Home / ATypI Copenhagen 2001
Date Sunday, September 23rd 2001
Venue Falkoner Centret, Copenhagen, Denmark / Track A

The Return to Nôm Script

Ngô Thanh Nhan (Copenhagen 2001) Ngô Thanh Nhan

Dialogue among civilizations: An emphasis on the cross-cultural aspects of type and typography

The return to Nôm is a journey strewn with sentiment, technical passion and aesthetic yearnings. Nôm is a Vietnamese ideographic script used in Viet Nam for more than 1,000 years and is facing the danger of extinction. The first step was a string analysis of reper­toires of Nôm characters which yields code points for Unicode and the ISO/IEC 10646 standards in a form of Chinese Song. A project to reproduce Nôm poetry of Ho Xuân Huong for Spring Essence in 1999 pro­vided a chance to approach the aesthetic issues in bringing printing technology closer to the beauty of her original work. This paper discusses this aesthetic journey in font design for a close-to-extinct writing system.

Ngô Thanh Nhan (Copenhagen 2001)
Speaker

Ngô Thanh Nhan

Ngô Thanh Nhan, Ph.D. linguistics, is a visiting scholar at the New York University Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, and natural language processing editor of the Health Language Center. He specializes in medical language processing and automatic encoding of clinical narratives for a variety of lndo European languages. He also specializes in computer character encoding and was asso­ciated with Vietnam's efforts to standardize quôc ngu, ideographic-based Nôm script and indic-based Cham script since 1990. He is involving a variety of non-profit organizations, notably The Brecht Forum, The Institute for Vietnamese Culture and Education (NY), and The Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation (FL).