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.

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.