Names Of Lao Letters

[Richard W]

I'm sorry this is a bit off-topic, but I believe I may find some people here who are knowledgeable enough to answer my questions.

When I looked through the Unicode Lao Block, two pairs of letter names appeared to have been transposed. It had:

• The Lao letter ຝ, which looks like Thai ฝ (fo fa), labelled as 'fo tam', literally 'low f'.
  
• The Lao letter ຟ, which looks like Thai ฟ (fo fan), labelled as 'fo sung', literally 'high f'.
  

Aren't these the wrong way round?

It also had:

• The Lao letter ຣ, which looks like Thai ร (ro ruea), labelled as 'lo ling'.
  
• The Lao letter ລ, which looks like Thai ล (lo ling), labelled as 'lo loot'.
  

Aren't these also the wrong way round? What do 'ling' and 'loot' mean here? From what I could find about Lao letters on the internet, it looks as though they mean 'monkey' (as in Thai) and 'car, truck', though I would expect the latter then to be 'lot'. (Lao can have 'lot' rather than 'hot' because the word is borrowed from Pali or Sanskrit.)

[meadish_sweetball]

Hi Richard,

Your Lao comes up as question marks, but since you provided the equivalent Thai letters, I still understand what you mean.

Unicode are indeed wrong about the names of the letters. They should be as you suggest, and according to the Thai rules. In this case, the high class consonants have the loop pointing inwards to the letter, whereas the loop on the low class consonants should point outwards. I am sure you have seen Lao Consonant table from SEASITE but I'll provide the link all the same.

About the names, well, I think sabaijai is the right person to answer that, unless we have any Lao friends popping in.

[Richard W]

I am sure you have seen Lao Consonant table from SEASITE but I'll provide the link all the same.

That and the associated pages are the only ones besides Unicode I could find. Therre is a flash card page amongst them that suggests they have old names likes like the Thai letters. However, these pages were prepared by someone educated in Thailand, so his statements could be contaminated by his knowledge of Thai. That's why I'm seeking confirmation. I suspect the flashcards were originally composed for Thai, and have been modified for Lao.

[OOLEEBER]

Changed

[sabaijai]

The Lao letter ຣ, which looks like Thai ร (ro ruea), labelled as 'lo ling'.

For all intents and purposes, the letter ຣ doesn't exist in modern Lao, but has been replaced by ລ (lo lot) . The reasons it was banned: 1) associated with Thailand, where the letter was pronounced as ร (always as lo ling in Lao), and Thailand's monarchy in particular, being closely associated with the usurped Royal Lao Government; 2) to simplify the Lao alphabet so that it would be entirely phonetic.

When I looked through the Unicode Lao Block, two pairs of letter names appeared to have been transposed. It had:

The Lao letter ຝ, which looks like Thai ฝ (fo fa), labelled as 'fo tam', literally 'low f'.

The Lao letter ຟ, which looks like Thai ฟ (fo fan), labelled as 'fo sung', literally 'high f'.

Aren't these the wrong way round?

Yep.

It also had:

The Lao letter ລ, which looks like Thai ล (lo ling), labelled as 'lo loot'.

Yes, in Lao the word associated with this letter is the Lao word for vehicle, /lot/, same as รถ in Thai.

Richard W, the Lao script comes through on my system fine, with IE encoding set to Western European (ISO)!

[Richard W]

How perverse! If I understand you correctly, the ancient Tai word for 'monkey' was written ຣິງ (almost equivalent to Thai *ริง) as though it were an Indian word, but the Indian word for 'vehicle' (Thai รถ) has long been written ລົດ (equivalent to Thai *ลด) (well, with initial ລ anyway) as though it were a native word!

How are Sanskrit and Pali written in Laos now? Do the monks still use the discarded letters, or do they use a foreign script?

[Richard W]

Richard W, the Lao script comes through on my system fine, with IE encoding set to Western European (ISO)!

The letters are encoded by numeric codes, so they should be understood as Lao by almost all systems. The problem is whether the font chosen can display them properly. For example, even if you do see Lao letters properly, Lao words may come out wrong! Arial Unicode MS will display the letters, but spaces Thai words wrongly - Tahoma spaces Thai words properly and cannot display Lao at all!

[sabaijai]

How are Sanskrit and Pali written in Laos now? Do the monks still use the discarded letters, or do they use a foreign script?

In modern Lao P/S words are spelt phonetically, ie, all the P/S orthography that's preserved in Thai is lost in Lao.

I can write Lao but don't have a Lao keyboard in front of me so will give an example using Thai.

Instead of นคร (P/S nagara) the Lao equivalent would be นะคอน.

There are no unwritten vowels in Lao, so the /a/ in words like นคร and the /o/ รถ are written out. The latter, in Lao, looks like an upside-down อั (here using อ as a placeholder).

Lao monks are supposed to use modern Lao to transcribe Pali but naturally the older ones are resistant as the underlying meaning is harder to discern. There are still plenty of old palmleaf manuscripts around, most of them written in phaasaa tham, another Lao script that differs from both pre- and post-1975 modern Lao.

[RDN]

Richard W, the Lao script comes through on my system fine, with IE encoding set to Western European (ISO)!

I couldn't see the Lao script until I installed these fonts:

http://www.tavultesoft.com/lswin/downloads/updatedfonts.zip