Introduction

This page records the glyphs for Tai Tham characters in the font Lamphun, and any other glyphs that may resonably be expected to appear in text. Punctuation of European origin is currently excluded.

The final row of each cell shows the Unicode encoding, and may also show the Pali transliteration (or Sanskrit transliteration in parentheses if the letter is not used for Pali) and the Northern Thai pronunciation. For consonants, the Northern Thai pronunciation is that of the consonant as an initial consonant. A dash indicates that the letter is not used for the corresponding language.

Consonants and Independent Vowels

Coverage

This section records the glyphs used for the consonants and independent vowels - code points U+1A20 to U+1A5E and also U+1A62, U+1A74 and U+1A7A, for the latter three may also function as consonants.

Basic forms

The overwhelming majority of Indic consonants could be organised into a table of 5 places of articulation and 7 different manners. However, the table was only complete for the oral and nasal stops. The original order was stops first, order by place of articulation and then manner of production, followed by the semivowels, and then the fricatives. This originally left ᩉ U+1A49 TAI THAM LETTER HIGH HA as the exception. The letter ᩊ was added for a distinctive allophone of ᨯ in Pali and Vedic Sanskrit.

For Thai, additional letters were needed for fricatives that did not occur in Pali or Sanskrit. They were created by modifying existing letters. They were placed in the alphabet after the letters of which they were modifications. The Tai Tham script adopted most of these modifications.

The code point order of the consonants is based on that of Thai.

The table below has consolidated the columns for fricatives and the row for the Indic sibilants. It has similarly incorporated the semivowel row in the table. The 'column numbers' correspond to the traditional 5 Indic columns.

1. The Tai languages do not distinguish the retroflex and dental orders. However, some distinction is made between RA and LA. The inclusion of RA in the retroflex order is hard to justify phonetically, but is traditional.
2. In initial position in Northern Thai, this consonant is pronounced /h/ in native words but /l/ in loanwords. It aspirates an immediately preceding unaspirated oral stop.
3. Continental South East Asian Indic scripts reinterpreted the independent vowel ᩋ as a consonant for the glottal stop followed by the implicit vowel. Consequently, ᩋ U+1A4B TAI THAM LETTER A appears in the table twice, once in each rôle.
4. As with most Indic scripts, the independent vowel ᩋᩣ is indistinguishable from the sequence of independent vowel ᩋ plus dependent vowel  ‍ᩣ (originally the vowel length mark). To avoid confusion, it is not encoded separately, but is included in this table for completeness.
5. Actually, ᩒ is not used in Northern Thai. The sequence ᩋᩰ is used instead.

Principal Subscript Forms

The following tables gives the coresponding principal subscript forms. Where there are contrasting subscript forms, this table gives the form used as the sakot consonant, i.e. to represent the phonetically final consonant of a syllable. The subscript forms are shown placed on the consonant ᨣ LOW KA.

Compound Letters

The following compounds are commonly treated as letters in their own right:

1. These are competing forms.

Other forms

The subscript and superscript forms are shown written on ᨣ U+1A23 TAI THAM LETTER LOW KA, which is not shown in the encoding. Note that the 'geminate' of an aspirated consonant is a cluster of the corresponding unaspirated consonant followed by the aspirated consonant.

1. U+1A58 TAI THAM SIGN MAI KANG LAI has two basic modes of behaviour. It can behave as a simple mark above, or behave like Burmese kinzi or a Devanagari repha and appear above the logically and phoneticially following consonant. The latter is the default mode in the Da Lekh font. It is therefore depicted in association with two instances of , the first as the logical base consonant, and the second as the consonant on which it appears.

   There is considerable variation in the shape of this character.

2. Khün-Lü-style glyphs are used in this row - if your browser heeds the page's imprecations to use them.
3. The association of this sign, U+1A74 TAI THAM SIGN MAI KANG, known as niggahita in Pali but as anusvāra in Sanskrit, and transliterated as ṃ for Pali, with /m/ as opposed to /ŋ/ is historical but weak. The sign also serves as a vowel, as in Lao.
4. Anomalously, this sign, U+1A5E TAI THAM CONSONANT SIGN SA, is commonly used for the coda consonant.
5. Lao-style glyphs are used in this row. This table is used as a convenient place to put them - they would not appear in this table if only Lao forms were shown on this page. There is a very good argument that the Lao glyph should be disunified, or alternatively that the Lao glyph should not be used for U+1A4C.

Consonant Ligatures

The following ligatures are supported or are under active consideration. Those of subscripts only are written on U+1A23 TAI THAM LETTER LOW KA, which is not shown in the encoding.

1. U+1A57 TAI THAM CONSONANT SIGN LA TANG LAI is included here because it has been argued that it is a ligature of the subscript form of NGA and the subscript form of LA, as occur naturally in the spelling of 'tang lai' as a single, chained syllable.

Vowels and Tones

The vowels and tones are shown written on either U+1A20 TAI THAM LETTER HIGH KA or U+1A23 TAI THAM LETTER LOW KA, which is not shown in the encoding.

* Tone contours are not shown.

1. Phonetically, the vowel is equivalent to a ligature of <U+1A6C, U+1A60, U+1A3F>.

Vowel and Tone Ligatures

The vowel and tone ligatures are shown written on either U+1A20 TAI THAM LETTER HIGH KA or U+1A23 TAI THAM LETTER LOW KA, which is not shown in the encoding.

Subscript ligatures

The ligated subscript consonants and vowels are shown written on U+1A23 TAI THAM LETTER LOW KA, which is not shown in the encoding.

Contextually Modified Marks

Digits

Punctuation and Symbols

This section records the non-European characters used in the Lanna writing systems. In Thailand, European punctuation has been borrowed from Thai, and it is likely that in China it will have been borrowed from Chinese, as in New Tai Lue.