1. Nguyen Trai and his Nôm poetry collection - Quoc am thi tap

Quoc am thi tap (國音詩集) is the 14 - 15^th century collection of Nôm poetry written by (Nguyen Trai 1380- 1442) – the most famous poet of Vietnam. He was recognized as an international cultural celebrity by UNESCO in 1980. Nguyen Trai is counted as “the first man to construct Vietnamse Nôm literature” (prof. Đào Duy Anh). Quoc am thi tap is not only the development of literature, but also the progress of Nôm script, Vietnamse language and Vietnamese culture. The Nôm text Quoc am thi tap is a cultural inheritance, because there are 12,500 Nôm characters of 15^th century in the text.

This poetic collection occupies an important place in the history of Vietnamese literature and culture. It is the most ancient Nôm poetry collection. And it's considered as the pre-eminent work of Vietnamese literature, and may be compared with The Tale of Kieu by Nguyen Du.

2. The introduction of “A Dictionary of 15^th Century Ancient Vietnamese”

a. Features

• Covers the 254 Nôm poems in the text Quoc am thi tap.
• The dictionary describes Nguyen Trai’s language in a way that can be compared to the Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary.
• Each entry of the dictionary contains Nôm characters from the original text.
• Dictionary of 15^th century Vietnamese- with linguistic data which is 200 - year older than the Dictionarivm Annnamiticivm Lvsitanvm et Latinvm of Alexandro de Rhodes (printed in 1651, Rome), and 400 - year older than The Tale of Kieu of Nguyen Du.
• The dictionary entries include: lexicon, literary allusions, idioms, proverbs, names of people, geographic names, etc. found in the text Quoc am thi tap.

b. Structure

• Explanatory Notes.
• Dictionary: 2,525 entries (with Nôm characters, etymology, reconstruction, ...).
• Index.
• Appendix: Interpretation and translation of 254 Nôm poems in the poetic collection Quoc am thi tap.
• References.