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Literary Chinese was the medium of all formal writing in Vietnam for almost all of the history of the country up to the early 20th century, when it was replaced by vernacular writing using the Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet. The language was the same as that used in China itself, as well as Korea and Japan, and used the same standard Chinese characters. It was used for official business, historical annals, fiction, verse, scholarship and even for declarations of Vietnamese determination to resist the Chinese. == Literary Chinese == Literary Chinese was a style of writing modelled on the classics of Warring States period and Han dynasty such as the ''Mencius'', the ''Commentary of Zuo'' and Sima Qian's ''Historical Records''. It remained largely static while the various varieties of Chinese evolved and diverged to the point of mutual unintelligibility. The language was also used for formal writing in Vietnam, Korea and Japan, enabling scholars from these countries, as well as China, to communicate in writing, in a role similar to that of Latin in Europe. Literary Chinese as written in Vietnam used the same characters and outward form as in China. Although Literary Chinese was used only for written communication, each Chinese character could be read aloud in a Vietnamese approximation of the Middle Chinese pronunciation. For example, the term for Chinese characters, 漢字 (''Hànzì'' in Modern Standard Chinese) has a Sino-Vietnamese reading of ''Hán tự''. With these pronunciations, Chinese words were imported wholesale into the Vietnamese language. The resulting Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary makes up over half the Vietnamese lexicon. The Vietnamese terms for writing in Chinese are ''chữ Hán'' ("Chinese writing") or ''chữ nho'' ("Confucian writing") in contrast to ''chữ Nôm'' ("Southern writing"), a script for the Vietnamese language. The Nôm script, using a mixture of Chinese characters and locally created characters, became the vehicle for a flourishing vernacular literature, peaking in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However Literary Chinese remained the medium of scholarship and administration for almost all of the period up to the early 20th century. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Literary Chinese in Vietnam」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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