Tone Marks In Romanized Thai

[stevehaigh]

appologies if this has been covered before, but i need to know how to type romanized thai and i can't figure out the tone marks. well i can get them all except rizing tone. any ideas anyone?

thanks steve

[withnail]

Start Menu\All Programs\Accessories\System Tools\Character Map

[stevehaigh]

that's great except it doesn't have the rising tone symbol, the 'v' shaped thing.

[Richard W]

Start Menu\All Programs\Accessories\System Tools\Character Map

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

So:

a caron is U+01CE (decimal 462) ǎ

e caron is U+011B (decimal 283) ě

i caron is U+01D0 (decimal 464) ǐ

o caron is U+01D2 (decimal 466) ǒ

u caron is U+01D4 (decimal 468) ǔ

Unfortunately, they are missing from many fonts. I tend to resort to '+' instead if I feel obliged to use an accent.

[withnail]

It does in Arial although to be honest I can't work out how to get it above another letter. I find the easiest method of transliterating Thai to English though is to look the word up on www.thai2english.com then copy and paste.

[Andrew Mac]

I'm not sure if the following rambling comments will be of any help to you or not, but one thing you might like to try is one of the purpose-built phonetic fonts, most of which contain comprehensive sets of diacritic marks, as well as all those cool characters for typing in phonetics.

Personally, I think one of the best is put out by the Summer Institute of Languages, and can be found at http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.ph...DownloadsDoulos

The font is called Doulos, and it certainly contains all the phonetic characters I've ever needed, that's for sure! It also supports a range of font technologies, such as OpenType, AAT (Apple Advanced Typography, for Macs), and SIL's own Graphite system, so if your word processor supports any of the technologies, you should get really pleasing results. The only real issue which might cause frustration, however, is that there are no bold or italic variations to the font: you only get plain old "Regular".

Another quite good typeface which SIL has recently taken over is Gentium, which you can find at http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.ph...ownloadsGentium -- this font has an italic face, but not bold.

There are, however, other phonetic fonts available, some of which support italics and bold. In no particular order, some of these include Thryomanes, Cardo, Junicode, Lucida Sans Unicode, and Arial Unicode (I'm afraid you might have to Google for these, I don't have the links at hand). On the Mac platform, at least, the system font Lucida Grande carries all the diacritics and phonetic characters you'll need for Thai, and I believe Windows offers something similar (although I'm not using Windows at the moment, so I can't confirm that).

All of the fonts I've listed above, by the way, are Unicode fonts, so they shouldn't give you any problem with modern software. You will probably need to get an appropriate keyboard layout, however, so that your character map thingy will understand where all the characters are located. Once again, SIL might have just what you need: check out http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.ph...=InputResources

I hope this is some kind of help -- and, oh, by the way, I don't have shares in SIL or anything: it's just that I've found them incredibly useful for all kinds of things over the years! :-)

[stevehaigh]

It does in Arial although to be honest I can't work out how to get it above another letter. I find the easiest method of transliterating Thai to English though is to look the word up on www.thai2english.com then copy and paste.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

that's f%$king awesom, khop khun maak maak loi khap!!! what a great web site! i used to use thailanguage.com before the webmaster got busted, this site looks great too!

and thanks for all the other suggestions too.

steve

[withnail]

If you meant www.thai-language.com that's up and running now, I also use www.learningthai.com and www.ethaimusic.com which has Thai song lyrics on it if that's a method of learning that would interest you. Some of the songs have poor transliteration however but of course you can always use www.thai2english.com.

[stevehaigh]

If you meant www.thai-language.com that's up and running now, I also use www.learningthai.com and www.ethaimusic.com which has Thai song lyrics on it if that's a method of learning that would interest you. Some of the songs have poor transliteration however but of course you can always use www.thai2english.com.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

i can't seem at access either www.thai-language.com or www.thai2english.com today. wonder what's up?

[Richard W]

i can't seem at access either www.thai-language.com or www.thai2english.com today. wonder what's up?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

They're accessible from England now (at 09:00 2005/04/02 UTC).

[ProfessorFart]

Just do (L) ® (F) etc.....

[Richard W]

So:

a caron is U+01CE (decimal 462) ǎ

e caron is U+011B (decimal 283) ě

i caron is U+01D0 (decimal 464) ǐ

o caron is U+01D2 (decimal 466) ǒ

u caron is U+01D4 (decimal 468) ǔ

Unfortunately, they are missing from many fonts.  I tend to resort to '+' instead if I feel obliged to use an accent.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It does in Arial although to be honest I can't work out how to get it above another letter. I find the easiest method of transliterating Thai to English though is to look the word up on www.thai2english.com then copy and paste.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It doesn't on my PC, which doesn't have Arial MS Unicode. I have sufficient other fonts that they do display with Firefox, but not on Internet Explorer.

One trick one can use from Thai2English.com is to use the combining modifier caron, decimal 774, and add it as a numeric character entity (...; ). One can then get the carons to display properly, thus:

a caron is ă

i caron is ĭ

o caron is ŏ

u caron is ŭ

If you do use Thai2English as a short cut, do check the result.

This then works on my PC, even with Internet Explorer.

[Richard W]

One trick one can use from Thai2English.com is to use the combining modifier caron, decimal 774, and add it as a numeric character entity (...; ).  One can then get the carons to display properly, thus:

a caron is ă

i caron is ĭ

o caron is ŏ

u caron is ŭ

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I should have checked. This is a cheat. Decimal 774 is a breve; the caron is decimal 780. I thought some of the carons looked a bit flat. Combining modifier carons is no more dependable than is using a single code for vowel and diacritic.

[mike_l]

One trick one can use from Thai2English.com is to use the combining modifier caron, decimal 774, and add it as a numeric character entity (...; ).  One can then get the carons to display properly, thus:

a caron is ă

i caron is ĭ

o caron is ŏ

u caron is ŭ

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I should have checked. This is a cheat. Decimal 774 is a breve; the caron is decimal 780. I thought some of the carons looked a bit flat. Combining modifier carons is no more dependable than is using a single code for vowel and diacritic.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That's true, however in Internet Explorer on my PC, vowel + ̌ would either display a square or put the caron distinctly to the right of the vowel rather than above it. Firefox is better, and seems to display both correctly. I'd certainly prefer the caron, but given IE's lack of support for it using the breve instead seemed overall more reliable to me.