My preceding post was about a collection of poems by an 18th-century Vietnamese concubine, Ho Xuan Huong, who wrote in an ideographic script a thousand years old that’s now nearly extinct in Vietnam.

Hanoi (AsiaNews) – In 2019 the Vietnamese Church celebrates 400 years since the first romanisation of the local language. The adoption of the modern Vietnamese alphabet (Chữ Quốc Ngữ) opened the ...

Vietnamese Catholics and intellectuals have commended foreign missionaries and ancestors for developing the national writing system that helped spread Catholicism around the country. Some 200 people, ...

Experts say that the Vietnamese people's contribution is unfairly ignored in exclusively crediting two European missionaries with creating the Quoc Ngu writing system. The fact that all credit for ...

The defunct Thanh Chiem Palace (1602-1883) is seen as a cradle of romanised Vietnamese script, and the place was linked with Portuguese missionary Francisco de Pina (1585-1625) – the founder of the ...

HANOI — At a calligraphy class in Hanoi, Hoang Thi Thanh Huyen slides her brush across the page to form the letters and tonal marks of Vietnam’s unique modern script, in part a legacy of French ...

The French Jesuit was a missionary in Vietnam between 1625 and 1645. Until the early 17th century, the Vietnamese language was based on Chinese characters. The new script became an effective tool for ...