This paper aims to introduce one piece of chữ nôm material, which Henri Maspéro mentioned in his article of 1912 as one of the oldest chữ nôm materials, and the existence of which remained for a long time unconfirmed. This paper also aims to analyze the chữ nôm characters contained in it from the historical phonological point of view.
 This material was rediscovered and introduced by Lê Thị Liên in her 1989 B. A. thesis. It is an inscription erected in 1343 on the Hộ Thành mountain (núi Non Nủớc) in the present Ninh Bình province, Vietnam. It concerns donations made by local inhabitants for the construction of a temple on the mountain.
 Before analyzing the chữ nôm characters in the inscription, we first review the traditional method of analyzing chữ nôm characters as proposed by Henri Maspéro in 1912, for the purpose of demonstrating the limitations of his method in the analysis of our material. We then refer to recent Viet-Muong phonological studies based on the newly discovered and described groups of the Viet-Muong branch such as Arem, Chứt, Mã Liềng, Aheu, and Pọng, most of which were not known when Maspéro wrote his paper. One of the main phonological features that differentiate them from the Mủờng dialects described by Maspéro is the existence of the disyllabic structure: (C₀)vC₁V(C₂)/T. We also utilize newly discovered chữ nôm materials such as the Sino-Vietnamese text of Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh, compiled in the 15th century, which also throws light on our analysis.
 The material contains 11 common words and 18 person or place names written in chữ nôm characters. The latter 18 proper nouns are the object of discussion. Their common characteristics are the use of two characters for the transcription of one proper noun and occurrence of the vowel /a/ as the first element. We claim for these examples to show (1) certain patterns of the initial consonantal cluster, and (2) the trace of the disyllabic morphemes still preserved in the 14th century Vietnamese. Concerning the former point, we can reconstruct such patterns as /^*bl-/, /^*ml-/, and /^*k‘r-/ from our material. The latter point is of special importance. Nguyễn Tài Cẩn (1995) reconstructed the major members of the minor syllable ((C₀)v) in the disyllabic structure of Proto Viet-Muong as /^*pə/, /^*tə/, /^*cə/, /^*kə/, /^*sə/, /^*a/, and we can recognize four of them in our matelial: /^*pə/, /^*tə/, /^*kə/, /^*a/. The chữ nôm characters contained in the Sino-Vietnamese text of Phật thuyết đại báo phụ mẫu ân trọng kinh mentioned above, in turn, show all six of them, and the characters transcribing each of these minor syllables coincide with each other between these two materials, a fact that may reinforce the credibility of our analysis.
 In conclusion, the insertion of a non-distinctive schwa vowel /ə/ between each of the initial consonantal clusters seems to have been common in Vietnamese during the 14th-15th centuries, but not in all cases. And the disyllabic strucure of Vietnamese, or at least the trace of it, is recognized to have existed until as late as 15th century.

抄録全体を表示