The Tai Viet script ( Tai Dam: ("Tai script"),

Vietnamese Vietnamese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia ** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam. * Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam ** Overse ...

: Chữ Thái Việt) ( th, อักษรไทดำ, ) is a

Brahmic script The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India ...

used by the

Tai Dam people The Tai Dam (Tai Dam: , lo, ໄຕດຳ, th, ไทดำ) are an ethnic minority predominantly from China, northwest Vietnam, Laos, Thailand. They are part of the Tai peoples and ethnically similar to the Thai from Thailand, the Lao from Lao ...

and various other

Thai people Thai people ( th, ชาวไทย; '' endonym''), Central Thai people ( th, คนภาคกลาง, sou, คนใต้, ตามโพร; ''exonym and also domestically'') or Siamese ( th, ชาวสยาม; ''historical exonym an ...

Vietnam Vietnam or Viet Nam ( vi, Việt Nam, ), officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam,., group="n" is a country in Southeast Asia, at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of and population of 96 million, making i ...

and

Thailand Thailand ( ), historically known as Siam () and officially the Kingdom of Thailand, is a country in Southeast Asia, located at the centre of the Indochinese Peninsula, spanning , with a population of almost 70 million. The country is b ...

.Bảng chữ cái tiếng Thái (Việt Nam), các quy tắc cơ bản
Lịch sử văn hóa Thái, 26/06/2018. In vietnamese.

History

According to Thai authors, the

writing system A writing system is a method of visually representing verbal communication, based on a script and a set of rules regulating its use. While both writing and speech are useful in conveying messages, writing differs in also being a reliable fo ...

is probably derived from the old Thai writing of the kingdom of Sukhotai. It has been suggested that the

Fakkham script The Fakkham script ( th, อักษรฝักขาม, "''Tamarind pod-script''") or Thai Lanna script is a Brahmic script, used historically in the Lan Na Kingdom. The script was frequently used in Lan Na stone inscriptions. Origin The Fa ...

is the source of the Tai Don, Tai Dam and Tai Daeng writing systems found in eastern

Yunnan Yunnan , () is a landlocked province in the southwest of the People's Republic of China. The province spans approximately and has a population of 48.3 million (as of 2018). The capital of the province is Kunming. The province borders the C ...

, northern Laos, and

. Differences in

phonology Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...

of the various local Tai languages, the isolation of communities and the fact that the written language has traditionally been passed down from father to son have led to many local variants. In an attempt to reverse this development and establish a standardized system,

's various Tai people in the former Northwestern Autonomous Region were approached with a proposal that they should agree on a common standard. Together with Vietnamese researchers, a first proposal called ''Thống Nhất'' (or Unified Alphabet) was developed, which was published in 1961 and revised in 1966. A unified and standardized version of the script was developed at a UNESCO-sponsored workshop in 2006, named "chữ Thái Việt Nam" (or Vietnamese Tai script). This standardized version was then approved to be included in Unicode. From May 2008, the improved Thai script was put into official use.

Description

The script consists of 31 consonants and 14 vowels. Unlike most other abugidas or brahmic scripts, the consonants do not have an inherent vowel, and every vowel must be specified with a vowel marker. Vowels are marked with diacritic vowel markers that can appear above, below or to the left and/or right of the consonant. Some vowels carry an inherent final consonant, such as /-aj/, /-am/, /-an/ and /-əw/. The script uses Latin script

punctuation Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. An ...

, and also includes five special characters, one to indicate a person, one for the number "one", one to repeat the previous word, one to mark the beginning of a text and one to mark the end of a text. Traditionally, the script did not use any spacing between words as they were written in a continuous flow, but spacing has become common since the 1980s.

Consonants

Initial consonant letters have both high and low forms, which are used to indicate tones. The high consonants are used for the syllable final letters -w, -y, -m, -n and -ng. The low consonant letter -k is used for final /k/- and /ʔ/-sounds, while low consonant letters -b and -d are used for final /p/ and /t/.

Vowels

The consonant character's position is marked with a circle: ◌.

* When /ɔ/ has a final, is used instead. Some additional vowels are written with a combination of two vowel characters. The following four combinations are used for Tai Dam: Some sounds are spelled differently in Tai Dón compared to in Tai Dam:Brase, J. (2008). Writing Tai Don: Additional characters needed for the Tai Viet script. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08217-tai-don.pdf

Tones

Traditionally the script used no tone marks and only partially indicated tones with the high/low consonant differentiation. The reader had to guess the tone and thus meaning of a word from context. In the 1970s two tone marks were developed, called mai nueng and mai song. Tone 1 is marked with only a low consonant. Tone 4 is marked with only a high consonant. Tone 2 is marked with the first tone mark and a low consonant form. Tone 5 is marked with the first tone mark and a high consonant form. Tone 3 is marked with the second tone mark and a low consonant form. Tone 6 is marked with the second tone mark and a high consonant form.

Unicode

Proposals to encode Tai Viet script in

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

go back to 2006. A Unicode subcommittee reviewed a February 6, 2007 proposal submitted by James Brase of SIL International for what was then called Tay Viet script. At the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 meeting on April 24, 2007, a revised proposal for the script, now known as Tai Viet, was accepted "as is", with support from TCVN, the Vietnam Quality & Standards Centre. Tai Viet was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2. The Unicode block for Tai Viet is U+AA80–U+AADF:

References

External links

SIL Tai Heritage Pro Font Download
Brahmic scripts {{list of writing systems