Quốc Âm Tân Tự (國音新字): the 22 Base Shapes, Marking Strokes and Character Composition

Overview

• Script: Quốc Âm Tân Tự, 國音新字, “new script for the sounds of the national language”.
• Language: Vietnamese. The script is phonetic: it writes the onset (initial consonant) and the rhyme of a syllable.
• Structure: 22 bases × 7 forms = 154 forms. 22 are marked Cán, 22 are unmarked Cán and 110 are Chi.
• Shape: straight strokes only, drawn in one square cell, with tone marks as circles and semicircles in the corners.
• Attested in: two manuscripts of one text, Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies, Hanoi, shelfmark AB.630.

The 22 base shapes

The manuscript lists the 22 bases in the section 幹音二十二字 (“the twenty-two characters of the trunk sounds”, page 2), each with a chữ Nôm annotation that gives its syllable. Every base is named after that syllable, which always has the rhyme -ông: mông, đông, công, ông and so on. The drawings below show the unmarked form, the three strokes without a marking stroke. These three strokes are shared by all seven forms of a base. Each shape fills a square cell. When two parallel lines are joined by a third, the two parallels are evenly spaced and set in from the edges of the cell, and the joining line runs along the edge across the full width or height.

The 22 shapes fall into eight geometric groups:

How the marking stroke works

Each base can carry one short marking stroke. The marking stroke always sits at the end of one of the three strokes. A stroke has two ends, so there are six possible positions. The position decides which form it is:

1. No marking stroke: the unmarked Cán. The bare three-stroke shape shown above. The source has no separate name for it; it calls marked and unmarked forms alike 幹 (Cán). The unmarked Cán is the part that is combined with other components.
2. Position 1: the marked Cán. The marking stroke is at the start position, which is the upper left or the upper middle of the shape, depending on the base. This is the form shown in the manuscript’s list of the 22 bases. It is never combined with other components.
3. Positions 2 to 6: the five Chi (枝, “branches”). Starting from position 1, the marking stroke moves counter-clockwise from one stroke end to the next. This gives the five Chi of the base, in order. Together the 22 bases have 22 × 5 = 110 Chi. The manuscript lists them in the section 枝字一百一十字 (“the 110 Chi”) in blocks of five per base.

Because the marking stroke moves in every Chi, no Chi looks like the marked Cán of its base. Each base therefore has seven distinct forms: one unmarked Cán, one marked Cán and five Chi.

The six positions drawn for all 22 bases

The figures below show every base with its three strokes in black and the six possible marking-stroke positions in colour, numbered 1 to 6. They are redrawn from the SVG font of the QATT project, whose handwriting-style strokes are slightly curved. The numbering always runs counter-clockwise: it starts at the top (position 1, upper left or upper middle), continues down the left side, along the bottom, up the right side and ends at the top right (position 6).

Marked Cán, position 1: the marking stroke is a short stroke across the end of a line, perpendicular to it. For ông it crosses the left end of the top horizontal line; for đông and chông it crosses the top end of the vertical line. The Chi use the marking stroke at positions 2 to 6 of the same base.

Marked and unmarked Cán both occur standing alone, with the same reading, and can carry tone marks. The manuscript illustrates the eight tones on the standalone unmarked Cán of đông.

How characters are composed

A character is one square cell. It contains one component, or two, or three. The manuscript describes three ways to combine components.

Phản thiết (反切): unmarked Cán + Chi of a different base

The unmarked Cán stands on the left and a Chi of a different base on the right. The method follows the traditional phản thiết spelling: the onset comes from the first component and the rhyme from the second. The manuscript describes it in the section Phản thiết hài âm pháp (反切諧音法). Example: the unmarked Cán of ông combined with a Chi of chông is read yên (annotated 嚥). With 22 unmarked Cán and 110 Chi there are 22 × 110 − 110 = 2,310 such combinations. If the Chi belonged to the same base as the Cán, the pair would add nothing to the Chi, so the Chi is written alone.

Hợp thư (合書): Chi + unmarked Cán of the same base

The Chi stands on the left and the unmarked Cán of the same base on the right. The heading of the section reads 合書左從枝体右從幹体畧法: “the left follows the Chi, the right follows the Cán”. Each Chi has exactly one unmarked Cán of its own base, so there are 110 hợp thư. The counting section of the manuscript also gives 110 hợp thư, each in eight tones.

Tham thư (參書): a hợp thư with a third component

A hợp thư may carry a third component, a single Chi above it. The base of a tham thư is always a hợp thư. The manuscript describes this structure but not how it is read; two examples are attested, both built on a hợp thư, and the function of the three components is not established. In principle this allows 110 × 110 = 12,100 tham thư.

Tone marks

A tone is written with a circle or semicircle in one of the four corners of the character. The corner gives the tone class (bình, thượng, khứ, nhập) and the shape gives the register: a semicircle for âm (陰), a circle for dương (陽). The manuscript states it as “yang uses a full circle, yin a half circle” (陽用全圈，陰用半圈).

A character carries at most one tone mark. The neutral tone ngang has its own mark, a semicircle in the lower left corner, so a character without any tone mark leaves the tone unspecified rather than neutral.

Reference table of the 22 bases

ASCII spellings follow the draft Unicode names: đ is written DD and d is written DZ.

Questions and answers

Source and notes

Quốc Âm Tân Tự is known from one text in two handwritten copies at the Institute of Hán-Nôm Studies in Hanoi, shelfmark AB.630. The text is undated; it can be placed in the reign of Emperor Thiệu Trị (1841–1847) because the character 華 lacks its final stroke, a naming taboo for the emperor’s mother. The author signs as Nam Thành cư sĩ Nguyễn Tử (南城居士阮子). The descriptions on this page are written from the manuscript by an independent researcher; the geometric wording is the author’s own description of the drawn forms and is not a quotation. The shapes in the first set of figures are schematic illustrations of that description; the position figures are redrawn from the project’s SVG font. Neither is a facsimile. The manuscript’s pages are not reproduced here.

Related pages: introduction, code table, rhymes.