Borrowing sounds is the phenomenon of borrowing the tones of "replaceable characters" to read the sounds of particular Chinese letters. The "Replaceable pseudo-character" is a phenomenon of borrowing homonyms, or words with similar pronunciations to read a certain Chinese character. This is called the borrowed-sound character, and both the original and the borrowed words co-exist. However, in countries in the region where Chinese characters are used such as Vietnam, Japan and Korea, there is also the phenomenon of borrowing the sounds and shapes of Chinese characters to record native languages. By using quantitative statistical methods, interdisciplinary research methods, and an oriented approach to grammatology 文字學 and etymology 語源學, this article will examine the phenomenon of borrowing sounds found in the Linh Nam Chich Quai 嶺南摭怪 (the Collection of the Strange Tales of the Linh Nam Realm) compiled during the Ly-Tran dynasties (XI-XIV centuries). This article provides a comparison of similar phenomena in some Chinese character works and epitaphs of the Ly Tran dynasty in Vietnam and the Nihon ryoiki 日本靈異記 of Japan. It argues that borrowing sounds are a common feature found in the works from these early periods which recorded folktales due to the influence of Han culture, and Vietnamese literature should be not placed outside the general rules of that influence.

The Tay people are the ethnic minorities with the largest population in Viet Nam, mainly distributed in the Northern Uplands and Midlands, mostly concentrated in the provinces of Cao Bang, Lang Son, Tuyen Quang and Ha Giang. Over the long history of development, along with the development and improvement of their language, the Tay people have gradually created a type of writing system using the graphic, phonetic, and meaning elements of Chinese characters in combination with indigenous phonetic and linguistic elements, to create the system that is called the Nom-Tay scripts or the Nom script of the Tay ethnic group. Traditional Tay literature is mainly recorded in this Nom - Tay script. The article reliesupon the texts that belong to the genre of narrative poetry (in this genre, a story is written as a long poem) written in Nom - Tay- the most significant part of the written classical folk literature of the Tay ethnic group. Materials from the texts, currently stored at the Institute of Sino - Nom Studies (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences), will be used to conduct an analysis of the usage and the method of writing of the Chinese characters in these texts. Thereby, the article strives to confirm the important role and the ample appearance of the Chinese characters in VietnameseNom- Tay texts.

Vietnam is a multi-ethnic country with many cultures, languages, and forms of texts that coexist independently and interactively. Among the Vietnamese ethnic minorities is the Tay, the most primarily populated one. Before the use of the Latinized script, the Tay people used to use Nom which is made up of the graphic, phonetic and semantic elements of Han characters. Currently, the cultural source of the Tay is one of the most precious cultural heritages of Vietnam. If we want to decode, research, explore and promote the values of this heritage, it is impossible not to have a good set of reference books, which are Nom-Tay (word-based and character-based) dictionaries. It is undeniable that the compilation of Tay-language dictionaries and texts has attracted interest, and been in implementation for about half a century, thanks especially to the government, research institutions, and generations of Vietnamese scholars. However, the achievements have not met the needs and utilization potential of the explored materials. With the extremely abundant resources of ancient Nom-Tay texts, with the proper attention and investment of the state and investment funds, and with researchers’ enthusiasm, the compilation of the Nom-Tay (word-based and character-based) dictionaries will, to be sure, attain remarkable achievements.

All of the languages in the cultural and linguistic Sinosphere display the phenomenon of borrowing Han characters and Han radicals to form their own scripts. The Nom Viet is no exception. When studying the structure of Nom Viet, scholars often use Han characters as the basis to analyze the structure of the Nom characters and divide them into different categories. This approach is applicable to the vast majority of Nom characters. However, in practice, when studying the processes of creating and using characters through many Nom texts, it is found that some Nom characters are formed on the basis of pre-existing Nom characters. This category of Nom characters, for a long time, has not won the attention of scholars. Surveying over 50 different Nom works, this article has collected 25 Nom characters with a multi-layered structure, which we call the derivative Nom category. By analyzing the components that directly make up these Nom characters and relying upon new research results on Chinese grammatology, the article will analyze and specify the internal structure of these Nom characters. The article has classified and presented the model of these Nom scripts. In addition, the separation of elements directly forming the characters has shown the process of acculturation of Chinese characters in Vietnam. It can be seen that the number of Nom derivatives is not large. However, their presence has more or less provided new materials for studying the structure of the Nom characters. Hopefully, the analysis in this article will contribute to shedding light on the current theoretical issues regarding the structure of the Nom Viet.

In the early First Millennium AD, Vietnam imported Chinese language and culture, which had a lasting influence ever since. Chinese influence on Vietnamese written and spoken language is notable in particular. Despite this, due to the fact the two languages belong to two distinct families and differences in the number and structure of syllables available in each language, the borrowed Chinese language cannot transcribe all of Vietnamese personal and local names properly. This is the reason for the formation of the Nom script. From the 17th century onwards, Western missionaries used the Nom script for religious purposes, which led to the formation of the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. It would not be an overstatement to say that, 17th century Catholic documents written in Nom are of indispensable value to researchers who wish to study the history of the Vietnamese language and the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. Based on the materials from Kinh nhung le mua phuc sinh (Scriptures on Easter Rituals), this paper will focus on the Nom transcription of foreign Saints' names, which will show the differences in syllabic structure between Western languages (Portuguese and France) and Vietnamese, as well as give an overall idea of Nom transcribing rules.

The development of Nom characters is promoted on the basis of and in attachment with Chinese characters, and in this regard the Phonetic Annotation of the Thousand Character Classic 《千字文解音》 compiled in the late Nguyen Dynasty in Vietnam was a very practical textbook for learning Chinese characters and Nom characters. Based on categorizing Nom characters, the paper intends to clarify several notions on Nom characters of the Phonetic Annotation of the Thousand Character Classic. In the beginning, Nom characters can be divided into two major types: the directly borrowed Chinese characters and the independently invented ones. The former includes borrowing sounds, meanings, and both. The latter, according to the components of Chinese character formations, can be divided into the pictophonetic of Chinese characters and that of Nom characters. In the last part of the article, we summarize the relationship between Chinese characters and Nom characters. It is necessary not merely to consider the relationship but to understand the comparisons between them. With the aid of studying Nom characters, we can find that irrespective of whether they are directly-borrowed from Chinese or independently invented, the sound of Chinese characters is the most important feature for them. But we cannot ignore the ideographic parts of Nom characters because they, on the one hand, make up the phonetic deficiency of Chinese characters while promoting the development of Nom characters on the other. In our modern society, Chinese characters and Nom characters came to drift apart, and the latter especially was withdrawn from the historical stage, but the traditional culture of Vietnam is still recorded in literature both in Chinese characters and Nom characters. Moreover, the Nom character is one of the most important representatives of Vietnam’s traditional culture. For this reason solely, this research shall be a great help to further understanding of significant cross-cultural aspects between China and Vietnam, and more specifically of histories related to the spreading, application, and development of Chinese characters in Vietnam.

Vietnamese practice of avoiding tabooed names and its expressions found in Vietnam’s Sino-Nom texts, which consists of texts written in the classical Chinese language and those in Nom, belong to a tradition that began in the Tran dynasty (the 13th century). There are three kinds of expressions of tabooed names in Sino-Nom literature: (1) lowercased annotations written in the place of the (unwritten) tabooed name: this type is very rare, only found in the documents of the 13th and 14th centuries; (2) a blank in the place where the tabooed name should have been inserted: this method is also very rare, only appearing once in a 15th century document; (3) modified forms of the character that represents the tabooed name: this is the main method of avoiding tabooed names of ancient literature. Because Chinese characters are built using different radicals and strokes, the omission or separation of them in order to modify the character into a new variant is easy. There are four modes: (3.1) the omission of strokes: this mode can be further divided into even more specific varieties which are the simple variety of characters with missing strokes, the variety of characters with missing strokes and an added circle-shaped mark, and the variety of characters with missing strokes and added components; (3.2) dividing and flipping of the characters: in this mode, the character is divided into two halves, left and right, or lower and upper, and each half is flipped to face the opposite direction, the “ 兩腳”, “two-footed mode”, so to speak; (3.3) the addition of new components regardless of whether or not their shapes are flipped or reversed; (3.4) variants with forms very different from those of “normal” characters. Each type of those mentioned above exists in even more varieties. The first two were mainly used in the 13th and the 14th centuries, when the practice of avoiding tabooed names just began to appear. The third type was mainly used in the 16th and the 17th centuries. After each dynasty, the practice as such became ever more important, and thus also more reliable as an indication to determine the date of each specific Sino-Nom text.

Based on the reference achievement scholars before, combined with the actual survey results on Nom Tay documents currently stored in Institute of Sino-Nom Studies, conducted article comparing other cases face each other and are similar in structure between the written word: Nom of the Kinh and Tay ethnic group in Vietnam with the letter of the Zhuang ethnic blocks (Guangxi, China). This indicates that, basically 3 types of this writing there are a lot of similarities in terms of composition, the differences are very small and specific characteristics. This sector should be studied in depth and hopefully more will have interesting results in the future.

In the first century, Sinographs and Chinese culture were transmitted to Japan, Korea and Vietnam, simultaneously had profound impact on countries they passed by, and then, formed the vast Sinographic Cosmopolis. During the contact with Sinographs and culture, the people of all three nations had created their writing systems that based on these elements of Sinographs. Based on script evidences recorded in Kokuji no Jiten, this article will analyze the characteristics and suggest the historical divergence of the Waji system (also called the Kokuji), conduct comparisons with the Vietnamese Nom script, develop the model of the structure of these scripts, and specifically point out the similarities and differences of these two writing systems.

The traditional writing of the Vietnamese nation – Nom characters – is a kind of “Sino style” (or so called “Chinese-character-shaped”) “square-shaped” writing system. For more than 100 years, many Vietnamese and foreign scholars have been interested in this writing, discussing and engaging in studying it from different angles. Starting from the philology point of view, the author tries to reveal the issues surrounding “Nom character” studies. They can be attributed to three big topics: 1. The origin of Nom characters and how it became a writing system lasting throughout different historical periods; 2. The internal structures of Nom characters and their evolution; 3. Different stages of Vietnamese philology and the social functions of “Nom characters”. This paper is going to discuss the above-mentioned topics, at the same time as introducing some of the authors’ observations on these topics as references for colleagues.

This study assessed the removal efficiency of NOM which is known as the precursors of DBPs in advanced water treatment using the ceramic membrane filtration, introduced the first in the nation at the Y water treatment plant (WTP). It is generally well-known that the removal of NOM by MF Membrane is very low in water treatment process. But, the result of investigation on removal efficiency of NOM in advanced water treatment using the ceramic membrane was different as follows. The removal rate of organic contaminant by the ceramic membrane advanced water treatment was determined to be 65.5% for the DOC, 85.8% for UV254, and 77 to 86% for DBPFP. The removal rate of pre-ozonation was found to be 6 to 15% more effective compared with the pre-chlorination. The removal rate of DOC and UV254 in biological activated carbon(BAC) process was over 50% and 75%, respectively although the rate was decreased 10 ~ 20% according to analysis items in converting from GAC to BAC.

자연유기물을 처리하는 침지형 중공사막 정밀여과 시스템에서 TiO2 나노입자와 UV를 이용한 광촉매 반응을 적용 시 공기폭기, TiO2 농도, 용액의 pH 그리고 Ca+2의 존재가 자연유기물에 의한 파울링에 미치는 혼합영향을 관찰하였다. 실험결과, TiO2 나노입자 없이 단순 UV의 조사만으로 자연유기물에 의한 파울링은 약 40% 정도 감소시킬 수 있었다. 또한 UV의 조사 없이 TiO2 나노입자의 교반만으로 약 25%의 파울링 감소효과를 나타내었다. 공기폭기가 광촉매 반응에 미치는 영향을 확인해 본 결과 공기폭기를 적용해 주지 않은 경우와 비교했을시 공기폭기로 인한 자연유기물의 제거효율은 약 12% 정도 향상되었다. 이는 공기폭기로 인한 분리막 표면으로부터 자연유기물의 물리적인 역수송 보다는 산소공급으로 인해 광촉매 반응이 더욱 향상된 것으로 판단된다. 공기폭기 유량, TiO2 농도, 용액의 pH 영향정도를 관찰한 결과 공기폭기가 자연유기물 파울링 감소에 미치는 영향이 가장 낮은 것으로 나타났다. 반면, 용액의 pH 경우 낮은 pH (= 4.5)에서 파울링 감소에 미치는 영향이 가장 높은 것으로 관찰되었다. 또한 TiO2 나노입자 농도가 증가할 수록 파울링 감소효과도 증가하였으며 용액의 pH를 낮출수록 파울링 감소는 증가하였다. 이는 낮은 pH에서 서로 반대전하를 지닌 자연유기물과 TiO2 나노 입자간의 정전기적인 인력이 증가하여 TiO2 나노입자 표면에서 자연유기물의 광촉매분해능이 향상된 것으로 사료된다. 또한 자연유기물 중 Ca+2의 첨가는 상대적으로 높은 pH (= 10)에서 자연유기물과 TiO2 나노입자 사이 가교현상을 촉진시켜 Ca+2이 첨가되지 않은 경우와 비교시 높은 파울링 감소효과와 자연유기물의 분해효과를 달성시킬 수 있었다.