The Tai Viet script ( Tai Dam: ("Tai script"), , , ) is a

Brahmic script The Brahmic scripts, also known as Indic scripts, are a family of abugida writing systems. They are used throughout South Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of East Asia. They are descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India and are used b ...

used by the Tai Dam people and various other

Thai people Thai people, historically known as Siamese people, are an ethnic group native to Thailand. In a narrower and ethnic sense, the Thais are also a Tai peoples, Tai ethnic group dominant in Central Thailand, Central and Southern Thailand (Siam prope ...

Vietnam Vietnam, officially the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (SRV), is a country at the eastern edge of mainland Southeast Asia, with an area of about and a population of over 100 million, making it the world's List of countries and depende ...

and

Thailand Thailand, officially the Kingdom of Thailand and historically known as Siam (the official name until 1939), is a country in Southeast Asia on the Mainland Southeast Asia, Indochinese Peninsula. With a population of almost 66 million, it spa ...

.Bảng chữ cái tiếng Thái (Việt Nam), các quy tắc cơ bản
Lịch sử văn hóa Thái, 26/06/2018. In vietnamese.

History

According to Thai authors, the

writing system A writing system comprises a set of symbols, called a ''script'', as well as the rules by which the script represents a particular language. The earliest writing appeared during the late 4th millennium BC. Throughout history, each independen ...

is probably derived from the old Thai writing of the kingdom of Sukhotai. It has been suggested that the Fakkham script is the source of the Tai Don, Tai Dam and Tai Daeng writing systems found in Jinping (

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...

), northern Laos, and

. Differences in

phonology Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...

of the various local Tai languages, the isolation of communities and the fact that the written language has traditionally been passed down from father to son have led to many local variants. In an attempt to reverse this development and establish a standardized system,

's various Tai people in the former Northwestern Autonomous Region were approached with a proposal that they should agree on a common standard. Together with Vietnamese researchers, a first proposal called ''Thống Nhất'' (or Unified Alphabet) was developed, which was published in 1961 and revised in 1966. A unified and standardized version of the script was developed at a UNESCO-sponsored workshop in 2006, named "chữ Thái Việt Nam" (or Vietnamese Tai script). This standardized version was then approved to be included in Unicode. From May 2008, the improved Thai script was put into official use.

Description

The script consists of 31 consonants and 14 vowels. Unlike most other abugidas or brahmic scripts, the consonants do not have an inherent vowel, and every vowel must be specified with a vowel marker. Vowels are marked with diacritic vowel markers that can appear above, below or to the left and/or right of the consonant. Some vowels carry an inherent final consonant, such as , , and . The script uses Latin script

punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...

, and also includes five special characters, one to indicate a person, one for the number "one", one to repeat the previous word, one to mark the beginning of a text and one to mark the end of a text. Traditionally, the script did not use any spacing between words as they were written in a continuous flow, but spacing has become common since the 1980s.

Consonants

Initial consonant letters have both high and low forms, which are used to indicate tones. The high consonants are used for the syllable final letters -w, -y, -m, -n and -ng. The low consonant letter -k is used for final - and -sounds, while low consonant letters -b and -d are used for final and .

Vowels

The consonant character's position is marked with a circle: ◌. * When has a final, is used instead. Some additional vowels are written with a combination of two vowel characters. The following four combinations are used for Tai Dam: Some sounds are spelled differently in Tai Dón compared to in Tai Dam:Brase, J. (2008). Writing Tai Don: Additional characters needed for the Tai Viet script. https://www.unicode.org/L2/L2008/08217-tai-don.pdf

Tones

Traditionally the script used no tone marks and only partially indicated tones with the high/low consonant differentiation. The reader had to guess the tone and thus meaning of a word from context. In the 1970s two tone marks were developed, called mai nueng and mai song. Tone 1 is marked with only a low consonant. Tone 4 is marked with only a high consonant. Tone 2 is marked with the first tone mark and a low consonant form. Tone 5 is marked with the first tone mark and a high consonant form. Tone 3 is marked with the second tone mark and a low consonant form. Tone 6 is marked with the second tone mark and a high consonant form.

Unicode

Proposals to encode Tai Viet script in

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

go back to 2006. A Unicode subcommittee reviewed a February 6, 2007 proposal submitted by James Brase of

SIL International SIL Global (formerly known as the Summer Institute of Linguistics International) is an evangelical Christian nonprofit organization whose main purpose is to study, develop and document languages, especially those that are lesser-known, to expan ...

for what was then called Tay Viet script. At the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2 meeting on April 24, 2007, a revised proposal for the script, now known as Tai Viet, was accepted "as is", with support from TCVN, the Vietnam Quality & Standards Centre. Tai Viet was added to the Unicode Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2. The Unicode block for Tai Viet is U+AA80–U+AADF:

References

External links

SIL Tai Heritage Pro Font Download

Proposal to encode additional Tai Viet characters for the Jinping Dai
Brahmic scripts Writing systems of Asia Tai languages Writing systems introduced in the 16th century Languages of Vietnam Vietnamese inventions 16th-century establishments in Vietnam {{list of writing systems