The script
Quốc Âm Tân Tự (國音新字) means “new script for the sounds of the national language”. It dates from the 1840s, the reign of Emperor Thiệu Trị, and is known today from a single text that survives in two manuscript copies in Hanoi. The script appears there among Chinese characters and Nôm.
Everything is built from 22 basic shapes, each made of three strokes. Add a small stroke at one of six places and a shape turns into six more variants. Two shapes side by side form one character: the left one stands for the beginning of a syllable, the right one for its ending. Small circles and half circles in the corners mark the eight tones.
Unicode proposal
Unicode is the standard that lets every script be displayed on every device, and QATT is not part of it yet. A draft proposal describes how the script could be added: 164 characters, with the shapes as building blocks and a joining character that glues them into one letter.
The page QATT Unicode lays the draft out as a chart and as a list of all characters with their names.
- Characters
- 164
- Status
- Draft, not yet part of Unicode
Decodings
The only source explains the script with a table written in Chữ Nôm. Many of its hints are ambiguous or lost, so what each symbol sounds like can only be reconstructed with some assumptions. The Decodings page shows the resulting table of symbols and readings. You can switch between the reading used on this site and the one on Omniglot, enlarge the symbols or turn the table around.