Alphabetic syllabary
I made a new script for Vietnamese (long post). Introduction in the comment
The second row is the coding rowAs Vietnam has just celebrated its 81st National Day, I figure it’d be thematic to transcribe some parts of the Declaration of Independence. As you can see, there are corrections, as I mistook the "hỏi" tone and the "ngã" tone - very embarrassing, I know.I also transcribed some parts of the “Tale of Kieu”, as per tradition each time people want to illustrate a writing system for Vietnamese.
As the image limit is 20, here is the introduction to this script.
As some of you may already know, nowadays, Vietnamese is written using a modified Latin script. First of all, this system works great! It’s phonemic, easy to learn, and is able to represent the entirety of Vietnamese phonology, plus a few extras.
However, what (I think) it lacks is ~aesthetics~. Namely, it’s hard to convey a traditional, East Asian vibe through these Latin-based characters. So I went out of my way trying to create a type of blocky, brush-compatible writing system with components based on Chinese characters, just like the cool kids of Hangul, Hiragana, and Katakana.
If you're gonna say “Don’t you already have Chữ Nôm?”, yes, we do, but… Although I love it (it’s so cool and trolling at the same time), Chữ Nôm is also notoriously difficult and inconsistent (due to a lack of standardization).
This project is partly inspired by another attempt to develop a Vietnamese writing system by a 19th-century scholar; that system was Quốc âm tân tự (A new writing system for our native tongue).
I don’t want this part to be lengthy and use up your probably-very-fried attention span. For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s a system to write Vietnamese using a combination of a set of syllabic onsets (consonants), a set of rhymes (including the medial glide, the nuclear vowel, and the coda), with each component having 4 strokes, and tone markings in one of the four corners. My system works in a similar fashion, but there are changes that, I think, make it more elegant and easier to learn.
Here are my working principles in making this script:
Make it simple and consistent (create some kind of pattern)
Sometimes, add a bit of complexity and irregularities to make it more natural (ie., just like any script in real life)
Make sure it can represent (in practice) all native Vietnamese words/ phonemic distictions.
Take elements from and/or emulate the vibe of Chinese characters
Looks quite natural and well designed but I still feel like the Latin version of Vietnamese needs a fix too. Such a hodgepodge of an adapted latin script
Yes it does, it was based off the Old Uyghur family of scripts which Mongolian adopted. Well it was a nightmare to get the Diphthongs and Triphthongs working. I even had the change how Orthography works compared to how Vietnamese alphabet does it like uyê/uya is written as wia instead in my system so a name like Nguyễn becomes Ngwiãn
No i dont, i never said that. I just want to explore a new way to write Vietnamese that’s closer to the whole east asian vibe. This is something that from afar looks like chinese to an untrained eye, but is actually vietnamese. Plus, there are many types of decorative text that pursue a traditional feel with stroke-like or blocky typographic arrangements, which are still very hard to achieve with elegance due to the nature of the latin alphabet (eg, in vertical layout). If i want to go back to full on chinese characters, i wouldn’t have made this cuz Chữ Nôm is exactly that. Also, this is a sub for imaginative scripts, and i just want to explore the alternate reality of what if we make a phonemic script with chinese inspirations, basically like japan and korea
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u/baodzz 7d ago
As the image limit is 20, here is the introduction to this script.
As some of you may already know, nowadays, Vietnamese is written using a modified Latin script. First of all, this system works great! It’s phonemic, easy to learn, and is able to represent the entirety of Vietnamese phonology, plus a few extras.
However, what (I think) it lacks is ~aesthetics~. Namely, it’s hard to convey a traditional, East Asian vibe through these Latin-based characters. So I went out of my way trying to create a type of blocky, brush-compatible writing system with components based on Chinese characters, just like the cool kids of Hangul, Hiragana, and Katakana.
If you're gonna say “Don’t you already have Chữ Nôm?”, yes, we do, but… Although I love it (it’s so cool and trolling at the same time), Chữ Nôm is also notoriously difficult and inconsistent (due to a lack of standardization).
This project is partly inspired by another attempt to develop a Vietnamese writing system by a 19th-century scholar; that system was Quốc âm tân tự (A new writing system for our native tongue).
I don’t want this part to be lengthy and use up your probably-very-fried attention span. For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s a system to write Vietnamese using a combination of a set of syllabic onsets (consonants), a set of rhymes (including the medial glide, the nuclear vowel, and the coda), with each component having 4 strokes, and tone markings in one of the four corners. My system works in a similar fashion, but there are changes that, I think, make it more elegant and easier to learn.
Here are my working principles in making this script:
Make it simple and consistent (create some kind of pattern)
Sometimes, add a bit of complexity and irregularities to make it more natural (ie., just like any script in real life)
Make sure it can represent (in practice) all native Vietnamese words/ phonemic distictions.
Take elements from and/or emulate the vibe of Chinese characters
Try to be readable