Re: Northern Thai Variants

On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 4:09 AM Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham=
[email protected]> wrote:

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
>

The first is of course fine and needs no registration.

I am firmly opposed to the second and third: the names are far too generic,
and people would use them for all sorts of things in all sorts of random
ways.  We would begin to see "en-US-phonetic" for foe-NET-ik
ree-SPELL-ingz, something which would have absolutely nothing to do with
Northern Thai phonetic use of Thai script.  This is a principle we have
fairly consistently stuck with: variant tags are meant to make sense only
in specific contexts, with a very few exceptions like 'fonipa', since the
IPA is inherently generic.

If there are no names for these conventions in Northern Thai or Central
Thai, try to come up with some.  Perhaps the names of the people who
established or promoted these orthographies?  That's what we've done with
sl-bohoric and sl-dajnko as well as be-tarask.  Dates can also be helpful,
as in ru-luna1918, the Russian orthography published by the committee
headed by A. A. Lunacharsky in 1918.

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.
>

You can't: as Mark Davis points out, Preferred-Value for a variant subtag
is only a suggestion.   But as he also says, that doesn't matter much.
What's important is to keep Northern Thai in context somehow.

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.


I think that should only be applied to a document whose original was in
Lana script and has been actually transliterated (by hand or machine, it
doesn't matter) to another script.  It would be suitable for a
Hebrew-letter version of the Syriac Bible (something I have seen done), but
not for documents originally written in nod-Thai.


> Users of Northern Thai learn Standard Thai in school, and will
> generally be more fluent in writing Standard Thai than in writing
> Northen Thai.


A more broadly scoped question: given the difficulties in reading Northern
Thai, even in Thai script, at all, is it really necessary to mark this
distinction clearly?  Are there spelling checkers, for instance, or is the
barrier between the two variants high enough to make life difficult for
readers of one to handle the other?  Is there any significant
standardization (even de facto, like standard English) around either
variant?

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