Re: beautiful scripts

On Tue, Oct 09, 2001 at 11:41:19PM -0400, Karapcik, Mike wrote:
>    I got out my book, "Writing Systems of the World", by Akira Nakanishi
> (ISBN:0804816549, highly recomend!). Thai letters, according to her, all
> have the "o" vowel.
I have that book!  It's a good book. :)

Incidentally, Akira is a male name, the female version is Akiko.

(Male names that end in -a and female names that end in -o, such
havoc with a westernized sense of gender!)

>    The Khmer script, however, is a bit wiggier. I will try to paraphrase
> what she says.
>
>    There are two "series" of letters. The "-a" are first series, and the
> "-o" are second series. (I think the series affects tone, but I'm not sure.)
>    The vowel diacritics create different vowels for the same diacritic
> between 1st and 2nd tone letters. Thus, "da" is first tone, and "da" with
> the tilde-thingy on top becomes "dei". However, "do" is second tone, so "do"
> with the tilde-thingy on top becomes "di:".
>
>    I have no idea why this is done, as I have not studied any language from
> this area. I'm assuming it's either a tone thing, or because "it's always
> been done that way".
Yeah, my thought was that "it's always been done that way."

Like I was saying before, sound changes changed the usual series of
'ka kha ga gha' into 'ka kha ko kho' without any apparent distinction
between the k in 'ka' and 'ko,' meaning you could theoretically apply
the -o diacritic to 'ka' and make the 'ko' vowel completely unnecessary.

So maybe it's some kind of shorthand, but then that doesn't explain why
there are full sets of vowels for each row... leading me once again to
conclude that it's probably just a traditional spelling.

I've heard some evidence that tones are forming in Khmer, but most
linguists aren't sure, and for the time being, it's not a tonal language,
so I don't think the difference has anything to do with tone.

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