--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "David Starner" <prosfilaes@...> wrote:

>
> <http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/10/23/features/lang.php> is an
> article on saving the languages of Thailand, in part by creating
> usable orthographies.

> Can this be encoded using the Thai characters already in
> Unicode, or does it need new characters? Does anyone know more about
> this?

็Have you tried googling for the language? Searching for "ภาษาชอง" I
found a vowel and register (literally 'tone') chart at
http://www.vijai.org/article/show_topic.asp?Topicid=190 and a
consonant chart at
http://www.manager.co.th/Home/ViewNews.aspx?NewsID=4645887886881 .
Fortunately Chong (in Thailand, at least) uses the same technical
terms as Thai, so the heading are farily easy to read.

There's a description of the language at
http://www.thapra.lib.su.ac.th/thesis/showthesis_th.asp?id=0000000325
; I didn't find it easy to skim, so you may lie to first read the
English abstract at
http://www.thapra.lib.su.ac.th/objects/thesis/abstract/thapra/en_sirikan_chareontham.txt
. There's an analysis of the language's phonemes at
http://www.thapra.lib.su.ac.th/objects/thesis/fulltext/thapra/Sirikan_Chareontham/Chapter2.pdf
.

Googling for "Chong language" I found some stuff that's more
accessible without Thai. There's a proposed alphabet at
http://www.thai-software.com/Chong/ProposedChongAlphabet.htm . There
are other links at http://www.thai-software.com/Chong/default.htm .
There's also a tone and register chart at p21 of
http://www.unescobkk.org/fileadmin/user_upload/aims/Pattaya_SCB_Jun05/Chong_Language_-_Part_1.pdf


There's more stuff out there, but all this would certainly keep me
busy for a while.

The quick summary seems to be as follows. There's a workable
orthography in the Thai script, but one of the local leaders wants the
language to have its own script. From the consonant and vowel table it
*might* be treatable as a set of Thai glyph variants, but I'd like to
see how consonants, vowels and register marks combine. I suspect they
will combine in ways incompatible with Thai. Not all vowel
combinations are simple character-for-character transliterations of
the Thai, but that is not an issue. I think the spelling in the new
script of the words spelt เม์ว 'fish'(?) and เอา 'shirt'(?) in the Thai
script would be good initial test cases.

Richard.