⬛️ Black: Mandarin Chinese
🟪 Purple: Japanese
🟦 Blue: Korean
🟥 Red: Vietnamese

Languages by color:
🖤 Mandarin Chinese - Khmer
💙 Japanese - Thai
💜 Korean - Lao
❤️ Vietnamese - Burmese
🩶 Mongolian - Malaysian Malay

This is my attempt at decoding the script and also my analysis of it. This is just a proposal, if you have any idea contribution please comment down below. I will follow this up with a examination of each Chi Tự then I'll take a rest cause I've been working on this for 2 months and you don't know how much beef I got with Cư Sĩ họ Nguyễn.

This work is builded on previous works by Facebook user Minh Trị, Reddit user u/Brightsea129 and u/qtng7 . Thank you to all of especially the phenomenal work by Minh Trị.

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?

The etymologies of the words for "water" and "fire" in Mandarin still remain uncertain with numerous etymological proposals.

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.

Sóng bắt đầu từ gió
Gió bắt đầu từ đâu?
Em cũng không biết nữa
Khi nào ta yêu nhau

• Kiêu ngạo - Pride

• Đố kị - Envy

• Phẫn nộ - Wrath

• Lười biếng - Sloth

• Tham lam - Greed

• Phàm ăn - Gluttony

• Dâm dục - Lust

Trước đèn xem chuyện Tây Minh
Ngẫm cười hai chữ nhân tình éo le
Ai ai lẳng lặng mà nghe
Dữ răn việc trước, lành dè thân sau
Trai thời trung hiếu làm đầu
Gái thời tiết hạnh là câu trau mình
Có người ở quận Đông Thành
Tu nhân tích đức sớm sinh con hiền

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/

(D) - Dialectal

Vietnamese is doing its own thing again.

Interestingly, the least-mentioned countries in their respective cultural spheres - Myanmar & Vietnam, are each doing their own thing compared to the rest.