1.
Abugida
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This contrasts with a full alphabet, in which vowels have status equal to consonants, and with an abjad, in which vowel marking is absent, partial, or optional. The terms also contrast them with a syllabary, in which the symbols cannot be split into separate consonants, abugidas include the extensive Brahmic family of scripts of South and Southeast Asia, Semitic Ethiopic scripts, and Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. As is the case for syllabaries, the units of the system may consist of the representations both of syllables and of consonants. For scripts of the Brahmic family, the term akshara is used for the units, abugida as a term in linguistics was proposed by Peter T. Daniels in his 1990 typology of writing systems. Abugidas were long considered to be syllabaries, or intermediate between syllabaries and alphabets, and the term syllabics is retained in the name of Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, other terms that have been used include neosyllabary, pseudo-alphabet, semisyllabary and syllabic alphabet. The formal definitions given by Daniels and Bright for abugida and alphasyllabary differ, some writing systems are abugidas but not alphasyllabaries, an abugida is defined as a type of writing system whose basic characters denotes consonants followed by a particular vowel, and in which diacritics denote other vowels. Bright did not require that an alphabet explicitly represent all vowels, Phagspa is an example of an abugida that is not an alphasyllabary, and modern Lao is an example of an alphasyllabary that is not an abugida, for its vowels are always explicit. This description is expressed in terms of an abugida and this may formally make the system ambiguous, but in practice this is not a problem, for then the interpretation with the never used inherent vowel sound will always be a wrong interpretation. The fundamental principles of an abugida apply to words made up of consonant-vowel syllables, the syllables are written as a linear sequences of the units of the script. If all modifications are by diacritics and all follow the direction of the writing of the letters. However, most languages have words that are more complicated than a sequence of CV syllables, the first complication is syllables that consist of just a vowel. Now, in languages, this issue does not arise. This is common in Semitic languages and in languages of mainland SE Asia, for some languages, a zero consonant letter is used as though every syllable began with a consonant. For other languages, each vowel has a letter that is used for each syllable consisting of just the vowel. These letters are known as independent vowels, and are found in most Indic scripts and these letters may be quite different to the corresponding diacritics, which by contrast are known as dependent vowels. As a result of the spread of writing systems, independent vowels may be used to represent syllables beginning with a glottal stop, the next two complications are sequences of consonants before a vowel and syllables ending in a consonant. The simplest solution, which is not always available, is to break with the principle of writing words as a sequence of syllables and use a unit representing just a consonant. In a true abugida, the lack of marking may result from the diachronic loss of the inherent vowel
2.
Northern Thai language
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Northern Thai, Lanna, or Kam Mueang is the language of the Northern Thai people of Lanna, Thailand. It is a Tai language closely related to Lao, Northern Thai has approximately six million speakers, most of whom live in Thailand, with a few thousand in northwestern Laos. Speakers of this language generally consider the name Tai Yuan to be pejorative and they generally call themselves khon mueang, Lanna, or Northern Thai. The language is known by one of these terms or as Phayap. The term Yuan is still used for Northern Thais distinctive Tai Tham alphabet, which is closely related to the old Tai Lue alphabet. The use of the tua mueang, as the alphabet is known, is now largely limited to Buddhist temples. There is no production of literature in the traditional alphabet. The modern spoken form is called Kam Muang, There is a resurgence of interest in writing it in the traditional way, but the modern pronunciation differs from that prescribed in spelling rules. The Northern Thai language has various names in Northern Thai, Thai, in Northern Thai, it is commonly called kam mueang, or phasa lanna. In Lao, it is known as phasa nyuan or phasa nyon, in Tai Lü, it is known as kam yon. In Shan it is known as kwam yon, currently, different scripts are used to write Northern Thai. Northern Thai is traditionally written with the Tai Tham script, which in Northern Thai is called tua mueang or tua tham, however, native speakers are presently illiterate in the traditional script, therefore, they instead use the Thai script to write the language. In Laos, the Lao script is used to write Northern Thai. Some problems arise when the Thai script is used to write Northern Thai, in particular, Standard Thai script cannot transcribe all Northern Thai tones. The two falling tones in Northern Thai correspond to a falling tone in Thai. Specifically, Northern Thai has two types of falling tones, high-falling tone and falling tone, however, Thai lacks the distinction between the two falling tones, not having a high-falling tone. When using Thai script to write Northern Thai tones, the distinction of the two falling tones is lost because Thai script can only indicate a low falling tone. As an example, the distinction between /ka᷇ː/ and /kâː/ is lost when written in Thai since as only /kâː/ is permitted
3.
Isan language
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Isan is a group of Lao varieties spoken in the northern two-thirds of Isan in northeastern Thailand, as well as in adjacent portions of Northern and Eastern Thailand. It is the language of the Isan people, spoken by 20 million or so people in Thailand. The language remains the language in 88% of households in Isan. The Isan language has unofficial status in Thailand and can be differentiated as a whole from the Lao language of Laos by the use of Thai grammar, vocabulary. Code-switching is common, depending on the context or situation, adoption of Thai neologisms has also further differentiated Isan from standard Lao. The Tai languages originated in what is known as central and southern China in an area stretching from Yunnan to Guangdong as well as Hainan. Tai speakers arrived in South-East Asia around 1000 CE, displacing or absorbing earlier peoples and setting up mueang on the peripheries of the Indianised kingdoms of the Mon, the Tai kingdoms of the Mekong Valley became tributaries of the Lan Xang mandala from 1354-1707. Lan Xang split into the Kingdom of Vientiane, the Kingdom of Luang Phrabang and the Kingdom of Champasak and this weakened the Lao kingdoms as the population was shifted to the kingdoms in Isan and small pockets of western and north-central Thailand, under greater Thai control. In 1904, Sainyabuli and Champasak were ceded to France, leading to the current borders between Thailand and Laos today, a 25 km demilitarised zone west of the river banks allowed for easy crossing, and Isan remained largely neglected for sometime. Rebellions against Siamese and French incursions into the region included the Holy Mans Rebellion, the Lao people also joined in the rebellion, but was crushed by Thai troops in Isan. Heavy-handed nationalist policies were adopted in 1933 with the end of the monarchy in Thailand. Many were instituted during the premiership of Field Marshal Plaek Phibunsongkhram, although Lao languages were banned from education in 1871, a new public education and new schools were built throughout Isan, and only Thai was to be used by government and media. References to Lao people were erased and propagation of Thai nationalism was instilled in the populace, the language was renamed Northeastern Thai. Although this blatant discrimination is rarer these days, most of these nationalistic Thaification policies remain in effect, during the course of World War II and afterwards, the Free Thai Movement bases in Isan made links with the Lao Issara movement. After the implementation of Thaification policies, many prominent Isan politicians were assassinated, the Communist Party of Thailand led insurrections during the 1960s and 1980s, supported by the communist Pathet Lao and some factions of the Isan populace. Integration continued, as highways and other infrastructure were built to link Isan with the rest of Thailand, due to population pressures and unreliable monsoons of the region, Isan people began migrating to Bangkok for employment. Isan speakers began to shift to the Thai language, and the language itself is absorbing larger amounts of Thai vocabulary, universities such as Mahasarakham and Khon Kaen are now offering classes on Isan language, culture, and literature. Attitudes towards regional cultures have relaxed and the continues to be spoken
4.
Lao language
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Lao, also referred to as Laotian, Thai Noi, is a tonal language of the Tai–Kadai language family. It is the language of Laos, and also spoken in the northeast of Thailand. The Lao language serves as an important lingua franca as the country of Laos consists of ethnic groups. Spoken Lao is mutually intelligible with the Thai language, Lao, like many languages in Laos, is written in the Lao script, an abugida. Although there is no standard, the Vientiane dialect has become the de facto standard. Oral history of the migrations is preserved in the legends of Khun Borom, Tai speakers in what is now Laos pushed out or absorbed earlier groups of Mon–Khmer and Austronesian languages. These Tai peoples are classified by the Lao government as Lao Loum or lowland Lao, Lao and Thai are also very similar and share most of their basic vocabulary, but differences in many basic words limit inter-comprehension. The Lao language consists primarily of native Lao words, because of Buddhism, however, Pali has contributed numerous terms, especially relating to religion and in conversation with members of the Sangha. Due to their proximity, Lao has influenced the Khmer and Thai languages. Formal writing has an amount of foreign loanwords, especially Pali and Sanskrit terms, much as Latin. For politeness, pronouns are used, plus ending statements with ແດ່ or ເດີ້, negative statements are made more polite by ending with ດອກ. The following are formal register examples, many consonants in Lao make a phonemic contrast between labialized and plain versions. The complete inventory of Lao consonants is as shown in the table below, hence, final /p/, /t/, and /k/ sounds are pronounced as, and respectively. * The glottal stop appears at the end when no final follows a short vowel, All vowels make a phonemic length distinction. The vowels are as shown in the table, Diphthongs are all centering diphthongs with falling sonority. There are six tones in unchecked syllables, that is. The number of tones is reduced to four in checked syllables. The only consonant clusters allowed are syllable initial clusters /kw/ or /kʰw/, any consonant may appear in the onset, but the labialized consonants do not occur before rounded vowels
5.
Proto-Sinaitic script
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It is also referred to as Sinaitic, Proto-Canaanite, Old Canaanite, and Canaanite. The earliest Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions are dated to between the mid-19th and the mid-16th century BC. The principal debate is between an early date, around 1850 BC, and a date, around 1550 BC. The choice of one or the other date decides whether it is proto-Sinaitic or proto-Canaanite, the so-called Proto-Sinaitic inscriptions were discovered in the winter of 1904–1905 in Sinai by Hilda and Flinders Petrie. The Wadi el-Hol inscriptions strongly suggest a date of development of Proto-Sinaitic writing from the mid-19th to 18th centuries BC, the Sinai inscriptions are best known from carved graffiti and votive texts from a mountain in the Sinai called Serabit el-Khadim and its temple to the Egyptian goddess Hathor. The mountain contained turquoise mines which were visited by repeated expeditions over 800 years, many of the workers and officials were from the Nile Delta, and included large numbers of Canaanites who had been allowed to settle the eastern Delta. The date of the inscriptions is placed in the 17th or 16th century BC. Four inscriptions have been found in the temple, on two small statues and on either side of a small stone sphinx. They are crudely done, suggesting that the workers who made them were illiterate apart from this script and they are all very short, most consisting of only a couple of letters, and may have been written by Canaanite caravaners or soldiers from Egypt. They sometimes go by the name Proto-Canaanite, although the term Proto-Canaanite is also applied to early Phoenician or Hebrew inscriptions, the Wadi el-Hol inscriptions were carved on the stone sides of an ancient high-desert military and trade road linking Thebes and Abydos, in the heart of literate Egypt. They are in a wadi in the Qena bend of the Nile, 25°57′N 32°25′E, among dozens of hieratic and hieroglyphic inscriptions. If the latter, h1 and h2 may be graphic variants rather than different consonants, some scholars think that the רב rb at the beginning of Inscription 1 is likely rebbe, and that the אל ʾl at the end of Inscription 2 is likely ʾel god. Brian Colless has published a translation of the text, in some of the signs are treated as logograms or rebuses Excellent banquet of the celebration of ʿAnat. ʾEl will provide plenty of wine and victuals for the celebration and we will sacrifice to her an ox and a prime fatling. This interpretation fits into the pattern in some of the surrounding Egyptian inscriptions, according to the alphabet hypothesis, the shapes of the letters would have evolved from Proto-Sinaitic forms into Phoenician forms, but most of the names of the letters would have remained the same. Below is a table showing selected Proto-Sinaitic signs and the correspondences with Phoenician letters. Also shown are the values, names, and descendants of the Phoenician letters. The Other section shows the corresponding Archaic Greek, Modern Greek, Etruscan, abjad Byblos syllabary Ugaritic script Albright, Wm. F
6.
Phoenician alphabet
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The Phoenician alphabet, called by convention the Proto-Canaanite alphabet for inscriptions older than around 1050 BC, is the oldest verified alphabet. The Phoenician alphabet is an abjad consisting of 22 letters, all consonants and it was used for the writing of Phoenician, a Northern Semitic language, used by the civilization of Phoenicia. The Phoenician alphabet is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and it became one of the most widely used writing systems, spread by Phoenician merchants across the Mediterranean world, where it evolved and was assimilated by many other cultures. The Paleo-Hebrew alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Another derivative script is the Aramaic alphabet, which was the ancestor of the modern Arabic script, the Modern Hebrew script is a stylistic variant of the Aramaic script. The Greek alphabet was derived from Phoenician. Phoenician was usually written from right to left, although there are texts written in boustrophedon. The earliest known inscriptions are the so-called Proto-Sinaitic script sporadically attested in the Sinai and in Canaan in the late Middle. The script was not widely used until the rise of new Semitic kingdoms in the 13th and 12th centuries BC, the Phoenician alphabet is a direct continuation of the Proto-Canaanite script of the Bronze Age collapse period. Beginning in the 9th century BC, adaptations of the Phoenician alphabet -- such as Greek, Old Italic, Anatolian, and the Paleohispanic scripts -- were very successful. This simple system contrasted with the scripts in use at the time, such as cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Another reason for its success was the trading culture of Phoenician merchants. Phoenician inscriptions have been found in sites at a number of former Phoenician cities and colonies around the Mediterranean, such as Byblos. Later finds indicate earlier use in Egypt, Phoenician had long-term effects on the social structures of the civilizations that came in contact with it. As mentioned above, the script was the first widespread phonetic script and its simplicity not only allowed it to be used in multiple languages, but it also allowed the common people to learn how to write. The Phoenician alphabet was first uncovered in the 17th century, and it was at first believed that the script was a direct variation of Egyptian hieroglyphs. This idea was popular due to the recent decipherment of hieroglyphs. However, scholars could not find any link between the two writing systems, nor to hieratic or cuneiform, the theories of independent creation ranged from the idea of a single man conceiving it, to the Hyksos people forming it from corrupt Egyptian
7.
Aramaic alphabet
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The ancient Aramaic alphabet is adapted from the Phoenician alphabet and became distinctive from it by the 8th century BCE. It was used to write the Aramaic language and had displaced the Paleo-Hebrew alphabet for the writing of Hebrew, the letters all represent consonants, some of which are also used as matres lectionis to indicate long vowels. Rather, it is a different type, the earliest inscriptions in the Aramaic language use the Phoenician alphabet. Over time, the alphabet developed into the form shown below, Aramaic gradually became the lingua franca throughout the Middle East, with the script at first complementing and then displacing Assyrian cuneiform, as the predominant writing system. Imperial Aramaic was highly standardised, its orthography was based more on historical roots than any spoken dialect and was influenced by Old Persian. Both were in use through the Achaemenid Persian period, but the cursive form steadily gained ground over the lapidary, the Aramaic script would survive as the essential characteristics of the Iranian Pahlavi writing system. A group of 30 Aramaic documents from Bactria has been recently discovered, an analysis was published in November 2006. The texts, which were rendered on leather, reflect the use of Aramaic in the 4th century BC in the Persian Achaemenid administration of Bactria, the widespread usage of Achaemenid Aramaic in the Middle East led to the gradual adoption of the Aramaic alphabet for writing Hebrew. Formerly, Hebrew had been using an alphabet closer in form to that of Phoenician. After the fall of the Achaemenid Empire, the unity of the Imperial Aramaic script was lost, the Hebrew and Nabataean alphabets, as they stood by the Roman era, were little changed in style from the Imperial Aramaic alphabet. A cursive Hebrew variant developed from the early centuries AD, the Old Turkic script is generally considered to have its ultimate origins in Aramaic, in particular via the Pahlavi or Sogdian alphabets, as suggested by V. Thomsen, or possibly via Karosthi. Aramaic is also considered to be the most likely source of the Brahmi script, ancestor of the Brahmic family of scripts, today, Biblical Aramaic, Jewish Neo-Aramaic dialects and the Aramaic language of the Talmud are written in the Hebrew alphabet. Syriac and Christian Neo-Aramaic dialects are written in the Syriac alphabet, Mandaic is written in the Mandaic alphabet. The near-identity of the Aramaic and the classical Hebrew alphabets caused Aramaic text to be mostly in the standard Hebrew script in scholarly literature. In Maloula, one of few surviving communities in which a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken and they started to use the Syriac alphabet instead. In Aramaic writing, Waw and Yodh serve a double function, originally, they represented only the consonants w and y, but they were later adopted to indicate the long vowels ū and ī respectively as well. In the latter role, they are known as matres lectionis or mothers of reading. Ālap, likewise, has some of the characteristics of a mater lectionis because in initial positions, it indicates a glottal stop, among Jews, the influence of Hebrew often led to the use of Hē instead, at the end of a word
8.
Brahmi script
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Brahmi is the modern name given to one of the oldest writing systems used in South and Central Asia from the 1st millennium BCE. Brahmi is an abugida that thrived in the Indian subcontinent and uses a system of marks to associate vowels with consonant symbols. It evolved into a host of other scripts that continue in use, Brahmi is related to the ancient Kharosthi script, which was used in what is now eastern Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kharosthi died out in ancient times, the best-known Brahmi inscriptions are the rock-cut edicts of Ashoka in north-central India, dating to 250–232 BCE. The script was deciphered in 1837 by James Prinsep, an archaeologist, philologist, Brahmi was at one time referred to in English as the pin-man script, that is stick figure script. Thence the name was adopted in the work of Georg Bühler. The Gupta script of the 5th century is sometimes called Late Brahmi, the Brahmi script diversified into numerous local variants, classified together as the Brahmic scripts. Dozens of modern scripts used across South Asia have descended from Brahmi, one survey found 198 scripts that ultimately derive from it. The script was associated with its own Brahmi numerals, which provided the graphic forms for the Hindu–Arabic numeral system now used through most of the world. The Brahmi script is mentioned in the ancient Indian texts of Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism, for example, the Lipisala samdarshana parivarta lists 64 lipi, with the Brahmi script starting the list. The Lalitavistara Sūtra states that young Siddhartha, the future Buddha, mastered philology, Brahmi and other scripts from Brahmin Lipikara, a shorter list of eighteen ancient scripts is found in the texts of Jainism, such as the Pannavana Sutra and the Samavayanga Sutra. These Jaina script lists include Brahmi at number 1 and Kharoshthi at number 4 but also Javanaliya, while the contemporary Kharosthi script is widely accepted to be a derivation of the Aramaic alphabet, the genesis of the Brahmi script is less straightforward. Salomon reviewed existing theories in 1998, while Falk provided an overview in 1993, an origin in Semitic scripts has been proposed by some scholars since the publications by Albrecht Weber and Georg Bühlers On the origin of the Indian Brahma alphabet. The most disputed point about the origin of the Brahmi script has long been whether it was an indigenous development or was borrowed or derived from scripts that originated outside India. Most scholars believe that Brahmi was likely derived from or influenced by a Semitic script model, however, the issue is not settled due to the lack of direct evidence and unexplained differences between Aramaic, Kharosthi and Brahmi. Virtually all authors accept that regardless of the origins, the degree of Indian development of the Brahmi script in both the form and the structure has been extensive. It is also accepted that theories of Vedic grammar probably had a strong influence on this development. In contrast, some reject the idea of foreign influence
9.
Pallava alphabet
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The Pallava script, a Brahmic script, was developed under the Pallava dynasty of Southern India around the 6th century AD. The form shown here is based on examples from the 7th century AD, letters labeled * have uncertain sound value, as they have little occurrence in Southeast Asia. Each consonant has an inherent /a/, which will be sounded if no vowel sign is attached, if two consonants follow one another without intervening vowel, the second consonant is made into a subscript form, and attached below the first. Sivaramamurti, C, Indian Epigraphy and South Indian Scripts, bulletin of the Madras Government Museum. Chennai 1999 Media related to Pallava script at Wikimedia Commons Examples of Pallava at SkyKnowledge. com
10.
New Tai Lue alphabet
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New Tai Lue script, also known as Simplified Tai Lue, is an alphabet used to write the Tai Lü language. Developed in China in the 1950s, New Tai Lue is based on the traditional Tai Le alphabet developed ca.1200 AD. The government of China promoted the alphabet for use as a replacement for the script, teaching the script was not mandatory, however. In addition, communities in Burma, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam still use the Tai Le alphabet, New Tai Lue script was added to the Unicode Standard in March,2005 with the release of version 4.1. In June 2015 New Tai Lue was changed from logical ordering used by most Indic scripts to a visual ordering model as used by the Thai and this change affected the four vowel letters which appear to the left of the initial consonant
11.
Universal Character Set characters
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The Unicode Consortium and the International Organisation for Standardisation collaborate on the Universal Character Set. The UCS is a standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate, because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. UCS has a capacity to encode over 1 million characters. Each UCS character is represented by a code point, which is an integer between 0 and 1,114,111, used to represent each character within the internal logic of text processing software. The number of encoded characters is made up as follows,128,019 graphical characters 218 special purpose characters for control, ISO maintains the basic mapping of characters from character name to code point. Often the terms character and code point will get used interchangeably, however, when a distinction is made, a code point refers to the integer of the character, what one might think of as its address. Input methods can be through keyboard or a character palette. The UCS can be divided in various ways, such as by plane, block, character category, the x must be lowercase in XML documents. The nnnn or hhhh may be any number of digits and may include leading zeros, the hhhh may mix uppercase and lowercase, though uppercase is the usual style. In contrast, an entity reference refers to a character by the name of an entity which has the desired character as its replacement text. The entity must either be predefined or explicitly declared in a Document Type Definition, the format is the same as for any entity reference, &name, where name is the case-sensitive name of the entity. Unicode and ISO divide the set of points into 17 planes. As of 2016 ISO and the Unicode Consortium has only allocated characters, the others remain empty and reserved for future use. Most characters are assigned to the first plane, the Basic Multilingual Plane. This is to ease the transition for legacy software since the Basic Multilingual Plane is addressable with just two octets. The characters outside the first plane usually have very specialized or rare use. Each plane corresponds with the value of the one or two hexadecimal digits preceding the four ones, hence U+24321 is in Plane 2, U+4321 is in Plane 0
12.
International Phonetic Alphabet
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The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association as a representation of the sounds of spoken language. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators. The IPA is designed to represent only those qualities of speech that are part of language, phones, phonemes, intonation. IPA symbols are composed of one or more elements of two types, letters and diacritics. For example, the sound of the English letter ⟨t⟩ may be transcribed in IPA with a letter, or with a letter plus diacritics. Often, slashes are used to signal broad or phonemic transcription, thus, /t/ is less specific than, occasionally letters or diacritics are added, removed, or modified by the International Phonetic Association. As of the most recent change in 2005, there are 107 letters,52 diacritics and these are shown in the current IPA chart, posted below in this article and at the website of the IPA. In 1886, a group of French and British language teachers, led by the French linguist Paul Passy, for example, the sound was originally represented with the letter ⟨c⟩ in English, but with the digraph ⟨ch⟩ in French. However, in 1888, the alphabet was revised so as to be uniform across languages, the idea of making the IPA was first suggested by Otto Jespersen in a letter to Paul Passy. It was developed by Alexander John Ellis, Henry Sweet, Daniel Jones, since its creation, the IPA has undergone a number of revisions. After major revisions and expansions in 1900 and 1932, the IPA remained unchanged until the International Phonetic Association Kiel Convention in 1989, a minor revision took place in 1993 with the addition of four letters for mid central vowels and the removal of letters for voiceless implosives. The alphabet was last revised in May 2005 with the addition of a letter for a labiodental flap, apart from the addition and removal of symbols, changes to the IPA have consisted largely in renaming symbols and categories and in modifying typefaces. Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for speech pathology were created in 1990, the general principle of the IPA is to provide one letter for each distinctive sound, although this practice is not followed if the sound itself is complex. There are no letters that have context-dependent sound values, as do hard, finally, the IPA does not usually have separate letters for two sounds if no known language makes a distinction between them, a property known as selectiveness. These are organized into a chart, the chart displayed here is the chart as posted at the website of the IPA. The letters chosen for the IPA are meant to harmonize with the Latin alphabet, for this reason, most letters are either Latin or Greek, or modifications thereof. Some letters are neither, for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ⟨ʔ⟩, has the form of a question mark
13.
Specials (Unicode block)
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Specials is a short Unicode block allocated at the very end of the Basic Multilingual Plane, at U+FFF0–FFFF. Of these 16 codepoints, five are assigned as of Unicode 9, U+FFFD � REPLACEMENT CHARACTER used to replace an unknown, unrecognized or unrepresentable character U+FFFE <noncharacter-FFFE> not a character. FFFE and FFFF are not unassigned in the sense. They can be used to guess a texts encoding scheme, since any text containing these is by not a correctly encoded Unicode text. The replacement character � is a found in the Unicode standard at codepoint U+FFFD in the Specials table. It is used to indicate problems when a system is unable to render a stream of data to a correct symbol and it is usually seen when the data is invalid and does not match any character, Consider a text file containing the German word für in the ISO-8859-1 encoding. This file is now opened with an editor that assumes the input is UTF-8. The first and last byte are valid UTF-8 encodings of ASCII, therefore, a text editor could replace this byte with the replacement character symbol to produce a valid string of Unicode code points. The whole string now displays like this, f�r, a poorly implemented text editor might save the replacement in UTF-8 form, the text file data will then look like this, 0x66 0xEF 0xBF 0xBD 0x72, which will be displayed in ISO-8859-1 as f�r. Since the replacement is the same for all errors this makes it impossible to recover the original character, a better design is to preserve the original bytes, including the error, and only convert to the replacement when displaying the text. This will allow the text editor to save the original byte sequence and it has become increasingly common for software to interpret invalid UTF-8 by guessing the bytes are in another byte-based encoding such as ISO-8859-1. This allows correct display of both valid and invalid UTF-8 pasted together, Unicode control characters UTF-8 Mojibake Unicodes Specials table Decodeunicodes entry for the replacement character
14.
Unicode
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Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the worlds writing systems. As of June 2016, the most recent version is Unicode 9.0, the standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium. Unicodes success at unifying character sets has led to its widespread, the standard has been implemented in many recent technologies, including modern operating systems, XML, Java, and the. NET Framework. Unicode can be implemented by different character encodings, the most commonly used encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and the now-obsolete UCS-2. UTF-8 uses one byte for any ASCII character, all of which have the same values in both UTF-8 and ASCII encoding, and up to four bytes for other characters. UCS-2 uses a 16-bit code unit for each character but cannot encode every character in the current Unicode standard, UTF-16 extends UCS-2, using one 16-bit unit for the characters that were representable in UCS-2 and two 16-bit units to handle each of the additional characters. Many traditional character encodings share a common problem in that they allow bilingual computer processing, Unicode, in intent, encodes the underlying characters—graphemes and grapheme-like units—rather than the variant glyphs for such characters. In the case of Chinese characters, this leads to controversies over distinguishing the underlying character from its variant glyphs. In text processing, Unicode takes the role of providing a unique code point—a number, in other words, Unicode represents a character in an abstract way and leaves the visual rendering to other software, such as a web browser or word processor. This simple aim becomes complicated, however, because of concessions made by Unicodes designers in the hope of encouraging a more rapid adoption of Unicode, the first 256 code points were made identical to the content of ISO-8859-1 so as to make it trivial to convert existing western text. For other examples, see duplicate characters in Unicode and he explained that he name Unicode is intended to suggest a unique, unified, universal encoding. In this document, entitled Unicode 88, Becker outlined a 16-bit character model, Unicode could be roughly described as wide-body ASCII that has been stretched to 16 bits to encompass the characters of all the worlds living languages. In a properly engineered design,16 bits per character are more than sufficient for this purpose, Unicode aims in the first instance at the characters published in modern text, whose number is undoubtedly far below 214 =16,384. By the end of 1990, most of the work on mapping existing character encoding standards had been completed, the Unicode Consortium was incorporated in California on January 3,1991, and in October 1991, the first volume of the Unicode standard was published. The second volume, covering Han ideographs, was published in June 1992, in 1996, a surrogate character mechanism was implemented in Unicode 2.0, so that Unicode was no longer restricted to 16 bits. The Microsoft TrueType specification version 1.0 from 1992 used the name Apple Unicode instead of Unicode for the Platform ID in the naming table, Unicode defines a codespace of 1,114,112 code points in the range 0hex to 10FFFFhex. Normally a Unicode code point is referred to by writing U+ followed by its hexadecimal number, for code points in the Basic Multilingual Plane, four digits are used, for code points outside the BMP, five or six digits are used, as required. Code points in Planes 1 through 16 are accessed as surrogate pairs in UTF-16, within each plane, characters are allocated within named blocks of related characters
15.
Thai language
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Thai, also known as Siamese or Central Thai, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people and the vast majority of Thai Chinese. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family, over half of the words in Thai are borrowed from Pali, Sanskrit and Old Khmer. It is a tonal and analytic language, Thai also has a complex orthography and relational markers. Spoken Thai is mutually intelligible with Laotian, Thai is the official language of Thailand, natively spoken by over 20 million people. Standard Thai is based on the register of the classes of Bangkok. In addition to Central Thai, Thailand is home to other related Tai languages, Isan, the language of the Isan region of Thailand, a collective term for the various Lao dialects spoken in Thailand that show some Siamese Thai influences, which is written with the Thai script. It is spoken by about 20 million people, Thais from both inside and outside the Isan region often simply call this variant Lao when speaking informally. Northern Thai, spoken by about 6 million in the independent kingdom of Lanna. Shares strong similarities with Lao to the point that in the past the Siamese Thais referred to it as Lao. Southern Thai, spoken by about 4.5 million Phu Thai, spoken by half a million around Nakhon Phanom Province. Phuan, spoken by 200,000 in central Thailand and Isan, Shan, spoken by about 100,000 in north-west Thailand along the border with the Shan States of Burma, and by 3.2 million in Burma. Lü, spoken by about 1,000,000 in northern Thailand, and 600,000 more in Sipsong Panna, Burma, nyaw language, spoken by 50,000 in Nakhon Phanom Province, Sakhon Nakhon Province, Udon Thani Province of Northeast Thailand. Song, spoken by about 30,000 in central and northern Thailand, Elegant or Formal Thai, official and written version, includes respectful terms of address, used in simplified form in newspapers. Rhetorical Thai, used for public speaking, religious Thai, used when discussing Buddhism or addressing monks. Royal Thai, influenced by Khmer, this is used when addressing members of the family or describing their activities. Most Thais can speak and understand all of these contexts, street and Elegant Thai are the basis of all conversations. Rhetorical, religious, and royal Thai are taught in schools as the national curriculum, many scholars believe that the Thai script is derived from the Khmer script, which is modeled after the Brahmic script from the Indic family. However, in appearance, Thai is closer to Thai Dam script, the language and its script are closely related to the Lao language and script
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Northern Thailand
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Northern Thailand is geographically characterised by several mountain ranges, which continue from the Shan Hills in bordering Myanmar to Laos, and the river valleys which cut through them. Historically it is related to the Lanna Kingdom and its culture, North Thailand is bound by the Salween River in the west and the Mekong in the east. The basins of rivers Ping, Wang, Yom, and Nan, all tributaries of the Chao Phraya River, the basins cut across the mountains of two great ranges, the Thanon Range in the western part and the Phi Pan Nam in the eastern. Their elevations are generally moderate, a little above 2,000 metres for the highest summits, although formerly forested, many of these mountains are now denuded. These high mountains are incised by steep valleys and upland areas that border the central plain. A series of rivers, including the Nan, Ping, Wang, Yom, sirikit Dam is on the Nan River in Uttaradit Province. The northeastern part is drained by rivers flowing into the Mekong basin, like the Kok, the four-region system includes the northern parts of the central plain as well as some mountainous areas bordering the western and the northeastern limits. The northern region, as defined by the National Geographical Committee in 1978, geographically the division, in conformance with the six-region system, includes most of the mountainous natural region of the Thai highlands. Regional classification of Northern Thailand North travel guide from Wikivoyage
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Laos
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Present day Laos traces its historic and cultural identity to the kingdom of Lan Xang Hom Khao, which existed for four centuries as one of the largest kingdoms in Southeast Asia. Due to Lan Xangs central geographical location in Southeast Asia, the kingdom was able to become a hub for overland trade. After a period of conflict, Lan Xang broke off into three separate kingdoms— Luang Phabang, Vientiane and Champasak. In 1893, it became a French protectorate, with the three territories uniting to form what is now known as the country of Laos and it briefly gained independence in 1945 after Japanese occupation, but returned to French rule until it was granted autonomy in 1949. Laos became independent in 1953, with a monarchy under Sisavang Vong. Shortly after independence, a civil war ended the monarchy. Laos is a one-party socialist republic and it espouses Marxism and is governed by the Lao Peoples Revolutionary Party, in which the party leadership is dominated by military figures. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam and the Vietnam Peoples Army continue to have significant influence in Laos, other large cities include Luang Prabang, Savannakhet, and Pakse. Laos is a country with the politically and culturally dominant Lao people making up approximately 60 percent of the population. Mon-Khmer groups, the Hmong, and other hill tribes, accounting for 40 percent of the population, live in the foothills. It is a member of the Asia-Pacific Trade Agreement, Association of Southeast Asian Nations, East Asia Summit, Laos applied for membership of the World Trade Organization in 1997, on 2 February 2013, it was granted full membership. According to the anti-corruption non-governmental organisation Transparency International, Laos remains one of the most corrupt countries in the world and this has deterred foreign investment and created major problems with the rule of law, including the nations ability to enforce contract and business regulation. This has contributed to a third of the population of Laos currently living below the poverty line. Laos has an economy, with one of the lowest annual incomes in the world. In 2014, the country ranked 141st on the Human Development Index, according to the Global Hunger Index, Laos ranks as the 29th hungriest nation in the world out of the list of the 52 nations with the worst hunger situation. Laos has also had a human rights record. In the Lao language, the name is Muang Lao or Pathet Lao. Stone artefacts including Hoabinhian types have been found at sites dating to the Late Pleistocene in northern Laos, archaeological evidence suggests agriculturist society developed during the 4th millennium BC
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Tone (linguistics)
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Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning – that is, to distinguish or to inflect words. Languages that do have this feature are called tonal languages, the tone patterns of such a language are sometimes called tonemes /ˈtoʊniːm/. Tonal languages are common in Africa, East Asia, and Mexico. In many tonal African languages, such as most Bantu languages, tones are distinguished by their pitch relative to each other. In multisyllable words, a tone may be carried by the entire word rather than a different tone on each syllable. Often, grammatical information, such as past versus present, I versus you, many words, especially monosyllabic ones, are differentiated solely by tone. In a multisyllabic word, each syllable often carries its own tone, unlike in Bantu systems, tone plays little role in modern Chinese grammar though the tones descend from features in Old Chinese that had morphological significance. Contour systems are typical of languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, including Tai–Kadai, Vietic, the Afroasiatic, Khoisan, Niger-Congo and Nilo-Saharan languages spoken in Africa are dominated by register systems. Many languages use tone in a limited way. In Japanese, fewer than half of the words have a drop in pitch, such minimal systems are sometimes called pitch accent since they are reminiscent of stress accent languages, which typically allow one principal stressed syllable per word. However, there is debate over the definition of pitch accent, most languages of Sub-Saharan Africa are members of the Niger-Congo family, which is predominantly tonal, notably excepting Swahili, most languages spoken in the Senegambia, Koyra Chiini and Fulani. The Afroasiatic languages include both tonal and nontonal branches, numerous tonal languages are widely spoken in China and Mainland Southeast Asia. Sino-Tibetan and Tai-Kadai languages are tonal, including Thai, Lao. The Hmong–Mien languages are some of the most tonal languages in the world, Austroasiatic and Austronesian languages are mostly non tonal with the rare exception of Austroasiatic languages like Vietnamese, and Austronesian languages like Cèmuhî and Utsul. Tones in Vietnamese and Utsul may result from heavy Chinese influence on both languages, there were tones in Middle Korean. Other languages represented in the region, such as Mongolian, Uyghur, in Europe, Swedish, Norwegian, Serbo-Croat, Slovene, Lithuanian, Latvian and Luxemburgish have tonal characteristics. Among the Indo-European languages of Asia, three Indo-Aryan languages have tonality, Punjabi, Dogri and Lahnda, although the Austronesian language family has some tonal members such as New Caledonias Cèmuhî language, no tonal languages have been discovered in Australia. A large number of North, South and Central American languages are tonal, including many of the Athabaskan languages of Alaska and the American Southwest, among the Mayan languages, which are mostly non-tonal, Yucatec, Uspantek, and one dialect of Tzotzil have developed tone systems
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Thai alphabet
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Thai script is used to write the Thai language and other languages in Thailand. It has 44 consonant letters,15 vowel symbols that combine into at least 28 vowel forms, and four tone diacritics. Although commonly referred to as the Thai alphabet, the script is in not a true alphabet but an abugida. In the case of the Thai script this is an implied a or o, consonants are written horizontally from left to right, with vowels arranged above, below, to the left, or to the right of the corresponding consonant, or in a combination of positions. Thai has its own set of Thai numerals that are based on the Hindu-Arabic numeral system, the Thai alphabet is derived from the Old Khmer script, which is a southern Brahmic style of writing derived from the south Indian Pallava alphabet. Although Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan languages have distinctive tones in their phonological system, thus, tone markers are an innovation in the Thai language that later influenced other related Tai languages and some Tibeto-Burman languages on the Southeast Asian mainland. Thai tradition attributes the creation of the script to King Ramkhamhaeng the Great in 1283, there is a fairly complex relationship between spelling and sound. There are various issues, For many consonant sounds, there are two different letters that represent the same sound, but which cause a different tone to be associated. This stems from a change that occurred historically in the phonology of the Thai language. At the time the Thai script was created, the language had three tones and a set of contrasts between voiced and unvoiced consonants at the beginning of a syllable. Thai borrowed a number of words from Sanskrit and Pali. This means that the Thai alphabet has a number of letters that represent separate sounds in Sanskrit and Pali. These are mostly or exclusively used in Sanskrit and Pali borrowings, moreover, many consonants from Sanskrit and Pali loanwords are generally silent. The spelling of the words resembles Sanskrit or Pali orthography, Thai สามารถ to be able Thai จันทร์ moon Thai letters do not have small, spaces between words are not used, except in certain linguistically motivated cases. Minor pauses in sentences may be marked by a comma, and major pauses by a period, a birds eye ๏ formerly indicated paragraphs, but is now obsolete. A kho mut ๛ can be used to mark the end of a chapter or document, Thai writing also uses quotation marks and parentheses, but not square brackets or braces. There are 44 consonant letters representing 21 distinct consonant sounds, there are in addition four consonant-vowel combination characters not included in the tally of 44. Consonants are divided into three classes — in alphabetic order these are high and low class — as shown in the table below
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Pali
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Pali is a Prakrit language native to the Indian subcontinent. It is widely studied because it is the language of much of the earliest extant literature of Buddhism as collected in the Pāli Canon or Tipiṭaka and is the language of Theravāda Buddhism. The word Pali is used as a name for the language of the Theravada canon, Childers translates the word as series and states that the language bears the epithet in consequence of the perfection of its grammatical structure. However, modern scholarship has regarded Pali as a mix of several Prakrit languages from around the 3rd century BCE, combined together and partially Sanskritized. The closest artifacts to Pali that have found in India are Edicts of Ashoka found at Gujarat, in the west of India. There is persistent confusion as to the relation of Pāḷi to the vernacular spoken in the ancient kingdom of Magadha, Pali, as a Middle Indo-Aryan language, is different from Sanskrit more with regard to its dialectal base than the time of its origin. A number of its morphological and lexical features show that it is not a continuation of Ṛgvedic Vedic Sanskrit. Instead it descends from one or more dialects that were, despite many similarities, however, this view is not shared by all scholars. Some, like A. C. Woolner, believe that Pali is derived from Vedic Sanskrit, Paiśācī is a largely unattested literary language of classical India that is mentioned in Prakrit and Sanskrit grammars of antiquity. e. Evidence which lends support to this interpretation is that literature in Paiśācī is fragmentary and extremely rare, many Theravada sources refer to the Pali language as Magadhan or the language of Magadha. This identification first appears in the commentaries, and may have been an attempt by Buddhists to associate more closely with the Maurya Empire. The Buddha taught in Magadha, but the four most important places in his life are all outside of it and it is likely that he taught in several closely related dialects of Middle Indo-Aryan, which had a high degree of mutual intelligibility. There is no attested dialect of Middle Indo-Aryan with all the features of Pali, Pali has some commonalities with both the western Ashokan Edicts at Girnar in Saurashtra, and the Central-Western Prakrit found in the eastern Hathigumpha inscription. In Sri Lanka, Pali is thought to have entered into a period of decline ending around the 4th or 5th century, the work of Buddhaghosa was largely responsible for its reemergence as an important scholarly language in Buddhist thought. Another scholar states that at time it was a refined. Modern scholarship has not arrived at a consensus on the issue, after the death of the Buddha, Pali may have evolved among Buddhists out of the language of the Buddha as a new artificial language. According to K. R. Norman, it is likely that the viharas in North India had separate collections of material, in the early period it is likely that no degree of translation was necessary in communicating this material to other areas. Around the time of Ashoka there had been more linguistic divergence, following this period, the language underwent a small degree of Sanskritisation
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Tai languages
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The Tai or Zhuang–Tai languages are a branch of the Tai–Kadai language family. Cognates with the name Tai are used by speakers of many Tai languages, the term Tai is now well-established as the generic name in English. In his book The Tai-Kadai Languages Anthony Diller claims that Lao scholars he has met are not pleased with Lao being regarded as a Tai language, for some, Thai should instead be considered a member of the Lao language family. One or more Ancient Chinese characters for ‘Lao’ may be cited in support of this alternative appellation, some scholars including Benedict, have used Thai to refer to a wider grouping and one sees designations like proto-Thai and Austro-Thai in earlier works. In this usage Thai would not then be considered a Tai language, according to Michel Ferlus, the ethnonyms Tai/Thai would have evolved from the etymon *kri, human being through the following chain, kəri, > kəli, > kədi, /kədaj. This in turn changed to di, /daj, and then to *dajA > tʰajA2 or > tajA2. Michel Ferlus work is based on simple rules of phonetic change observable in the Sinosphere. Many of the languages are called Zhuang in China and Nung in Vietnam, the language names used in Haudricourts original are provided first, followed by currently more widespread ethnonyms in brackets. g. Li Fang-Kuei divided Tai into Northern, Central, and Southwestern branches, however, Central Tai does not appear to be a valid group. Li proposes a division of Tai into three sister branches. This classification scheme has long accepted as the standard one in the field of comparative Tai linguistics. Gedney considers Central and Southwestern Tai to form a subgroup, of which Northern Tai is a sister, in a 2009 Ph. D. dissertation, Pittayawat Pittayaporn classifies the Tai languages based on clusters of shared innovations. In Pittayaporns classification system, the Zhuang varieties of Chongzuo in Guangxi have the most internal diversity, only the Southwestern Tai branch remains unchanged from Li Fang-Kueis 1977 classification system, and several of the Southern Zhuang languages allocated ISO codes are shown to be paraphyletic. The classification is as follows, Standard Zhuang is based on the dialect of Shuangqiao, the following phonological shifts occurred in the Q, N, B, and C subgroups. Furthermore, the following shifts occurred at various nodes leading up to node Q. E, *p. t- > *p. r-, *ɯm > *ɤm G, *k. r- > *qr- K, *e, *o, > *ɛ, *ɔ, O, *ɤn > *on Q, *kr- > *ʰr- Proto-Tai has been reconstructed in 1977 by Li Fang-Kuei and by Pittayawat Pittayaporn in 2009. Proto-Southwestern Tai has also reconstructed in 1977 by Li Fang-Kuei. Below is comparative table of Tai languages, many Southwestern Tai languages are written using Brahmi-derived alphabets. academia. edu/3659357/Tai_Words_and_the_Place_of_the_Tai_in_the_Vietnamese_Past
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Nasal consonant
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Examples of nasals in English are and, in words such as nose and mouth. Nasal occlusives are nearly universal in human languages, there are also other kinds of nasal consonants in some languages. Nearly all nasal consonants are nasal occlusives, in which air escapes through the nose but not through the mouth, the oral cavity still acts as a resonance chamber for the sound. Rarely, non-occlusive consonants may be nasalized, most nasals are voiced, and in fact, the nasal sounds and are among the most common sounds cross-linguistically. Voiceless nasals occur in a few such as Burmese, Welsh, Icelandic. In terms of acoustics, nasals are sonorants, which means that they do not significantly restrict the escape of air, however, nasals are also obstruents in their articulation because the flow of air through the mouth is blocked. This duality, a sonorant airflow through the nose along with an obstruction in the mouth, for example, nasals tend to pattern with other sonorants such as and, but in many languages, they may develop from or into stops. Acoustically, nasals have bands of energy at around 200 and 2,000 Hz.1, ^ The symbol ⟨n⟩ is commonly used to represent the dental nasal as well, rather than ⟨n̪⟩, as it is rarely distinguished from the alveolar nasal. Examples of languages containing nasal occlusives, The voiced retroflex nasal is is a sound in Languages of India. Many Germanic languages, including German, Dutch, English and Swedish, as well as varieties of Chinese such as Mandarin and Cantonese, have, tamil has a six-fold distinction between, and. Catalan, Occitan, Spanish, and Italian have, as phonemes, nevertheless, in several American dialects of Spanish, there is no palatal nasal but only a palatalized nasal, as in English canyon. In Brazilian Portuguese and Angolan Portuguese, written ⟨nh⟩, is pronounced as, a nasal palatal approximant. Semivowels in Portuguese often nasalize before and always after nasal vowels, resulting in, what would be coda nasal occlusives in other West Iberian languages is only slightly pronounced before dental consonants. Outside this environment the nasality is spread over the vowel or become a nasal diphthong, the Mapos Buang language of New Guinea has an unusual three-way dorsal distinction between, and uvular. The presence of on a level is extremely rare cross-lingually, especially when the language also has other phonemic dorsal nasals present as in the case of Mapos Buang. The term nasal occlusive is generally abbreviated to nasal, however, there are also nasalized fricatives, nasalized flaps, nasal glides, and nasal vowels, as in French, Portuguese, and Polish. In the IPA, nasal vowels and nasalized consonants are indicated by placing a tilde over the vowel or consonant in question, French sang, a few languages have phonemic voiceless nasal occlusives. Among them are Icelandic, Faroese, Burmese, Jalapa Mazatec, Kildin Sami, Welsh, iaai of New Caledonia has an unusually large number of them, with /m̥ m̥ʷ n̪̊ ɳ̊ ɲ̊ ŋ̊/, along with a number of voiceless approximants
listen, Tai Lü: ᨲᩫ᩠ᩅᨵᨾ᩠ᨾ᩼ , Tham, "scripture"), is used for three living languages: Northern Thai (that is, Kham Mueang), Tai Lü and Khün. In addition, the Lanna script is used for Lao Tham (or old Lao) and other dialect variants in Buddhist palm leaves and notebooks, the script is also known as Tham or Yuan script.
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