Tai Laing Sibilants

Richard Wordingham richard.wordingham at ntlworld.com
Mon Aug 30 11:17:43 CDT 2021


On Mon, 30 Aug 2021 12:15:15 +0200
Vinodh Rajan via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:

> My original post (about 2 years ago) is here:
> 
> https://corp.unicode.org/pipermail/unicode/2019-August/008206.html

That references L2/11-130R, which I can't find.  The document register
only knows L2/11-130 dated 19 April 2011.  I wonder if it was lost in
the great crash.  I have more to say at the end.

> On Sat, Aug 28, 2021 at 4:17 PM Richard Wordingham via Unicode <
> unicode at corp.unicode.org> wrote:  

> > 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.

Comparing L2-11/130 and the final(?) document, L2-12/012, there are
some interesting changes.

It was originally proposed that a new character be encoded for 'KHAMTI
SA with peg' (this is where a glyph registry would be handy!), 'MYANMAR
LETTER TAI LAING SHA'. By L2-12/012, it had been unified with MYANMAR
LETTER KHAMTI SA.  There is a very relevant paragraph on p5 of
L2-12/012; I don't know if it is in L2-11/130R:

"The proposed characters have been circled in figure 4, with all the
other characters already supported in the UCS.  Notice that the
labelling of the sa and sʰa characters is wrong when compared with the
Pali based shiksha.  In addition the shape of the sʰa belies its
underlying encoding of U+AA6C MYANMAR LETTER KHAMTI SA, as can be seen
in figure 5".

I think the analysis was thrown off by the general Shan pattern that
Proto-SW Tai *c yields Shan /s/ and Proto-SW Tai *s yields Shan /sʰ/,
so I see no contradiction between the chart of native consonants and
the palatal row (c, ch, ...) of the Pali chart.  (Recall how 's' takes
the position of 'ch' in the Lao alphabet, and the merger of the two
sounds in Northern Thai and Tai Khuen.)

The material in Tai Laing in L2-12/012 clearly uses the glyph with the
peg for the native /sʰ/, so I think UTN-11 should have used U+AA6C in
the slot for 's' in the character lists.  As to what happens with Pali
in Tai Laing, I think we're going to have to find some documents
ourselves.  I tried googling for various plausible Tai Laing spellings
of 'gacchāmi' (all with U+A9E9 MYANMAR LETTER TAI LAING GA), but had no
luck - not even Facebook.

The shiksha on p7 might even be right.  Very few Pali words start with
'jh', word internally it follows 'ñ' or 'j', and 'ñs' and 'js' are not
possible Pali clusters, so the system could work.  It's just very odd
to have a diacritic as part of a very common letter like 's'.  And
Latin 'i' usually has its tittle.

Richard.



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