Tai Laing Sibilants

[Richard Wordingham]

I thought I had seen a query from Ben Mitchell or Vinodh Rajan about
this, but I can't find it, let alone a resolution, explanation or way
forward.  (I would have access to a discussion on Unicore.)

The anomaly appears when looking at the letters for Pali, as implicitly
described in UTN 11 and as shown in L2/12-012 Figure 5:

c  ၸ U+1078 MYANMAR LETTER SHAN CA

ch ꩬ U+AA6C MYANMAR LETTER KHAMTI SA

j  ꧫ U+A9EB MYANMAR LETTER TAI LAING JA

jh ꧬ U+A9EC MYANMAR LETTER TAI LAING JHA

ñ  ꧧ U+A9E7 MYANMAR LETTER TAI LAING NYA

s  ꧬ U+A9EC MYANMAR LETTER TAI LAING JHA

The double application of U+A9EC as both <jh> and <s> is anomalous.

The voiced palatals for Pali are regularly formed by application of the
overstriking voicing dot diacritic.

Now, L2/12-012 Figure 4 also gives letters for the consonant phonemes
of Tai Laing.  The first two rows are:

k က U+1000 MYANMAR LETTER KA

kʰ ၵ U+1075 MYANMAR LETTER SHAN KA

ŋ င U+1004 MYANMAR LETTER NGA

s ၸ U+1078 MYANMAR LETTER SHAN CA

sʰ (see below)

ɲ ꧧ U+A9E7 MYANMAR LETTER TAI LAING NYA


Comparing the letters with the reference forms, we see a large U-shaped
bowl at the start of some letters, which has to be shrunk to obtain the
references forms of SHAN KA and TAI LAING NYA. If we apply the same
analogy to /sʰ/ and trim that off, we find the letter သ SA.

I can think of a just-so story to explain what is going on:

1. Locally, the distinction of Pali <ch> and <s> has been lost, as
seemingly in much of Northern Thailand, and in the corresponding
vernacular, a merger that extends to Lao.

2. We therefore end up with Tai Laing viewed in isolation having three
significant glyphs for writing /sʰ/ - (a) KHAMTI SA, (b) KHAMTI SA with
a peg at the bottom of the middle, which may be interpreted as SA with
a flourish at the start and is what is shown in Figure 4, and (c) the
same again, but with the peg implemented as a dot in the right-hand
bowl.

3. One way of writing Pali is to use Tai Laing writing phonetically, but
with the extra consonants denoted by a dot - possible borrowed from the
European notation for Indic letters outside typical European
repertoires.  CHA and SA are distinguished by specialising the glyphs,
in much the same way as IPA 'a' and 'ɑ' are distinguished.  When the
chart in Figure 5 was drawn up, the wrong Tai Laing glyph was
accidentally inserted for Pali <s>.

Can anyone with access to Tai Laing materials verify or disverify this
story?

I think the question we have left is what should be the
encoding of the character(s) for Tai Laing /sʰ/ and Pali <s> in Tai
Laing orthography?  The answer might simply be to use U+101E MYANMAR
LETTER SA.  But perhaps we need a new character rather than dismiss the
bowl as mere font variation.

Richard.