Borrowed Thai Punctuation in Tai Tham Text

From: Richard Wordingham <richard.wordingham_at_ntlworld.com>
Date: Sat, 6 Jul 2013 22:59:19 +0100

Modern Tai Tham materials from northern Thailand show what appear to be
borrowed Thai punctuation. The following characters may need some UTC
action:

U+002E FULL STOP, U+002C COMMA:

As a matter of style, these may be placed on either the Roman baseline
(used by Thai) or the hanging baseline (used by Tai Tham). The style
where they are always placed on the Roman baseline raises no issues at
all. In the other case, is the distinction between the two positions a
matter of font design and script-indicating mark-up? If not, I
believe I have evidence of new characters.

Some of the complexity arises from a list of Tai Tham words embedded in
a Thai sentence being separated by commas on the Roman baseline, while
a list of Tai Tham words not so embedded is separated by commas on the
hanging baseline.

(These characters seem to be being used in accordance with Thai
practice, which is why I am treating them as borrowed from the Thai
script. In particular, the full stop is not being used to terminate
sentences.)

U+0E4F THAI CHARACTER FONGMAN:

How many examples do I need to collect to add Tai Tham to the script
extensions property for this character?

U+0E5B THAI CHARACTER KHOMUT:

The character khomut and the matching opening form are occasionally used
in Thai to bracket titles of books and sections of text. Has what we
might call REVERSED KHOMUT ever been proposed for encoding? It might
have been rejected as decoration rather than text.

As an end of topic marker, I can see it alternating with what might
just be a very restrained version of U+1AAC TAI THAM SIGN HANG.

How many examples do I need to collect of either of these uses to add
Tai Tham to the script extensions property for U+0E5B?

Richard.
Received on Sat Jul 06 2013 - 17:05:05 CDT

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