Richard Wordingham wrote:

>
> --- 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>

A first guess would be Gérard Diffloth, but Cornell does its email by
initials, so this would seem to be by M.B., and I don't know who that
might be. (Definitely not Martin Bernal.)

> . 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.

There have been a handful of studies of Southeast Asia as a Linguistic
Area, which is where you'd look for unified treatments of the phenomena
you mention, but the linguistic world is waiting with bated breath for
Jim Matisoff's book in the Cambridge Language Surveys (Cambridge Green
series) for a full and detailed treatment. But he said he wouldn't get
around to it until at least one volume of the Sino-Tibetan Etymological
Dictionary was done, so it's hard to say when it might appear.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...