many Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist scriptures. By 1174, had become the official writing script of the court, mainly used by administration and literati, and continued to serve this role until the mid-19th century during French colonial rule when the traditional writing system was abolished in favour of transliterated . Sino-Vietnamese readings of In Vietnam, texts were read with the vocalization of Chinese text, called (), similar to Chinese on-yomi in Japanese (), or the assimilated vocalizations in Korean (/). This occurred alongside the diffusion of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary into vernacular Vietnamese, and created a Sinoxenic dialect. The Sinologist Edwin G. Pulleyblank was the one of the first linguists to actively employ "Sino-Vietnamese" to recover earlier histories of China. Chữ Nôm From the 13th century, the dominance of Chinese characters began to be challenged by Chữ Nôm, a different writing system based on the Chinese script to transcribe native Vietnamese words. These were even more difficult than Chinese characters themselves. Nôm script borrowed Chinese characters in their phonetic and semantic values to create new characters. Whilst designed for native Vietnamese words, Nôm required the user to have a fair knowledge of chữ Hán, and thus chữ Nôm was used primarily for literary writings by cultural elites (such as the poetry of Nguyễn Du and Hồ Xuân Hương), while almost all other official writings and documents continued to be written in classical Chinese until the 20th century. Though technically different from chữ Hán, it is simplest to think of Nôm as a derivation of chữ Hán for vernacular Vietnamese, with modifications and new Vietnamese-coined logograms. Together, they are called Hán Nôm. Ultimately Nôm was deemed an inferior method of enabling mass communication and transcription of Vietnamese speech, with the Latin script seen as more practical. Quốc Âm Tân Tự Quoc Am Tan Tu (Chữ Nôm: 國音新字), literally meaning 'new script of national sound (language)', was a writing system for Vietnamese proposed in the mid-19th century. Two documents written on this type of script (four pages each) are kept at the Institute for the Study of Han Nom: An older unnamed manuscript, and a more recent copy called Quoc Am Tan Tu (國音新字). There is no information in the text of the Quoc Am Tan Tu that indicates the specific date and year this work was written. Based on the fact that in the preface of the work the last stroke of the character