In a curious quirk, an American poet, John Balaban, who first came to Vietnam as a conscientious objector during the war and who has nurtured a love affair with the country ever since, is leading a drive to revive the script, which he says will unlock a trove of hidden Vietnamese culture. "Nom keeps a flavor of a culture washed away with the language of the Roman alphabet," Balaban said during a visit here. "There are real literary treasures, and still a lot of texts that have not been translated."

At a gathering of international linguists in the city of Hue earlier this month, he introduced four young Vietnamese "font carvers" who are working at digitizing the script. A non-profit foundation created by Balaban for the preservation of the script has compiled a Nom dictionary, a collection of 20,000 characters, which he says can be more difficult to master than Chinese.

By making the script accessible on the Internet, Balaban said, he hopes that an array of Vietnamese writings from the 10th to the early 20th century, will be translated into modern Vietnamese. Many of these writings were spirited out of the country by missionaries during the colonial era and are tucked away in foreign archives, including the Vatican and the Musée Guimet in Paris.

Balaban cannot read Nom, but from his days as a medic in the countryside helping wounded civilians during the Vietnam War, he can speak and read Vietnamese. A poet in residence and professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Balaban has used that knowledge to translate Vietnamese poetry written in Nom into English.

For 10 years, he labored over the works of Ho Xuan Huong, one of Vietnam's most treasured poets, who wrote sensuous, sometimes cheeky, always powerful verse in the Nom language.