Tai Yo

This chapter documents the scripts of mainland Southeast Asia, also known as the Indochinese Peninsula. Most scripts of Southeast Asia described in this chapter are written from left to right; many use no interword spacing but use spaces or marks between phrases. They are mostly abugidas , but with various idiosyncrasies that distinguish them from the scripts of South Asia. Thai and Lao are the official scripts of Thailand and Laos, respectively, and are closely related. These scripts are unusual for Brahmi-derived scripts in the Unicode Standard, because for various implementation reasons they depart from logical order in the representation of consonant-vowel sequences. Vowels that occur to the left side of their consonant are represented in visual order before the consonant in a string, even though they are pronounced afterward. Myanmar is the official script of Myanmar, and is used to write the Burmese language, as well as many minority languages of Myanmar and Northern Thailand. It has a mixed encoding model, making use of both a virama and a killer character, and having explicitly encoded medial consonants. The Khmer script is used for the Khmer and related languages in the Kingdom of Cambodia. The term “Tai” refers to a family of languages spoken in Southeast Asia, including Thai, Lao, and Shan. This term is also part of the name of a number of scripts encoded in the Unicode Standard. The Tai Le script is used to write the language of the same name, which is spoken in south central Yunnan (China). The New Tai Lue script, also known as Xishuangbanna Dai, is unrelated to the Tai Le script, but is also used in south Yunnan. New Tai Lue is a simplified form of the more traditional Tai Tham script, which is also known as Lanna. The Tai Tham script is used for the Northern Thai, Tai Lue, and Khün languages. The Tai Viet script is used for the Tai Dam, Tai Dón, and Thai Song languages of northwestern Vietnam, northern Laos, and central Thailand. Unlike the other Tai scripts, the Tai Viet script makes use of a visual order model, similar to that for the Thai and Lao scripts. The Tai Yo script is a vertical script traditionally used for the Tai Yo language of Vietnam and Laos. Cham is a Brahmi-derived script used by the Austronesian language Cham, spoken in the southern part of Vietnam and in Cambodia. It does not use a virama. Instead, the encoding makes use of medial consonant signs and explicitly encoded final consonants. Pahawh Hmong is an alphabetic script devised for writing the Hmong language in the latter half of the 20th century. Its development includes several revisions. The script is used by Hmong communities in several countries, including the United States and Australia. Nyiakeng Puachue Hmong is a writing system created in the 1980s to write the White Hmong and Green Hmong languages. It is also called the Ntawv Txawjvaag or Chervang script, and was devised for use in the United Christians Liberty Evangelical church in the United States. The script is written from left to right, and is reported to be used in Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, France and Australia. The Pau Cin Hau alphabet is a liturgical script of the Laipian religious tradition, which emerged in the Chin Hills region of present-day Chin State, Myanmar at the turn of the 20th century. Hanifi Rohingya is an alphabetic script used to write the Rohingya language, an Indo-Aryan language spoken by one million people primarily in Myanmar and Bangladesh. The script was developed in the 1980s and shows Arabic influence in its general appearance and structure. The Thai script is used to write Thai and other Southeast Asian languages, such as Kuy, Lanna Tai, and Pali. It is a member of the Indic family of scripts descended from Brahmi. Thai modifies the original Brahmi letter shapes and extends the number of letters to accommodate features of the Thai language, including tone marks derived from superscript digits. At the same time, the Thai script lacks the