At 16:35 -0700 2001-10-11, Kenneth Whistler wrote:
>The kind of thing I am thinking about for 3 could be exemplified
>by the modern Tai Le orthography. It is an evolutionary descendant
>of earlier SE Asian Brahmi-based scripts maybe 800 years ago. But
>the 1954 orthographic reform introduced the systematic
>representation of tones with combining diacritics. And the particular
>combining diacritics are basically a structural loan from Latin
>(as opposed to Thai, which *could* have been taken as the model,
>but wasn't). The 1988 orthographic reform added tone letters, whose
>shapes seem based on Greek or Latin letters, and whose concept is
>derived, again, from Latin transcriptions using tone letters.
Latin, I believe. I've evidence for this somewhere. Maybe Coulmas.
-- Michael Everson *** Everson Typography *** http://www.evertype.com 15 Port Chaeimhghein Íochtarach; Baile Átha Cliath 2; Éire/Ireland Telephone +353 86 807 9169 *** Fax +353 1 478 2597 (by arrangement)
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Oct 11 2001 - 18:32:52 EDT