--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Marco Cimarosti <marco.cimarosti@...>
wrote:

> Richard Wordingham wrote:
> > Browsing through the Unicode mailing list, I noticed a remark by Peter
> > Constable that the Thai collation order had been changed by removing
> > its dependency on how a word was pronounced.
>
> Why not asking this on the Unicode List itself?
>
> Seems to me that a very technical IT question about the internals of the
> Unicode standard is more appropriate on a forum about Unicode than on a
> forum about writing systems in general.

The Unicode standard specifies a default collation order not
necessarily suitable for any language - that is as much as the Thai
collation order has to do with the Unicode standard. I'm not sure
that it is right to regard the alphabetic ordering of words as an IT
question rather than a general question - dictionaries need some form
of alphabetisation, and I presume Pallegoix's dictionary of 1854 would
have needed to alphabetise Thai.

The current alphabtic ordering of Thai words had been established by
the 1960's - I have a textbook written then that explains how to look
Thai words up in a dictionary, and it makes no mention of an earlier
system. I don't see how an obsolete collation order would have any
relevance to Unicode, whereas it is a part of the history of a writing
system.

> As you said, there is nothing
> special in the Thai vowel marks themselves: the peculiarity is the

way they

> have been encoded in the Thai block in Unicode.

As far as I can deduce what the 'logical order' would be, it would be
neither visual nor phonetic.

Actually, the Thai vowel marks may be peculiar. When Thai is widely
spaced out horizontally (e.g. written on a sequence of rectangles on a
background of another colour), the preposed and following vowels are
spaced out as though they were actually consonants. Typographically,
they may as well be base letters. (Sara am may be an oddity here -
can anyone recall how it is treated in such signs?) Vertically
written Thai is quite rare, and what I have seen seems to be an
imitation of Japanese or Thai. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to
find any examples of Thai crosswords since I started looking for them.
I have encountered at least one, but I didn't study it enough at the
time. I did notice that the 'squares' needed extensions for
superscript marks.

Richard.