Zompist Bboard Again

bradrn wrote: ↑Thu Jan 04, 2024 7:06 am Surely Proto-SW Tai is sufficiently old that it predates the scripts?

No. The Khmer were chiselling away in Khmer by 611, while Pittayporn dates the start of the expansion of SW Tai to the 8th to 10th centuries AD.

Usually, I do find that I can comprehend French papers in linguistics. (Although weirdly, Spanish is easier.) But for some reason this one seems to be a bit more difficult to read — fewer technical terms, I suspect! Fewer technical linguistic terms, perhaps, but the paper seems unusually rich in wo...

Ferlus offers answers to most of Bradn's questions about Thai. …in French, a language I don’t speak. (I do have plans to learn it soon, but that only helps so much.) I must say the French looks very English; it's not like a newspaper. Also, there are a lot of pictures. Still, it may be a lot of wor...

Ferlus offers answers to most of Bradn's questions about Thai.

Khmer had 2 orthographic vowel notions, <a> (null glyph) and <ā>, to cover 2 degrees of aperture and 2 lengths. They prioritised aperture. I don’t quite understand this… consulting Wikipedia, it looks like all Khmer vowel sounds are written separately? If you look at the notes in the vowel table, y...

Hmm, so you consider ‘alphasyllabary’ and ‘abugida’ to mean different things? How so? (I tend to agree with masako that most people use them as synonyms.) Bright's definition of an alphasyllabary and Daniels' definition of an abugida are quite different. That's why Meroitic is not an alphasyllabary...

Another innovation from that area is the use of matres lectionis in an abugida, not an abjad. The subscript letters for Indic /a/, /v/ and /y/ are used for representing vowels (Khmer and Tai languages) … The Bengali writing system has also developed a mater lectionis. I don’t find this particularly...

Now these two points are interesting… they remind me strongly of how consonant-doubling gets used with the Latin script (especially in Germanic). What vowel quality difference does consonant-doubling achieve in Thai? The consonant doubling made the vowel of the closed syllable into /a/. Without the...

Of course, these definitions are not the only possible ones. I know that many people consider the essential component of abugida-hood to be the writing of C+V in a single ‘syllable block’ (as I’ve been calling it). By this standard, scripts like Lao would be abugidas, while Meroitic and 'Phags-pa w...

Well, what I was thinking is that a consonantal grapheme would represent either a single consonant or a single syllable. But I’m leaning towards the ‘null grapheme’ analysis, for the same kinds of reasons you mentioned. I hadn’t heard of Pali Thai specifically, but I know that Hindi Devanagari does...

In the Thai writing system, subscripting stopped a long time ago, and now we even have a Thai parallel to alif otiosum. Hmm, what’s alif otiosum? Searching the term online turns up nothing helpful. Also known as 'guarding alif' or 'separating alif', which are translations of the Arabic names. When ...

But I dislike thinking of blocks as part of the definition: rather, I define ‘alphabets’ and ‘abugidas’ by which unit of language their graphemes represent. Whether they have syllable blocks or not is then an entirely orthogonal property. I commend Bright's term 'alphasyllabary' to you. I’ve alread...

Wikipedia, desperately in need of a comma: The Jena Band [of Choctaw Indians] was isolated until the 1950s on Whatley and Bowie lands, having limited contact with area whites because of Choctaw determination to maintain their community and discrimination. Move it on a generation, and you'd think th...

But I dislike thinking of blocks as part of the definition: rather, I define ‘alphabets’ and ‘abugidas’ by which unit of language their graphemes represent. Whether they have syllable blocks or not is then an entirely orthogonal property. I commend Bright's term 'alphasyllabary' to you. The first a...

And of course, all syllabaries have syllable blocks by definition! The property ‘having syllable blocks’ is independent of the property ‘is an abugida’ (i.e. ‘has an inherent vowel’), though there is admittedly a strong correlation. I don't agree that all syllabaries have syllable blocks. A pure CV...

This is indisputably an alphabet, and a very good one at that: the correspondence between graphemes and phonemes is near-perfect. When you say "near-perfect", are you including how Hangul is read across syllables ? I would hardly call that "correspondence between graphemes and phonem...

Interesting question, though to answer it I think you'd need fairly deep knowledge of a language... dictionaries won't do. It wouldn't surprise me if "furry creatures" is a very old concept, but I don't know. "Beast" in (slightly older) English is often a rough equivalent. E.g. ...

I'm not sure why people came up with कि ki vs. की kī. All I can glean from WWS is that this doesn't go back to Brahmi. I wonder if one reason is that premodern people seem very reluctant to invent entirely new symbols, so a weird use of an existing one is preferred to creating a new one. Judging by...

Of course, the Hangul isn't being written as it was designed to be. It's overall direction used not to be left to right, but top to bottom. It's not certain that Lao ແ should be seen as two components, rather than one. Incidentally, except when used as the sole vowel component, ເ can be taken as a r...

I’ve just realised that we do in fact have another extant script similar to modern Lao: namely, Hangeul! Both are nonlinear yet write all consonants and vowels, though of course Hangeul takes the nonlinearity further than Lao does. Closer to home, we have the Latin script, e.g. in 17th century Engl...