--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, Patrick Chew <patrick.chew@...> wrote:

>
>
> Richard:
>
> I've been checking through my materials and the consonant coda-final
> distinctions are definitely from the recommendations made by the Dai Le
> Script Reform Committe.
>
> When I get a chance, I'll post (with translation) the summary.

Thanks for the reply, viz (omitting the Chinese, replacing the Tai Lue
letters with their abbreviated Uniocde names, and removing the vowel
diacritics):
<QUOTE>
After improvement, the New Dai Script had the following changes in
consonants and vowels:
(1) Abolished 21 original letters; these letters were mostly used to
expressly transliterate Pali loanwords.
(2) Added three letters [LOW QA], [LOW BA], [LOW DA] to supplement
three low register letters missing in the original script.
(3) Regulated the written positioning of vowel marks – all are to be
written either before or after the consonant, abolishing the writing
habits of placement above and below the consonant; designed six new
vowel marks to replace the original inconvenient vowel marks: [SIGN
II] [i], [SIGN U] [u], [SIGN UU] [u:], [SIGN OA] [ɔ], [SIGN UE] [ɯ],
[SIGN E-SIGN II] [ə].
(4) Abolished the originally non-unified vowel clusters and
regularized the writing of the vowel clusters. The coda [-i], for the
most part, is written on the bottom right region of the vowel using [-
?] for representation; the coda [-u] is thus written following a vowel
or consonant, using [-FINAL V] to represent it.

[What could have been FINAL Y has been absorbed into the Unicode vowel
symbols, so I can't use the charts to refer to it. - JRW]

(5) Abolished the original two irregular methods for representing
consonant codas; otherwise using a small circle below the consonant to
represent that it is a coda, for example: [-FINAL K] [-k], [-FINAL D]
[-t], [-FINAL B] [-p], [-FINAL NG] [-ŋ], [-FINAL N] [-n], [-FINAL M] [-m].
(6) As for tones, the two tone marks [TONE 1] and [TONE 2] were newly
created to replace the pre-existing ones, and moreover are all written
at the end of the syllable.
</quote>
They're infuriatingly vague about where the innovations came from. I
can't tell whether the subscript circle for final consonants is a
complete innovation or the *regular* old method. As the regular
method should not be vary rare, we must *presume* the former.

Signs II and UE are pretty obviously based on the original superscript
I/II/UE/UUE vowels, Sign U looks like the corresponding independent
vowel, and sign UU looks like the subscript dependent long vowel.
Sign OA ('oa' as in English 'broad') long had me puzzled, but it seems
to be the superscript [au] vowel of Northern Thai and Lao usage. The
low [O] value seems odd - according to Li, Tai Lue still has a [au]
vowel (with a slightly mid first element).

From Li's description, they overdid the consonant deletion. When he
studied the language, some Tai Lue dialects still distinguished [kh]
and [x].

Richard.