Burmese To Thai "mapping"

[Khon Baan Nok]

I met a person at work today who had studied Burmese and had learned the script and so forth. I suggested that that might be helpful in getting a jump start on Thai, though my perusal of the Burmese script on Omniglot does not quite support that notion. It looks a lot closer to Devanagiri, which I can read.

Do any of you by chance have a chart that "pairs" the Devanagiri characters with BOTH their Burmese and Thai equivalents? And, in addition, includes the characters from Thai and Burmese that don't have equivalents in Devanagiri.

I have such a chart/table for Devanagiri and Thai, but before trying to fold in Burmese I thought I'd see if some of you haven't already done that.

Tks.

[Jay_Jay]

I have done up a comparative charts of several indic based scripts including Thai on my blog. I will try and add Burmese to it in the next couple of days.

http://stujay.blogspot.com/2006/12/learnin...-of-indian.html

[Richard W]

Do any of you by chance have a chart that "pairs" the Devanagiri characters with BOTH their Burmese and Thai equivalents? And, in addition, includes the characters from Thai and Burmese that don't have equivalents in Devanagiri.

Compare the Devanagari and Burmese charts on the Unicode site - matching characters have matching names.

For a Devanagari-Thai comparison, see an alternative presentation of the Thai consonants.

The extra characters in Thai are mostly the vowel symbols - sara ue, sara uue, sara ae, sara ai mai muan, mai han akat, mai tai khu, karan. (I think mai han akat and mai tai khu are variants of sara a, but some deny that sara a is the same as visarga.) The tone marks are, I think, additions, though I'll listen if anyone can show a connection with Vedic accent marks.

The consonants added in Thai mostly correspond to Devanagari nukta forms - kho khuat = KHHA, kho khon = GHHA, so so = ZA, fo fa = FA. However, there is no Devanagari equivalent of fo fan, though you could make one by adding a nukta to BA, though to me BA is already being distinguished from VA by some sort of diacritic. Early scripts in SE Asia lost the distinction between these two letters, which is why Sanskrit/Pali /v/ is often represented by pho phan.

Devanagari PA corresponds to both bo bai mai and po pla, TA to both do dek and to tao, and TTA to do chara and to patak. I suppose you can argue that the first of each pair is the original, but I'm never happy at being forced to choose.

I don't know where ho nok huk comes from. I used to think of it as a modification of o ang, but I now suspect it is actually a modification of ro ruea. That makes sense, as inherited Thai words with ho nok huk are usually doublets of words in ro ruea, ฮัก and รัก being the most obvious pair.

To round up, MYANMAR LETTER NNYA is just a doubled MYANMAR LETTER NYA in origin.

Finally, note that Thai and Burmese are South Indian scripts, deriving from the Pallava script.

[Khon Baan Nok]

Thanks, Stuart and David. I have marked your table, Stuart, and will check back to see when the Burmese gets on. I see you are planning to include some other scripts as well, which will be interesting. Once upon a time I knew both Oriya and Bengali scripts, and it is fun to see them side by side, tks.

Your point, David, on ho nok huk and ro ruea is interesting. I came across a chart recently that was showing how ro ruea sounds from Thai often turn into "h" sounds in Isaan. Correlated?

[Richard W]

Your point, David, on ho nok huk and ro ruea is interesting. I came across a chart recently that was showing how ro ruea sounds from Thai often turn into "h" sounds in Isaan. Correlated?

Yes. Both Lao scripts (Lao proper and the Tham script, a.k.a. Lanna) use a special version of the /r/ letter for the equivalent of ho nok huk, which is what made me suddenly wonder if that was the origin of the shape of ho nok huk. The Northern Tai spelling in the Tham script frequently continues to use the ro ruea letter - its functional equivalent of ho nok huk in Northern Thai spelling is effectively the normal /h/ plus a diacritic loop.

The sound change (/r/ > /h/) is not just Isaan/Lao/Northern Thai - it occurs in all the living SW Tai languages except Central and Southern Thai, thus also in Shan and Black Tai. Literary Tai Lue is reported to have preserved the distinction between /r/ and /h/, but that was about 50 years ago and the Chinese reform of the Tham script for Tai Lue made no provision for distinguishing it from plain /h/ with the tone that goes with low consonants. /r/ is preserved in Ahom (the Tai language of Assam), but that is a dead language.

The sound /r/ can exist as a marginal sound in the SW Tai languages that have lost inherited /r/, though /l/ is usually substituted in loan words.

[Tilokarat]

How does the Mon language and script fit into all of this? I have read, from Hans Penth and Donald Swearer experts in northern Thai, that some of the Northern Thai language is based on Old Mon as seen from some of the inscriptions gathered at Wat Haripunchai/Wat Cammadevi in Lamphun.

[Richard W]

How does the Mon language and script fit into all of this?

The Burmese script is the Mon script, as most Burmese will admit. There are a few extra characters needed for Mon language processing, due to appear in the next version of Unicode (Version 5.2 or 6 - I don't know which it will be called.). The genuinely extra characters are two for the bilabial implosive stop (presumably series 1 and series 2, but I don't which is which) - a bull's-eye character (like the IPA bilabial click U+0298) and what was originally the mba conjunct - and a superscript version of the /e/ vowel, which in Mon is only used in conjunction with the /u/ vowel, but is the closed-syllable /e/ vowel in Shan. Other characters have been added for the Mon style of certain subscript consonants, and for the Mon styles of NGA and JHA. The latter is no more different from the usual Burmese JHA than the two Lanna versions of the same letter - roughly speaking, one based on CA and one based on JA. (The forms are very close to those of the cya and jya conjuncts.)

The characters used for Old Mon are generally square in shape, whereas the modern characters are round.