Northern Thai Variants
Richard Wordingham <[email protected]> Thu, 10 Jan 2019 09:08:59 +0000
| Newsgroups | gmane.ietf.languages |
|---|---|
| Message-ID | <20190110090859.23aec72a@JRWUBU2> |
I have been looking at localisation for northern Thai (language code nod) and it seems to me that, simplifying, for any speech variety there are three basic varieties of writing system: 1) Writing in the Tai Tham script (subtag Lana) 2) Writing in the Thai script (subtag Thai) with consonants having the same phonetic values as the corresponding Tai Tham consonants. 3) Writing in the Thai script with stop consonants having the same phonetic values as in Standard Thai. My idea for approaching this is to use the labels: nod-Lana nod-Thai-etymo nod-Thai-phonetic However, there are several issues with this approach. The first is whether nod-etymo and and nod-phonetic would then be allowed as identifiers of Northern Thai Thai-script writing systems. nod-Lana-etymo would not make sense, and I'm not sure how to word the subtag record to exclude, or at least discourage, it. The second is the possibility that Scheme 2, but not Scheme 3, should be treated as a transform of Scheme 1, and therefore scheme 2 should be nod-Lana-t-Thai, which would remove the need for variants at this level. My most cogent objection is that the transformation depends on phonetic and etymological information - ambiguities in some orthographies for Scheme 1 are removed in Scheme 2, and word-final <SIGN OA BELOW, RA> is converted according to etymology, (generally) with <O ANG, RO RUEA> in words of Pali/Sanskrit origin and <O ANG, NO NU> in native words. Users of Northern Thai learn Standard Thai in school, and will generally be more fluent in writing Standard Thai than in writing Northen Thai. Can I please have advice. Richard.