u/qtng7

Chữ Hán Nôm + Quốc Âm Tân Tự mixed script.

Ở trong câu này chữ "Việt Nam" được viết cách thảo thư. Notice the 越南.

Hôm nay có đi đâu 空? Có ghé 越南空?

Writing grass script with Quốc Âm Tân Tự, some cursive abbreviations. Tone marks at the bottom become dots to make extreme cursive possible.

Thảo thư dùng Quốc Âm Tân Tự cơ bản.

+| → –| (cán lược "t")

|+ → 卜 (cán lược "n")

、→ 乀 → 辶 (phẩy ở vị trí 6, tức là âm cuối -M)

Vì chữ thảo khó phân biệt vị trí của dấu thanh, các dấu ở dưới được viết bằng một hoặc hai chấm:

• 1 chấm ⚊ cho thanh dương / ☰ (nặng入, huyền)

• 2 chấm ⚋ cho thanh âm / ☷ (sắc入, ngang)

ₒ◌ → .◌ ☰

◌ₒ → ◌. ☰

◌꜆ → ◌.. ☷

꜀◌ → ..◌ ☷

◌° → ◌° ☰

°◌ → °◌ ☰

◌꜂ → ◌꜂ ☷

꜄◌ → ꜄◌ ☷

In Quốc Âm Tân Tự all the 22 cán tự have no function when writing. My thought is, why don't we use them for ong, ông, and ung, since these rhymes are missing from the rhyme table.

I searched all possible pronunciations for the cán tự M, B, and Ph, with the corresponding chunom 蒙, 葻, 口風:

蒙 mong mòng mỏng mông muống

葻 bong boong bông bung buông von

口風 (諷? phúng)

This fits perfectly for mông bong phung, even matching the rhymes in the next row.

無事 (Vô sự) – "There is nothing to do", "everything is fine", "profound peace".

A small calligraphy piece I made. In Thiền, this phrase points to a state of ultimate inner peace, having an unaffected mind that has stopped chasing external goals, realizing that everything is already complete just as it is.

The small text says: bút mực tùy duyên - ink and brush follow destiny.

All written in Quốc âm tân tự, the seals were added digitally.

Brush calligraphy has always been part of Zen (Vietnamese Thiền).

In Viernam it is still practiced by thousands of people with Quốc Ngữ and Hán Nôm. This app extends it to Quốc Âm Tân Tự which I find is ideal for people with no Hán Nôm knowledge who want to practise Thiền meditation using traditional brush and ink calligraphy. Maybe this could even be the only real world use case for QATT.

The breathing circle is a direct hommage to Master Thích Nhất Hạnh, breathing in for the first half and breathing out for the second half and filling the center with words (also add a drop of tea to the ink!). This is in stark contrast to the Japanese enso circle which is painted explosively when breathing out and is purposefully left empty.

In Thiền imperfection must be accepted, but with QATT imperfection is evil. So this system introduces cursive shorthands for fault tolerance. The companion PDF introduces these shorthands and the cursive forms.

Find the app here: https://qatt.org/qatt/vandao/

I've been analyzing this Quốc Âm Tân Tự table and noticed a clear phonetic pattern. Aside from the first row (open syllables / zero coda) and the last four X-columns, the rows seem to be sorted by the coda's place of articulation. They progress systematically from the back of the mouth to the front (velar → alveolar/palatal → bilabial/labiovelar). This is similar to how Yunjing rhyme tables are organized.

If this hypothesis is correct, we can predict that the -m and -u codas must be in nearby rows or even in the same row. Looking at the 5th row, there are some gloss characters with an "L" mark. My interpretation is that the "L" is a lenition mark, changing the coda from bilabial to labiovelar (from -m to -u/-o). So, the last row is shared by rhymes ending in /m/ and rhymes ending in /w/. That makes perfect sense because most -m rhymes in the mirrored columns don't exist (like uâm, oam, uym, uyêm, ươm), leaving the mirrored columns in the 5th row free for w-rhymes. A side note: ươ appears to be treated as /wơ/, because rhymes with that nucleus are placed in mirror columns.

Some columns have no lenition mark. These might be the columns for â and ă. Since â and ă must be followed by a coda, combinations like âu and ău already exist in the first row—meaning no lenition is required in the 5th row.

Applying this information on the rhyme table leads to 11 pairs of columns. Each pair containg to 10 slots that are systematically assigned to rhymes of the same vowel group, like this:

1. a ang an ai am / oa oang oan oai ao
2. e eng en - em / oe oeng oen - eo
3. • iêng ia iên iêm / - - uya uyên iêu ...

Note how the 5th and 10th item correspond due to lenisation, e.g. am/ao, em/eo, iêm/iêu

This makes much more sense than arbitrarily assigning rhymes and it also makes sense considering that the author of QATT clearly had knowledge about ancient rhyme tables.

2 times good morning/evening. With literal tones (月=🌛 for âm, 日=🌞 for dương)

The group of rhymes ending in "n" is very special in Quốc Âm Tân Tự. It is the only group of rhymes that is spread over all 22 initals (cán lược). And here is another logic that only this group consistently applies without exception.

In this group, rhymes with medial /w/ are always the mirror image of the same rhyme without a medial. That is, we have pairs of an-oan, en-oen, in-uyn etc. that are perfect mirrors. Rhymes that have no medial version were assigned a the symbol with "X" (the u in uô is not a medial!). This is perhaps the rhyme group we can most safely say has been correctly deciphered.

As a side effect: The mini-qatt/qatt-cơ-bản system that is based on this special group only needs 11 base symbols plus the tone marks to write the whole language.

Using gemini AI you can generate images with improved script styles from one of the straight line fonts. Just make a screenshot of the characters using the normal font und upload it to gemini. Then tell it to apply a certain brush style on the characters. Youncan use vietnamese terms like thư pháp, but some times the results are better when you use chinese or japanese terms (kaish, lishu, shodo), maybe because the AI has had more training data about these terms. Here are some results. Some of the text has no meaning, I just took word fragments that I happened to have at hand.

Writing "Quốc Âm Tân Tự" using Quốc Âm Tân Tự in the original 1841 style.

⫤ → K Z lược → IÊ (iên trừ n) 口 = 又 → U/Ô フ → sắc

→ KIỂU

This is read with the -n rhymes only, i.e. the mark on the rhyme is interpreted as the final -n. Omitting the mark is read as omitted -n. Ông mark is read as final -ng or modifying -n to -m.

The text reads: Nam quốc sơn hà Nam đế cư Tiệt nhiên định phận tại thiên thư Như hà nghịch lỗ lai xâm phạm Nhữ đẳng hành khan thủ bại hư.

The nhập tones make it very hard to quickly scan a text. Here is a way to improve readability when writing nhập tones. Instead of moving the tone mark to the bottom right, move the whole rhyme symbol to the bottom. The tone mark can stay at the top or move it to the bottom, too. That way it í easier to distinguish the final consonant, i.e. m/n/ng vs p/t/c.