Richard Wordingham wrote:

> > Modern ("reformed") Lao, especially, is basically an alphabet.
>
> Doesn't the difference in order merit a distinction? My experience
> is with Thai, where the challenge of guessing the syllabification may
> make vowels that precede the consonants more of an issue.

I guess it could... at this point, I just leave it up to intuition and
whatnot to make the syllabic breaks.

>> Unlike Thai, which has an "inherent vowel" when no "vocalization"
> is
>> overt (in an open-syllable, it's [O] "open-o"; in a closed-syllable
> it's
>> [o])
>
> In Thai words of two or more phonetic syllables, the inherent vowel
> in phonetically open syllables is usually [a]. [O] as an inherent
> vowel seems almost to be restricted to open monosyllables and cases
> where the following consonant is <r>. The only counter-example I can
> think of is the long form <ba.r:h.asapati:> (¾ÄËÑʺ´Õ) /pha_H rM_H
> hat_L sa_L bO_M di:_M/ 'Jupiter', 'Thursday'. (Perhaps I should
> write <b.r:h.aspti:> as Thai doesn't *use* anything like a virama,
> but I think it's more considerate to put some vowels in just as the
> Egyptologists do when transliteerating Ancinet Egyptian.)

Sure...
but then now we're making a distinction between monosyllabic and
polysyllabic "words", the latter most of which are loans. Thinking on
"native" words that aren't mere monosyllables, e.g. sesquisyllables,
etc., the overt expression of the 'short epenthetic vowel' ([a] ~ [ə])
seems to be either expressly overt, if relatively productive and common,
e.g. the prefixes <kra->, <ma->, etc., but not if it's Khmer or
otherwise loaned, e.g. camuuk <cmUk> 'nose'.

I still maintain my statement, since orthographic <gn> is [khon]
'person', <k~> is [kO(O)], etc.

When dealing with Pali-Sanskrit loans, I've always enjoyed the temple
names in Thailand to be great examples of how things aren't always what
they seem... especially the instances of vowel rounding after labials
(cf. your "Saturn" example.)

Well... re: Thai and the virama... technically they do... it's just not
used in much and not in currency for much other than Buddhist
transliterations, I think. After all, there is the codepoint U+0E3A
(phinthu = Pali virama), and the thanthakhat (U+0E4C) has cancellation
properties like the virama/pulli, etc. etc. etc...

-patrick

ps: How are you encoding your posts? UTF-8? the Thai came out as
mojibake for me...