Doubled Sara Ii - อีีก

[Richard W]

Is there any tendency to write อีก with the vowel symbol doubled? I got over a million raw Google hits on "อีีก" (with the vowel symbol typed twice), but I don't know whether this an expressive writing of the word or an unnoticed typing error.

[cosmono]

interesting question. A million hits seems like a lot for a spelling mistake. I see many colloquial "misspellings" in my Facebook feed every day, but I've never seen anyone use อีีก

[bytebuster]

It must be an expressive writing. I've also seen ดีี.

[rak sa_ngop]

I am confused, what are you guys talking about?

What is "อีีก" (with the vowel symbol typed twice)?

Am I missing something?

[Richard W]

What is "อีีก" (with the vowel symbol typed twice)?

That is the question! While 'traditional' Thai input mechanisms will simply ignore the second sara ii (or beep and then ignore it), other, more general, mechanisms will allow one to type it twice. My question is whether this double typing is deliberate or accidental.

Possibly the answer you are looking for is '<o ang, sara ii, sara ii, ko kai>'.

Edited October 1, 2013 by Richard W

[rak sa_ngop]

So what you are talking about is อีกี as opposed to the correct spelling อีก.

[Richard W]

So what you are talking about is อีกี as opposed to the correct spelling อีก.

No, I'm talking about อีีก <o ang, sara ii, sara ii, ko kai>, not อีกี <o ang, sara ii, ko kai, sara ii>. But you are correct, it is an abnormal spelling of อีก. It is sufficiently weird that some renderers will insert a dotted circle between the two instances of sara ii. I've used a huge font for the Thai because there can be a very subtle difference between a single sara ii and a double sara ii.

[meadish_sweetball]

In spoken Thai, I've registered that displeasure with something being done or happening again is often expressed with the low tone of อีีก heavily emphasized in the low register and somewhat prolonged. Maybe this doubling of sara you have noticed i is how that spoken feature is expressed in Facebook Thai?

[SlyAnimal]

gf reckons that people don't type like that, not even on fb, and that it's probably just typos which you're seeing (Maybe they pressed อี twice, or maybe they wanted to do อี๊?). Although she's not a 15 year old trying to be cool, so perhaps not the best authority on fb slang lolz.

[Lara Alex]

I agree that using double 'ี' is a typo.

[Richard W]

Yes, looking at some of the other doubling cases, such as มีี for มี, it looks as though it is just a typo. Years ago, computers would beep at you and refuse to accept the extra letter if you typed double ii by mistake. Now they just silently and almost invisibly accept it, which is not an improvement.

[rak sa_ngop]

On my computer both มี (one sara i) and มีี (two sara i) look identically the same.

[kriswillems]

On my computer both มี (one sara i) and มีี (two sara i) look identically the same.

That might very well the reason for the typos (you can't notice them on some systems).

[ChristianPFC]

I never encountered this before, and I was not aware that it is possible. But to my great surprise, when I try to type it turns out as อีีก and even three i are possible: อีีีก And how about อััก อัััก I thought the program you use for writing would suppress such impossible combinations. I cannot write this in Word, only here in the forum. (E.g. in French you can put only one accent on a vovel, in German umlaute are separate so you can't put two double dots on a letter.)

Edited October 15, 2013 by ChristianPFC

[Mole]

The reason double umlaut and accent doesn't work is that each of those letters are as a separate font character while the sara in Thai is a character on their own.

[Richard W]

(E.g. in French you can put only one accent on a vovel, in German umlaute are separate so you can't put two double dots on a letter.)

The reason double umlaut and accent doesn't work is that each of those letters are as a separate font character while the sara in Thai is a character on their own.

What I hope that Mole is struggling to say is that for French and German, one does not normally type the base letter and the accent separately, but instead uses as special combination of key strokes or a single key on a specialised keyboard.

One can type them separately, e.g. ä̈ or ä̈! I actually struck sequences of five and seven keys - what I entered were a_"_" and ax<rubout>_"_" , but I use the IPA far more than I write German, so I use a keyboard mapping that translates them into two characters, small a with umlaut followed by combining umlaut and three characters, small a, and two combining umlauts. The combinations ä̈ and ä̈ should display the same; if they don't, either your rendering system is buggy (like the one I'm using) or doesn't support the Latin script. c

[Mole]

Being fluent in Norwegian, I know perfectly well how one types these umlaut characters.

What I am saying is that the sara characters in Thai are a separate font glyph while all the latin characters with umlaut or accents have their own glyph.

While there may be a glyph for certain double umlaut letters which may be used in certain languages I don't think there are any double accent character glyphs.

This is why you won't be able to "stack" several umlauts or accents, unless there's a specific font glyph for it. (Vietnamese seems to have added many combinations.)

Edited October 16, 2013 by Mole

[coma]

No, Never, not ever. Typos only.

[Mole]

Also, on Norwegian keyboards, in order to type one of the accent characters such as é ó á, one type the ´ key while pressing AltGr then the letter one needs e o a.

Some font glyphs with combinations of certain umlauts and accents exist just because it's possible to combine them, although no language really uses some of these combinations.

This is similar to Korean hangul which many glyphs are taken by certain combinations which are not used in Korean at all.

Edited October 16, 2013 by Mole

[Richard W]

What I am saying is that the sara characters in Thai are a separate font glyph while all the latin characters with umlaut or accents have their own glyph.

You're confusing glyph with character code. Nowadays, character codes are assigned by Unicode / ISO (for inclusion in ISO 10646). It so happens that most combinations of Latin base letter and diacritic(s) used by standardised languages have their own character code, but they have refused to allocate any more, so a few minor languages use combinations without a code. By contrast, combinations only used by phonetic notation or transliteration schemes (e.g ISO 11940 Part 1) frequently do not have encodings as a single character. Unicode handles this asymmetry by declaring the precomposed character codes to be equivalent to a sequence of base character and diacritics.

Now, the X Window system assumed that text could be represented by a simple mapping of characters to glyphs, including 'advance widths' to move from one character to another that were properties of the individual character. This is not very pretty for Thai, as the vertical positioning of tone marks depends on whether there is another mark above, and usually the marks above move leftwards to avoid clashing with the base consonant. Even worse, when writing Pali, ฐ and ญ lose their lower parts when sara u, sara uu or phinthu comes below.

OpenType fonts (and the Apple equivalent) contain data tables specifying contextual replacement, splitting and merger of glyphs and relative placements of glyphs. Technology has moved on.

Now, for each combining diacritic in a font, it makes sense to include all combinations of it with character codes for use in pick lists. However, that doesn't actually mean that the glyphs will be used. I remember one font designer telling me that the first thing he did in his fonts was to decompose all such characters into base character plus diacritics!

While there may be a glyph for certain double umlaut letters which may be used in certain languages I don't think there are any double accent character glyphs.

This is why you won't be able to "stack" several umlauts or accents, unless there's a specific font glyph for it. (Vietnamese seems to have added many combinations.)

I'm not aware of any double umlaut letters used in actual languages, and there certainly aren't any such characters in Unicode. When I typed ä̈ in my post, I deliberately entered one of the two as a single letter and two diacritics. Stacking only depends on the capabilities of the rendering system - font(s) plus layout engine. Some fonts arrange them properly; others make a terrible mess of them. So the mathematical combination x dot circumflex dot (rate of change of estimate of rate of change of x-component of position) can be typed as ẋ̂̇ , but what it actually appears as is in the lap of the gods.

The primary reason double accents don't occur when typing French or Norwegian is simply that the usual keyboard layouts for those languages don't allow one to produce isolated combining accents. It has nothing to occur with what is in the fonts.

[Mole]

Hmm, OK, I wasn't actually aware of this technicality.

Perhaps it's because I don't believe in the concept of "god(s)" [or religion and any related terminologies].

Still it requires quite a deliberate effort to produce these unlike the double ีี which may even become a future trend.