Re: [unicode] Re: Lao Script Block - Missing Letters

From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>
Date: Wed, 15 Jun 2011 01:36:09 +0100

On Tue, 14 Jun 2011 22:51:48 +0900
mpsuzuki_at_hiroshima-u.ac.jp wrote:

> One of the possibility I don't want to see is that
> the text was a per-character replacement of Thai
> text by Lao characters, and Lao users have different
> transliteration convention.

I'd be surprised if such a blunder mattered. Apart from /a/ and
vowel suppression, the candidate vowel symbols to use in the
Lao script for Pali are pretty obvious and are already used for Lao.

Maha Sila's Lao dictionary of 1960, when the extra characters had
just been officially removed (from Pali, it seems, having already been
rejected for Lao), uses a character corresponding to U+0E3A THAI
CHARACTER PHINTHU (a 19th century Thai innovation, I suspect) as the
Pali virama when a preceding U+0EB1 LAO CHARACTER MAI KAN doesn't
indicate the lack of a vowel. From a brief look, it seems that that
dictionary used the nearest available Lao Lao character for the missing
consonants.

The best attested current Lao transcription convention for Pali that I
can find is to use the (Tai) Tham (= dharma) script.

Richard.
Received on Tue Jun 14 2011 - 19:41:00 CDT

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.2.0 : Tue Jun 14 2011 - 19:41:02 CDT