Aw: Re: [palistudy] Thai font for Pali (with decenderless tho than and yo ying)

Dear Dmytro,

 

Thank you for your links to the standard forms of "tho than" and "yo ying" which I am using on a daily base. But I really mean the special forms without descender, exclusively used for writing pure Pali in Thai script, which are not included in unicode.

 

This problem is also mentioned on this site under "pending issues":      http://www.tipitaka.org/others

It's also on this to-do list (second paragraph, point 6):                  http://th.lug.wikia.com/wiki/Tlwg_todo_list

 

In an old Word document (my MA thesis), I used these characters, but one day I found out that they are not displayed any more. (Maybe since I have been using Windows 7?) I also have a Thai rtf file with an excerpt from the Nissaya Tipitaka (i.e. annotated word-for-word translation switching between writing Pali and Thai in Thai script), and some characters are not displayed.

 

In Siam, Pali used to be written in Khmer script. King Mongkut (Rama IV.) already worked on a method of writing Pali in Thai script (after 1865), and later one of his sons, known as the Prince Patriarch Vajirañānavarorasa, refined this method (basically by replacing two special characters by a single one, the phinthu). In 1893, under King Chulalongkorn (Rama V.) his method was used to print the Pali canon (in Pali) in Thai script. The study of Khmer script was banned from the monastic curriculum, and until today, Pali has been written in Thai script. For lay people, in the chanting books, they render Pali in Thai script in the usual Thai way, i.e. they use normal Thai characters and write short a vowels. However, "genuine Pali" written in Thai means that the Thai script is written and read as we know it from Devanāgari script, i.e. there are units of consonant+vowel diacritic (the short a being the "zero diacritic"), and as there are no ligatures in Thai script, a dot (called phinthu in Thai, i.e. P./Sk. bindu) under a consonant followed by a consonant eliminates the inherent vowel, like the Virāma in Sanskrit. It's very systematic and logic. As those two consonant signs I mentioned, yo ying and tho than, consist of a basic sign with descender underneath, the phinthu (which is not in use for writing Thai with Thai script) wouldn't be visible, at least in the case of yo ying. Actually, tho than corresponds to < ṭh> in Roman-script Pali and wouldn't be combined with a phinthu... Whatever, those two consonant signs are used without descender when writing Pali (or Sanskrit). But somehow these special forms of the consonant signs didn't find their way into unicode.

 

So, I'm still looking for a solution of my font problem. Actually, I don't need to be able to read the Thai rtf file, as I am converting the Pali part into Roman pali anyway. I guess, for now I would be already served if I could copy the descender-less forms somewhere and insert it in my old Word file, and it would be nice if it would be still there after conversion into PDF.

 

Kind regards,

Susanne