters denotes usage in different compounds or, are they interchangeable? When I hit on different characters, the same list of meanings appear. Thus, can I say they are more likely to be substitutes for one another? However, this seems strange to me as each radical is different and sometimes meaningful. I hope to get some expert advice soon.
I am pasting a simple example here:
http://sager-pc.cs.nyu.edu/~huesoft/tracuu/vietnom.php?txtTukhoa=l%E1%BA%A1&Maw=24625&dk=1
Thank you very much in advance.
Best wishes,
Grace
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From: Ngô Thanh Nhàn <nhan@temple.edu>
Date: 2008/7/18
To: gclchew@yahoo.co.uk, Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
Cc: Phan Anh Dung <fanzung@gmail.com>
Dear Grace,
I am hosting this site for HueSoft (Thua Thien - Hue Center for Information
Technology) from our Medical Language Processing at New York
University, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
I am glad that you're using this work. I include in this reply the email
address of Phan Anh Dung (the author, from Hue). I am working
with Phan Anh Dung on a tuồng classical theater project (with Prof.
Sophie Quinn-Judge at the Center for Vietnamese Philosophy,
Culture and Society of Temple University, and Prof. Nguyễn Văn Sâm).
Following are my 2-cent contribution.
Since there is no standard in Nom, Nom ideograms tend to record
sounds (dialectal and historical) rather than meaning (reflecting in
their contexts). The ideograms are sometimes interchangeable
and sometimes not.
In the introductory page (for vietnom)
http://128.122.140.98/~huesoft/tracuu/vietnom.php
PAD said that the entries were taken
from Bảng tra chữ Nôm (Hanoi, 1976) or BTCN.
This glossary has an ideogram and the smallest
context phrase for the ideogram.
In your example, lạ in BTCN listed:
(1) lạ (item 3091) has the context lạ lùng
(2) lạ (item 7957), also read la, has the context lạ lùng
(3) lạ (item 8181) also has context lạ lùng.
So from the example you gave, I guess the Nôm
ideogram entries were taken from BTCN, the entries
in quốc ngữ below were taken from a different
Vietnamese quốc ngữ dictionary.
Note that ideograms from BTCN were taken from 15
literary works, such as Ức trai thi tập, Gia huấn ca, Bạch
Vân am thi tập, Hồng Đức quốc âm thi tập, Nhị độ mai,
Kim Vân Kiều, Vương Kim diễn tự truyện, Đoạn trường
tân thanh, etc.
From the above, your impression seems to be correct, that the three ideograms for lạ are most likely identical in context and hence in meaning.
Best,
Nhan
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