In Nôm, a Vietnamese word can be written using a Chinese character for a word with a similar meaning or pronunciation. Each character represents an idea. Such characters are called "ideographs." In addition, each character represents a syllable, or sound. Because traditional characters have this dual property, nearly every syllable in modern Vietnamese has acquired a semantic meaning. Like Chinese, Vietnamese is a tonal language. Since the issue of tone does not arise for Japanese or Korean, native phonetic scripts could develop for these languages without this complicating factor.