Chu Nom is no Chinese Characters, I can't read Cho Noms for example (can read kanji/hanja without any issue), it is more like `Vietnamese` Characters, it is its own set of unique logograms, if that makes sense.
It is complex and difficult to use/write, abolishing it really didn't take too much effort, as most of the population is illiterate at the time.
However, this is very different from CJK countries, where the Chinese characters are mostly kept consistent. Cho nom on the other hand, renders almost completely unreadable to me.
Try reading some Japanese in man'yougana https://ja.wikisource.org/wiki/%E4%B8%87%E8%91%89%E9%9B%86/%... and compare to the version where all characters used purely for their sound value have been distorted into squiggly hiragana. I find it much easier to pick out coherent words in the latter because they're clearly visually distinct.
> Nom is pretty much Chinese word meaning + Chinese word pronunciation.
Hard disagree, from a Japanese speaker standpoint. I suspect it's almost deliberate that any mixtures of Chu Nom and Chinese can be handled natively to Vietnamese speakers, and nobody else. Nothing in it makes sense to me, far less than Chinese text do.
Understandable, because it was based on how it sounded, not based on the meaning of the compound characters. So it only makes sense for Vietnamese people.
The first word "núi" (mountain) is made up of 山 and 內, 山 is the meaning of the word, and 內 is how it (mostly) sounds. Without knowing Vietnamese it is impossible to guess the meaning.
Japanese also developed a Chu Nom type system (manyogana) to represent Japanese sounds using Chinese characters, and it was almost as complex, requiring a good understanding of Chinese as a foundation. But manyogana was simplified into the two syllabaries used today, hiragana and katakana.
Hiragana or Katakana are not Chinese characters. They don’t follow the principles of how Chinese characters were developed(六书), nor did they follow the structures.
At best they are inspired by Chinese characters. No one in China or Japan will classify kanas as Japanese made Chinese characters, which by itself, meant something different entirely, like 畑/辻/雫
イ developed from 伊, ク from 久, め from 女 and れ from 礼 in much the same way that 余 developed from 餘, 区 from 區, 汉 from 漢 and 礼 from 禮.
Wantonly altering character shapes to make them easier to write quickly may not be a blessed way to create new characters, but it has tradition. It's not like the Oracle Bone Script was passed unchanged from generation to generation and only the moderns dared lay hand to it. Lazy scribes have existed for as long as there have been scribes.
That hiragana and katakana are now treated as a completely separate category is more down to them being used very differently than how they were derived.
«Wantonly» is perhaps not the most accurate term at least in the context of hiragana. It evolved as a writing script for women and used exclusively by women and by women only due to the Japanese women having been denied education in Japan at the time and having been considered too inferior to learn kanji. The men scoffed at hiragana for many centuries as something relegated to the «crazy» women writing love letters and expressing «lowly» emotions in a correspondence with each other. The Japanese men would only write using kanji. Eastern Asian mysoginy has a pretty rich history that has even found its reflection in a writing system.
Fair, I think the difference here is that by simplifying Chinese characters into Kana, it also removes the semantics from the character completely, but that is also not completely unheard for Chinese either (like 的, for example).
It is complex and difficult to use/write, abolishing it really didn't take too much effort, as most of the population is illiterate at the time.