--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:

> > This doesn't help my search for a concept unifying SE Asian scripts.
>
> Why would you want to unify a bunch of scripts with diverse origins used
> for many diverse languages? What do they have in common but geography?

I criticised the Unicode description of the effects of Thai consonants
on tone, and got told I should propose an alternative. This behaviour
is part of a family of effects seen in Thai, Lao and Khmer in the
Khmer group of encoded scripts, and in New Tai Lue but *not* Burmese
in the Mon group. It is also present in some unencoded scripts -
Lanna, Viet Thai, Mon (mostly encoded) and Cham - though I had to dig
hard to find evidence for the latter, e.g. on p119 of
<http://www.people.cornell.edu/pages/mb236/Eastern%20Cham%20register.pdf>
. I felt that if these effects were worth mentioning they should be
mentioned together, but I'm not sure where. It's good to see that
register spreading occurs from Bangkok (transferred tone rule) to the
Mekong delta, though I hesitate to suggest that Unicode mention that.

One problem is that these are mostly language rather than script
effects - Burmese does not participate - and the curious pronunciation
of final consonants in Burmese is clearly not considered worth
mentioning. The only script effects I can think of are the two extra
tone marks in Thai and Lao, the new Tai Lue consonants created with a
circumflex-like mark (related to the Yi 3rd tone mark?), some isolated
extra letters, and the register shifting accents of Khmer.

Another is that, so far as I am aware, these register effects are
totally irrelevant to the Indic scripts of insular SE Asia.

Richard.